Trivia Of The Day

The word orange ( meaning the fruit) entered the English language around 1400 — but it wasn’t used as the name of a color until the 1540s. Before then, the English speaking world referred to the orange color as geoluhread, which literally translates to “yellow-red."

The Beatles played their first proper evening gig at Liverpool’s Cavern Club on March 21, 1961. They played there 292 times between 1961 and 1963, sharing just £5 a gig between them.

Alpha Centauri is the closest star system to the Solar System, being 4.37 light-years from the Sun. A car traveling 100 mph would take more than 29 million years to reach Alpha Centuri.

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Happy Birthday

1685 Baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach, Saxe-Eisenach, Germany on March 21, 1685, the youngest of eight children. Johann was orphaned aged 10 and was raised by his eldest brother Johann Christoph Bach, the organist at the Michaeliskirche in nearby Ohrdruf. He attended the Gymnasium in Eisenach the same school that Martin Luther attended 200 years earlier.

Eisenach in 1647

Bach was acknowledged in Germany as the greatest organist of his time and esteemed as a specialist in the mechanics of organ building. However his contrapuntal (music that consists of two or more melodies played at the same time) style of writing sounded old fashioned to his contemporaries. Indeed his sons Carl Philip and Johann Christian Bach were more famous in their lifetime than their father.

For more March 21 anniversaries, including the Napoleonic Code coming into force, the first-ever Earth Day proclamation and the creation of Twitter, check out OnThatDay.

Today Is...

International Color Day is celebrated each year on March 21 by the International Color Association. Apparently they chose the date to mark the spring equinox, when light and dark are equal, though the equinox usually falls on March 19 or 20.

The human eye can detect more shades of green than any other color.

The color you see in a pitch-black room is "Dark Gray" not black and it is called "Eigengrau".

When asked to name a color, 60% of any sample will name the color “red.”