September 7 Birthday

Famous Birthdays on September 7

• Grandma Moses (1860)

  American folk artist born Anna Mary Robertson Moses, who began painting seriously in her late 70s and became a celebrated self-taught American painter.

• Elizabeth I (1533)

  Queen of England and Ireland from 1558 to 1603, whose reign is often called the Elizabethan era.

• Chrissie Hynde (1951)

  American singer-songwriter and founder of The Pretenders, known for hits like Brass in Pocket.

• Evan Rachel Wood (1987)

  American actress known for Thirteen, Westworld, and her advocacy work on behalf of survivors of abuse.

This Day in History

• 1533 — Elizabeth Tudor, later Queen Elizabeth I of England, was born at Greenwich Palace.

• 1776 — The Turtle, a hand-powered submersible built by American inventor David Bushnell, attempted the first submarine attack in naval warfare against HMS Eagle in New York Harbor.

• 1940 — Germany began the sustained bombing campaign against London known as the Blitz, which continued nightly for months.

What September 7 Says About You

Two of September 7's real events involve someone trying something that had never quite been tried before, which sits well next to a numerology day number of 7, traditionally the digit linked to introspection but also to quiet, unglamorous experimentation. In 1776, an American inventor named David Bushnell launched the Turtle, a hand-cranked, egg-shaped submersible, in an attempt to attach an explosive charge to the hull of HMS Eagle in New York Harbor — the first submarine attack in the history of naval warfare, and one that failed to sink its target but proved the underlying concept was possible. A century and a half later, in 1940, Germany began the sustained nightly bombing campaign against London that became known as the Blitz, a different kind of first: the first time a European capital faced sustained aerial bombardment on that scale, reshaping how the rest of the war would be fought and survived. The date's gentler history belongs to Elizabeth Tudor, born at Greenwich Palace on September 7, 1533, who would grow into Elizabeth I and preside over a reign — the Elizabethan era — remembered for stability and cultural flourishing after decades of Tudor upheaval. Among more recent births, Grandma Moses, born Anna Mary Robertson Moses in 1860, didn't begin painting seriously until her late seventies, becoming one of the most recognizable self-taught American artists of the twentieth century on a timeline that upends most assumptions about when a creative career is supposed to start. Chrissie Hynde, born in 1951, founded The Pretenders and helped define a specific, unsentimental strand of new wave rock. And Evan Rachel Wood, born in 1987, moved from an acclaimed teenage role in Thirteen into a long career playing complicated, often unsettling characters, alongside advocacy work drawn from her own experience. As a Virgo date, September 7 carries the sign's methodical, detail-focused instincts, a fitting match for a birthday whose real history includes both a jury-rigged underwater weapon and a queen whose decades-long reign rewarded patience over spectacle. The Turtle's pilot, Sergeant Ezra Lee, spent nearly two and a half hours maneuvering the cramped, hand-cranked vessel through New York Harbor's currents before failing to attach his explosive charge to the copper-sheathed hull of HMS Eagle, and the device was lost entirely on a later mission, meaning Bushnell's invention is remembered today almost entirely for its audacity rather than its results, though the U.S. Navy still credits it as the philosophical ancestor of every American submarine built since, and a working replica of the Turtle now sits on display at the Connecticut River Museum near where Bushnell originally built it. Sapphire and the month's paired flowers, aster and morning glory, belong to all of September equally rather than the 7th on its own, though the stone's old reputation for wisdom sits well beside a date that keeps rewarding whoever is patient or bold enough to try the thing nobody's tried before.