September 13 Birthday

Famous Birthdays on September 13

• Roald Dahl (1916)

  British author of children's classics including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, and James and the Giant Peach.

• Claudette Colbert (1903)

  French-American actress and Academy Award winner known for It Happened One Night.

• Fiona Apple (1977)

  American singer-songwriter known for Criminal and an acclaimed, deliberately paced recording career.

• Niall Horan (1993)

  Irish singer and member of the boy band One Direction, later a solo recording artist.

This Day in History

• 1922 — A weather station at El Azizia, Libya, recorded a temperature of 136.4°F (58°C), long cited as the hottest ever reliably measured on Earth's surface, though the reading was formally decertified by the World Meteorological Organization in 2012 as inaccurate.

• 1985 — Super Mario Bros. was released in Japan for the Nintendo Entertainment System, becoming one of the best-selling and most influential video games ever made.

• 1994 — President Bill Clinton signed the Federal Assault Weapons Ban into law as part of a broader crime bill.

What September 13 Says About You

For nearly ninety years, September 13, 1922, held the record for the hottest temperature ever reliably measured on Earth, when a weather station at El Azizia, Libya, logged a reading of 136.4°F — a figure repeated in almanacs and record books for decades before the World Meteorological Organization formally investigated and decertified it in 2012, concluding the equipment and observation methods used at the time couldn't support the claim. It's a useful reminder that even settled-seeming historical facts sometimes need revisiting, and that honest almanac writing means noting the correction rather than repeating the old number as though it still stands. The date's other major event needs no asterisk: Super Mario Bros. launched in Japan on September 13, 1985, introducing a plumber who would go on to anchor one of the most commercially successful media franchises in history and, in the process, help legitimize home video game consoles as mainstream entertainment. Nearly a decade later, in 1994, President Bill Clinton signed the Federal Assault Weapons Ban into law, a policy that expired a decade after its passage and remains a reference point in ongoing American debates over gun legislation. Four people born on September 13 have built careers defined by imagination taken in very different directions. Roald Dahl, born in 1916, wrote children's books that treated young readers as capable of handling genuine darkness and moral complexity, a tone that helped make Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Matilda into enduring classics. Claudette Colbert, born in 1903, won an Academy Award for It Happened One Night and became one of the defining leading women of 1930s Hollywood. Fiona Apple, born in 1977, built a career on unhurried, meticulously crafted albums released years apart by design rather than record-label pressure. And Niall Horan, born in 1993, moved from a globally dominant boy band into a steady solo career. Numerology reduces the 13th to day number 4, tied to structure and hard work, a fitting undercurrent for a date whose real history runs through a corrected scientific record, a meticulously built video game franchise, and legislation that took years of negotiation to pass. As a Virgo date, September 13 carries the sign's exacting, fact-checking instincts, which suits a birthday whose most famous historical record turned out to need a second look. Super Mario Bros. sold more than 40 million copies over its lifetime, a figure that made it the best-selling video game in the world for nearly three decades until Minecraft eventually surpassed it, and its scrolling side-view design became a template so widely copied that the genre itself is still commonly called a 'platformer' in reference to games built the same way. Whatever meaning gets read into September's shared birthstone and flowers, sapphire and the paired aster and morning glory apply to the whole month rather than the 13th on its own — a caveat that fits a date whose most famous "fact" turned out to need one too.