14 Fascinating Facts Fortuitously Falling on April 14

14 Fascinating Facts Fortuitously Falling on April 14

By Michelle Carr Crowe, Silicon Valley real estate guide selling homes in San Jose

What do the Human Genome Project, Abraham Lincoln and Sikhism have in common? They all three share an important anniversary today, April 14, 2013.

Are you an inquisitive person who enjoys learning? If you’ve read my blog, you know one of the pastimes I enjoy is discovering new facts and interesting pieces of history.

I like to share intriguing stories from our local newspaper theSan Jose Mercury News, as well as my favorite print and online magazinesMental Floss, the National Geographic Society or  Smithsonian Magazine. Other times I find articles or facts online at  The History Place, Brainy History,orDates In History.These events for today’s blog post are primarily from Wikipedia.

While these interesting items are intriguing, they have nothing to do with my real estate business, which is helping people like you buy and sell homes in San Jose, Cupertino and Saratoga, Calif. They just add fun and fascination to life.

Here are today’s 14 Fascinating Facts Fortuitously Falling on April 14. I hope you find them interesting, too.

14 Fascinating Facts Fortuitously Falling on April 14   

1. 966 – After his marriage to a Christian, Dobrawa of Bohemia, the pagan ruler of the Polans, Mieszko I, converts to Christianity. His conversion is considered the foundation of the Polish state.     
2. 1699 – Khalsa: The Sikh Religion was formalized as the Khalsa (AKA the brotherhood of Warrior-Saints), by Guru Gobind Singh in Northern India.
3. 1775 – The first North American abolition society in is established. The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage is organized in Philadelphia, Penn. by Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush.
4. 1828 – Noah Webster copyrights the first edition of his dictionary.
5. 1860 – The first Pony Express rider reaches Sacramento, California.   
6. 1865 – U.S. President Abraham Lincoln is shot in Ford's Theatre by John Wilkes Booth (died April 15th). That same day, U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward (who was ill and convalescing) and his family are brutally attacked in their home by Lewis Powell.
7. 1894 – The first ever commercial motion picture house opened in New York City using ten Kinetoscopes, a device for peep-show viewing of films.
8. 1906 – The Azusa Street Revival opens and will launch Pentecostalism as a worldwide Christian fundamentalist movement.
9. 1912 – The British passenger liner RMS Titanic hits an iceberg in the North Atlantic at 11:40pm (it sinks the morning of April 15th).
10. 1935 – "Black Sunday Storm", the worst dust storm of the U.S. Dust Bowl. Four years later in 1939, American author John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, a tale of families affected by the Dust Bowl, is first published by the Viking Press.
11. 1956 – In Chicago, Illinois, videotape is first demonstrated.
12. 1969 – At the U.S. Academy Awards there is a tie for the Academy Award for Best Actress between Katharine Hepburn and Barbra Streisand.
13. 2003 – The Human Genome Project is completed with 99% of the human genome sequenced to an accuracy of 99.99%.   
14. 2003 – U.S. troops in Baghdad capture Abu Abbas, leader of the Palestinian group that killed an American on the hijacked cruise liner the MS Achille Lauro in 1985.

Thank you for reading my ActiveRain Results blog today. You may want to read my blog at www.activerain.com/results for more fun facts on history, real estate, home, life and other topics. I hope you learned something new from reading about these 14 Fascinating Facts Fortuitously Falling on April 14.

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