Trivia People

March 12 marks the 103rd anniversary of the founding of the Girl Guides, which would later become the Girl Scouts of the USA.

Juliette Gordon Low founded the Girl Guides after meeting Robert Baden-Powell, who founded the Scouting movement in 1907.

The Girl Scout mission is to build “girls of courage, confidence and character, who make the world a better place.” They do this through activities such as camping, community service and by learning practical skills.

Today there are more than 2.8 million Girl Scouts in the United States and 10 million worldwide.

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March 11th marks the 128th anniversary of the start of the Great Blizzard of 1888.

As much as 60 inches of snow fell over parts of New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts over the course of four days. Paired with winds up to 80 miles per hour, this led to snowdrifts as tall as 52 feet near Coney Island.

The storm took down telegraph lines, wrecked boats and blocked rail lines for days, leading to the creation of Boston’s subway system and the underground placement of communication lines in New York.

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On March 10, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell made the first successful telephone call, speaking the words “Mr. Watson — Come Here — I want to see you,” to his assistant in another room.

Later that year, Bell would demonstrate a telephone that transmitted across a four-mile distance.

He offered to sell the patent to the Western Union telegraph company for $100,000. The company rejected it, saying the telephone had little application beyond that of a toy. The president of Western Union later said he would buy the patent for $25 million, but Bell no longer wanted to sell.

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March 9th marks the 56th birthday of one Barbara Millicent Roberts, better known as Barbie.

The first Barbie doll was introduced at the American International Toy Fair by the Mattel company in 1959.

About 350,000 Barbie dolls were sold in the first year of production, and an estimated 1 billion dolls have been sold since they were introduced.

A 1959 Barbie doll in mint condition sold for $3,552 on eBay in 2004.

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March 8th is the 198th anniversary of the founding of the New York Stock Exchange.

Originally located in a coffee shop on Wall Street, the exchange moved to several locations before settling at its current location in 1903.

The Dow Jones industrial average was created in 1896 to gauge the performance of industrial stocks.

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March 7th is the 50th anniversary of the first Selma-to-Montgomery March, also known as “Bloody Sunday.”

In February, 1965, a march in Perry County, Alabama, resulted in the shooting death of protester Jimmie Lee Jackson by a state trooper.

Organizers planned a march to Montgomery as a nonviolent outlet for the outrage over Jackson’s death. The intention was to go the state capital to question Governor George Wallace about his involvement in the police response to the February march, and call attention to the continued violation of the civil rights of African Americans.

On March 7, a group of about 600 marchers headed out of Selma across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where they were met by state troopers and sheriff’s deputies. Soon after, police started shoving the marchers, eventually knocking them to the ground and beating them with nightsticks.

John Lewis, a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, had his skull fractured in the melee. Sixteen other marchers were hospitalized.

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March 6th is the 146th anniversary of the publication of Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table of elements.

Mendeleev, a Russian professor of chemistry, is recognized as the first person to use a periodic table to predict the properties of then-undiscovered elements. He also ordered his table according to chemical properties rather than atomic weight, unintentionally listing them in order of atomic number.

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March 5th marks the 69th anniversary of Winston Churchill coining the phrase “Iron Curtain” to describe the Soviet Union’s influence on the countries of Central and Eastern Europe following World War II.

Initially, Churchill’s speech was not well received in the west, which still considered the Soviets a wartime ally.

The Iron Curtain remained in place until the late 1980s when the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev started policies of Glasnost and Perestroika, opening the door for the fall of communism.

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On March 4, 1837, the city of Chicago was incorporated.

Chicago is the third-largest city in the United States behind New York and Los Angeles, and ahead of Houston and Philadelphia.

Chicago is known for its skyscrapers. The Sears Tower, now known as the Willis Tower, was the tallest building in the world from 1973 to 1998.

Upon completion, the tower, which stands at 1,451 feet, surpassed the North Tower of New York’s World Trade Center, which was 83 feet shorter.

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On March 3, 1923, Time magazine published its first issue, featuring former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Joseph G. Cannon, a republican from Illinois on its cover.

In addition to covering hard news, Time was one of the first weeklies to cover popular culture and entertainment, at the behest of its cofounder Britton Hadden.

The other co-founder, Henry Luce, would go on to buy Life magazine, and start Fortune and Sports Illustrated magazines.

In 1927, Time named its first “Man of the Year,” aviator Charles Lindbergh.

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