December 12 Birthday

Famous Birthdays on December 12

• Frank Sinatra (1915)

  American singer and actor regarded as one of the most influential vocalists in popular music history.

• Edvard Munch (1863)

  Norwegian painter best known for The Scream, a foundational work of Expressionism.

• Bob Barker (1923)

  American television host who presented The Price Is Right for over three decades.

• Jennifer Connelly (1970)

  American actress and Academy Award winner known for A Beautiful Mind and Requiem for a Dream.

This Day in History

• 1901 — Guglielmo Marconi received the first transatlantic radio signal, a Morse code letter S transmitted from Cornwall, England, and received in Newfoundland, Canada.

• 1911 — Delhi was proclaimed the new capital of British India, replacing Calcutta.

• 2000 — The U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Bush v. Gore, effectively ending Florida's presidential vote recount and determining the outcome of the 2000 U.S. presidential election.

What December 12 Says About You

Signals traveling somewhere they'd never reached before is a recurring thread on December 12, most literally in 1901, when Guglielmo Marconi received the first transatlantic radio signal — a single Morse code letter S, sent from a transmitter in Cornwall, England and picked up across the Atlantic in Newfoundland, proving that radio waves could cross the ocean despite most contemporary physicists' skepticism that the Earth's curvature would block them. Ten years later, on the same date in 1911, a different kind of signal about reach and authority was sent when Delhi was proclaimed the new capital of British India, replacing Calcutta and permanently shifting the country's administrative center of gravity. And in 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore landed on this date, effectively ending Florida's contested recount and determining the winner of one of the closest presidential elections in American history — a very different kind of transmission, but one that carried just as far. Sagittarius, presiding over mid-December, is traditionally associated with long-distance reach, whether physical, political, or communicative. Frank Sinatra, born on this exact date in 1915, built a voice and public persona that reached further, culturally, than almost any American entertainer of his era, crossing from music into film and back for decades. Edvard Munch, born in 1863, painted The Scream, an image whose reach into popular culture has arguably outlasted almost every other single artwork of its period. Bob Barker, born in 1923, spent over three decades reaching the same daytime television audience with unusual consistency, while Jennifer Connelly, born in 1970, built a career moving fluidly between mainstream and art-house film. The 12th reduces to numerology day number 3, tied to communication, an almost literal match for a date whose most famous event is the first transatlantic radio signal. Neither December's birthstones nor its two birth flowers carry an obvious connection to radio waves or legal rulings, but the date's real thread, something reaching further than expected, runs clearly enough on its own. Marconi's transatlantic transmission defied the expectations of most contemporary physicists, who assumed radio waves traveled in straight lines and would be blocked by the Earth's curvature over such a distance; the successful reception in Newfoundland helped establish that the atmosphere's upper layers could bend and reflect signals around the globe. The 1911 Delhi Durbar, at which King George V personally announced the capital's relocation, was staged as an enormous ceremonial spectacle attended by hundreds of thousands, a display of imperial pageantry that stood in stark contrast to the quieter, more contested legal proceedings of Bush v. Gore nearly ninety years later, which the Supreme Court decided by a narrow five-to-four margin in an unusual unsigned per curiam opinion.