May 14 Birthday

Famous Birthdays on May 14

• Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686)

  Physicist and inventor of the mercury thermometer and the Fahrenheit temperature scale, though his exact birth date is disputed between May 14 and May 24, 1686 due to calendar-conversion records.

• George Lucas (1944)

  American filmmaker who created the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises.

• David Byrne (1952)

  Scottish-born American musician, founding member and frontman of Talking Heads.

• Cate Blanchett (1969)

  Australian actress and two-time Academy Award winner known for roles in Elizabeth and Blue Jasmine.

• Mark Zuckerberg (1984)

  American entrepreneur and co-founder of Facebook (now Meta Platforms).

This Day in History

• 1607 — English colonists founded the Jamestown settlement in Virginia, the first permanent English colony in North America.

• 1804 — The Lewis and Clark Expedition departed from Camp Dubois, Illinois, beginning its journey to explore the American West.

• 1948 — David Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of the State of Israel.

• 1998 — Frank Sinatra died in Los Angeles at age 82.

What May 14 Says About You

Founding moments cluster unusually thickly on May 14. Jamestown, the first permanent English colony in North America, was established on this date in 1607, and nearly two centuries later, in 1804, Lewis and Clark launched their expedition into unmapped western territory from Camp Dubois — two very different kinds of American beginnings sharing a calendar date. David Ben-Gurion's 1948 declaration of Israeli statehood on this exact day is the most consequential founding of all tied to May 14, a single afternoon announcement that reshaped the region's politics for the rest of the century and beyond. Mark Zuckerberg, born May 14, 1984, built his own kind of founding moment out of a Harvard dorm room decades later, though on a wildly different scale than a nation-state — still, there's something fitting about a founder's-instinct birthday accumulating this much company across history. George Lucas, also born on this date, in 1944, spent years painstakingly building an entirely fictional universe from scratch before Star Wars became a cultural institution in its own right, a very literal act of world-founding carried out with Taurus-grade patience through years of rejected pitches before it worked. The numerology day number for the 14th reduces to 5, tied to change and versatility — a fitting pairing for David Byrne, whose work with Talking Heads and afterward has ranged restlessly across music, film, theater, and visual art without settling into one lane, and for Cate Blanchett, whose acting range spans period drama to sharp-edged comedy with equal ease. Gabriel Fahrenheit's birth date itself carries a genuine asterisk: surviving records place it on either May 14 or May 24, 1686, a discrepancy tied to how Danzig's calendar records from that period have been transcribed and converted over the centuries, and it's never been definitively resolved. Frank Sinatra's death on this date in 1998 closes out a life that, in its own way, was also about founding something — an entire mid-century style of American pop vocal performance that later singers spent decades trying to emulate. Under the same emerald and lily of the valley as every other May date, May 14's real theme keeps surfacing anyway: the moment something new gets declared into existence, for better or worse, and then has to be lived with. Cate Blanchett, also born May 14, has built a career notable for accepting roles across wildly different scales of production, from major franchise films to small independent dramas, without treating either as more legitimate founding ground for her reputation than the other. The Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery that departed Camp Dubois on this date would not return for well over two years, a founding journey whose actual duration far outlasted the modest, practical send-off it received. David Byrne's later career included founding his own record label and touring production company, extending the same restless instinct for building new structures from scratch well beyond his original band.