January 15 birthdays & history

Famous people born on January 15

• 1929Martin Luther King Jr., American minister and activist, Nobel Prize laureate
• 1622Molière, French actor and playwright
• 1850Sofia Kovalevskaya, Russian-Swedish mathematician and physicist
• 1850Mihai Eminescu, Romanian journalist, author, and poet
• 1908Edward Teller, Hungarian-American physicist and academic
• 1996Dove Cameron, American actress and singer
• 1902Nâzım Hikmet, Greek-Turkish author, poet, and playwright
• 1791Franz Grillparzer, Austrian author, poet, and playwright
• 1895Artturi Ilmari Virtanen, Finnish chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate
• 1981Pitbull, American rapper and producer

What happened on January 15

• 1818A paper by David Brewster is read to the Royal Society, belatedly announcing his discovery of what we now call the biaxial class of doubly-refracting crystals. On the same day, Augustin-Jean Fresnel signs a "supplement" (submitted four days later) on reflection of polarized light.
• 1885Wilson Bentley took the first known photograph of a snowflake by attaching a bellows camera to a microscope.
• 1889The Coca-Cola Company, then known as the Pemberton Medicine Company, is incorporated in Atlanta.
• 1892James Naismith publishes the rules of basketball.
• 1908The Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority becomes the first Greek-letter organization founded and established by African American college women.
• 1910Construction was completed on the Buffalo Bill Dam, then the tallest dam in the world, on the Shoshone River in the U.S. state of Wyoming.
• 1911Palestinian Arabic-language Falastin newspaper founded.
• 1933A teenage girl in Banneux, Belgium, reported the first of several Marian apparitions, now known as Our Lady of Banneux.
• 1936The first building to be completely covered in glass, built for the Owens-Illinois Glass Company, is completed in Toledo, Ohio.
• 1943The highest-capacity office building in the world, the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense known as the Pentagon, was dedicated.
• 1962The Derveni papyrus, the oldest surviving manuscript in Europe, was discovered in Macedonia in northern Greece.
• 2001The first edit to the internet encyclopedia Wikipedia was made.

Also observed on January 15

• Arbor Day (Egypt)
• Armed Forces Remembrance Day (Nigeria)
• John Chilembwe Day (Malawi)
• Korean Alphabet Day (North Korea)
• Ocean Duty Day (Indonesia)
• Teacher's Day (Venezuela)