March 11 Birthday
March 11, 2011: A 9.0 magnitude earthquake struck seventy miles off the coast of northeastern Japan — the largest earthquake in Japan's recorded history. The quake shifted the Earth's axis by ten inches and moved Honshu eight feet east. The tsunami it generated reached heights of 130 feet and traveled six miles inland. Nearly 20,000 people died. The wave overwhelmed the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, cutting power to the cooling systems. Three reactors melted down. It was the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. 165,000 people were evacuated and have never returned. The cleanup will take decades. The plant's operator, TEPCO, had been warned that its seawall was too low and did nothing. In the aftermath, Japan shut down all its nuclear reactors — the country that had relied on nuclear for 30% of its electricity went to zero. Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party on this day in 1985. He was fifty-four — the youngest leader since Stalin. He inherited an economy that was stagnating, a military burden that was crushing, and a society that was demoralized. His policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) were intended to save the Soviet system by reforming it. Instead, they exposed its failures and accelerated its collapse. Gorbachev did not intend to end the Soviet Union, but his reforms made it impossible to maintain. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990. When hardliners attempted a coup in August 1991, Gorbachev was held under house arrest at his Crimean dacha. He returned to find that Boris Yeltsin had become the face of resistance and that the Soviet Union was dissolving. He resigned on December 25, 1991. The Daily Courant, England's first daily newspaper, was published on March 11, 1702, by Edward Mallet. It consisted of a single sheet, printed on both sides. Mallet promised to publish only foreign news, "being assured that his readers are more naturally concerned about what happens abroad than what occurs at home." The paper survived for thirty years before being absorbed by the Daily Gazetteer. The idea that news could be published daily was revolutionary — it assumed a literate public with enough interest and money to buy a paper every day. That assumption created the modern news cycle, and with it, the modern sense of time as a sequence of events that must be tracked. Douglas Adams, born this day in 1952, wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as a radio series for BBC Radio 4 in 1978. It became a book, a television series, a movie, and a cultural touchstone. Adams invented the number 42 as the answer to life, the universe, and everything — he picked it at random while staring out a window. He was a technology evangelist who was the first person in Europe to buy a Macintosh computer. He died of a heart attack at forty-nine in 2001, having never finished the third Dirk Gently novel. People born on March 11 fall under the zodiac sign of Pisces. The birthstone is Aquamarine and the birth flower is Daffodil. Historical events on March 11 include 1702: The Daily Courant, first English daily newspaper, published in London, 1985: Mikhail Gorbachev becomes General Secretary of Soviet Communist Party, 2011: Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami devastate northeastern Japan (Fukushima disaster). Famous people born on March 11 include Douglas Adams (1952), Rupert Murdoch (1931), Antonin Scalia (1936).