May 12 : If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.

On this day, 12 May...

1459 - Sun City India founded by Rao in Jodhpur. (The city is known as the "Sun City" for the bright and sunny weather it enjoys all the year round). 

1816 - The Columbian Press, the first printing press invented in America. It was designed by George E. Clymer.  The Columbian was somewhat well-received in America, even at $400, which was twice the cost of a wooden press. In 1818, Clymer took his business to England and found much greater success.   From the 1840s, the presses were manufactured by companies all over Europe.

1874 - The prolific black American inventor Elijah J. McCoy patented an ironing table.

1896 - American inventor C.B. Brooks was issued a U.S. patent for street sweepers.

1925 - A trodden pneumatic tire was patented in the U.S. by Alden Putnam.

1926 – The Italian-built airship Norge becomes the first vessel to fly over the North Pole.

1936 - The Dvorak typewriter keyboard was patented in the U.S. The efficiency experts August Dvorak (a cousin of the composer) and William Dealey studied the typewriter to determine that they could arrange the keys in a new way which would speed up the operators of the typewriter. They designed a keyboard to maximize efficiency by placing common letters on the home row and make the stronger fingers of the hands do most of the work. By contrast, the original QWERTY layout was designed for the earlier, less efficient typewriters. Previously, speed would result in two typebars hitting each other in their travel, so the original keyboard was laid out to reduce collisions.

1941 - Konrad Zuse completed the world's first fully-functional programmable computer (Turing-complete computer), his Z3 machine.

1949 - 1st foreign woman ambassador received in U.S. (Smt Vijay Laxmi Pandit, India).

1987 - Britain's HMS Hermes becomes Indian Navy's second aircraft carrier named INS Viraat.

1995 - India refused to sign NPT in its present discriminatory form.

1998 - Bill Clinton, US President, asks India to sign the CTBT.

2014 - The discovery of what was believed to be the world's oldest seat of learning, the Library of Alexandria, was announced by Zahi Hawass, president of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities.  A Polish-Egyptian team had uncovered 13 lecture halls featuring an elevated podium for the lecturer. Such a complex of lecture halls had never before been found on any Mediterranean Greco-Roman site. (Alexandria may be regarded as the birthplace of western science, where Euclid discovered the rules of geometry, Eratosthenes measured the diameter of the Earth and Ptolemy wrote the Almagest, the most influential scientific book about the nature of the Universe for 1,500 years).

2015 - A second major earthquake, magnitude 7.3, hits Nepal less than three weeks after a magnitude 7.8 earthquake shook the nation and caused thousands of deaths and injuries; at least 48 people are known to have perished in this second event.

Born

1820 - Florence Nightingale, English nurse, and statistician, “The Lady With The Lamp,” who established modern nursing practice. Her contributions to public health included developing methods of applying and displaying statistics to demonstrate the need for improvements. 

1930 - Admiral R. H. Tahiliyani, former Indian Navy Chief.

RIP

1984 - Dr. Rajah Sir Muthiah Chettiar, social reformer.

You may have known...

ADIDAS is named after the founder Adolf (Adi) Dassler.