March 8 Birthday
March 8, 1917: Thousands of women in Petrograd took to the streets on International Women's Day, demanding bread and an end to the war. They were textile workers, exhausted by three years of World War I, working twelve-hour shifts for wages that could not feed their families. The march triggered the February Revolution (so named because Russia still used the Julian calendar, in which it was February 23). Within a week, Tsar Nicholas II had abdicated. Within nine months, the Bolsheviks had seized power. The women who started the revolution did not benefit from it — Lenin suppressed feminist organizations, and Soviet women's rights were subordinated to the needs of the state. International Women's Day was celebrated in the Soviet Union but not in the West until the 1970s. The UN adopted it in 1977. On March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 took off from Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing with 239 people aboard. Forty minutes into the flight, as it crossed from Malaysian to Vietnamese air traffic control, the transponder was switched off. The plane turned west, flew back across the Malay Peninsula, and headed south into the Indian Ocean. It has never been found. Satellite data showed it flew for seven hours after disappearing from radar, ending its flight somewhere in a 120,000-square-kilometer area of the southern Indian Ocean. Debris confirmed to be from the aircraft has washed up on islands in the western Indian Ocean and on the coast of Africa. The disappearance is the greatest mystery in aviation history. Theories range from pilot suicide to hijacking to mechanical failure to deliberate diversion. Without the wreckage, nothing can be confirmed. Johannes Kepler discovered his third law of planetary motion on this day in 1618. The law states that the square of a planet's orbital period is proportional to the cube of its semi-major axis — in simpler terms, planets farther from the Sun move more slowly. Kepler had been working on planetary orbits for twenty years, using the meticulous observations of Tycho Brahe, who had died in 1601. Kepler's three laws described how planets move but not why. It took Isaac Newton, fifty years later, to explain that gravity was the force behind Kepler's mathematics. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., born this day in 1841, served on the Supreme Court for thirty years, until he was ninety. He was wounded three times in the Civil War and carried a bullet near his heart for the rest of his life. His legal philosophy — that the law should adapt to the needs of the time, not remain frozen in precedent — transformed American jurisprudence. People born on March 8 fall under the zodiac sign of Pisces. The birthstone is Aquamarine and the birth flower is Daffodil. Historical events on March 8 include 1618: Johannes Kepler discovers his third law of planetary motion, 1917: February Revolution begins in Petrograd with International Women's Day march, 2014: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappears over the South China Sea. Famous people born on March 8 include Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841), Kenneth Grahame (1859), Lynn Redgrave (1943).