On This Day: March 27

This is the 86th day of the year.

Fact of the Day: kangaroos

Kangaroos can produce two different kinds of milk at the same time from adjacent teats. While a tiny joey (baby kangaroo) is attached to one of the teats, the other is available to feed a joey which has left the pouch. The older of the two is given milk with a higher percentage of protein (33 percent higher) and a much higher proportion of fat (400 percent higher).

Holidays

Feast day of St. Rupert, St. Athilda, and St. John of Egypt.

Myanmar/Burma: Army Day / Resistance Day.

Luxembourg: Osweiler.

Events

1512 - Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon sighted Florida.

1703 - Czar Peter the Great founded the city of St. Petersburg.

1794 - President George Washington and Congress authorized creation of the U.S. Navy.

1860 - The corkscrew was patented by M. L. Byrn of New York.

1884 - The first long-distance telephone call was made, between Boston and New York City.

1899 - Guglielmo Marconi sent the first radio signals, across the English Channel.

1912 - The wife of President William Howard Taft planted cherry trees on the bank of the Potomac River, in an event celebrating a gift by the Japanese government of 3,020 cherry trees to the U.S. government.

1917 - The Seattle Metropolitans became the first U.S. team to win the Stanley Cup as they defeated the Montreal Canadiens.

1920 - Film stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks were married.

1958 - Nikita Khrushchev became Soviet premier in addition to First Secretary of the Communist Party.

1964 - The strongest earthquake in American history, measuring 8.4 on the Richter scale, occurred in southern Alaska, creating a deadly tsunami; 114 people were killed and thousands injured.

1998 - The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the impotency drug Viagra, made by Pfizer.

Births

1813 - Nathaniel Currier, American lithographer: Currier & Ives.

1845 - Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, Nobel Prize-winning scientist who discovered X-rays.

1863 - Sir Henry Royce, founder of Rolls-Royce Ltd., with C.S. Rolls.

1924 - Sarah Vaughan (The Divine One), American jazz singer.

Deaths

1923 - James Dewar, Scottish physicist and chemist who invented the thermos flask.