March 6 in History
1475 Michelangelo (Buonarroti), Italian painter (the scenes from Genesis on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, “The Last Judgment” on its altar wall), sculptor (“Pietà”, “David”), architect and poet, is born in Caprese, Republic of Florence. 1665 The first secretary of the Royal Society, Henry Oldenburg, publishes the first issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the world’s longest-running scientific journal.
1853 Giuseppe Verdi’s opera “La traviata” premieres at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice.
1899 Aspirin is patented in Berlin by the drug and dye firm Bayer (soon to become a major pharmaceutical company) following Felix Hoffman’s discoveries about the properties of acetylsalicylic acid.
1913 Stewart Granger, English and Hollywood actor (“Saraband for Dead Lovers”, “King Solomon’s Mines”, “Scaramouche”), is born James Lablache Stewart in Kensington, West London. 1933 Great Depression: Two days after his inauguration as 32nd US president, Franklin D Roosevelt declares a four-day bank holiday, closing all US banks to stabilise the banking system. During this time the federal government will inspect all banks, re-open those that are sufficiently solvent, reorganise those that can be saved and close those that are beyond repair. 1944 Dame Kiri (Jeanette Claire) Te Kanawa (pictured right in “Braintest”), operatic soprano, is born Claire Mary Teresa Rawstron in Gisborne, New Zealand, to a single Irish mother and a Maori father who was already married. She is adopted as a baby by Tom Te Kanawa, the owner of a successful trucking business, and his wife Nell. 1951 Cold War: The trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, accused of providing top-secret information about radar, sonar, jet propulsion engines and nuclear weapon designs to the
USSR, begins in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. They are found guilty on March 29 and executed on June 19 1953. 1957 Four British territories Gold Coast, Ashanti, the Northern Territories and British Togoland unify as Ghana, an independent dominion within the Commonwealth of Nations. 1992 A pre-internet-era virus causes arguably the first ever public malware scare. Once the boot-sector virus infects a computer, it remains dormant until March 6 each year. It is dubbed the Michelangelo virus by researchers who notice that the activations coincide with the Renaissance artist’s date of birth in 1475.