March 7: The day NASA launched the Kepler spacecraft, which revolutionized astronomy by discovering thousands of exoplanets

The spacecraft was launched on March 7, 2009 for a planned 3.5-year mission. Also on March 7, the composer Maurice Ravel and the famous policeman Traian Tandin were born.

Kepler space probe

1875: Maurice Ravel, French composer, was born

Bolero is the most staged opera of all time. Until the 2000s, the piece was the most exported classical music work in the French copyright chart, earning over €1.5 million annually.

The French Impressionist composer was born on March 7, 1875 in Ciboure, France. The composer's attraction to Hispanic sounds is thus explained by the Basque-Hispanic DNA. However, little Maurice only spent a short time in the Basque Country; his parents came to Paris in the year of his birth. Ravel was a precocious talent, encouraged by his father. At only 12 years old, he was admitted to the famous Paris Conservatory.

Maurice Ravel PHOTO: Getty Images

He was a remarkable pianist who dedicated his first works to this instrument: antique minuet, habanera, pavane for a dead infanta: showing a special inclination for dancing; from baroque to modern dance: waltz, foxtrot but also for the blues.

Ravel revived the French classical spirit in the piano sonatina and the pre-classical suite Couperin's Tomb. His most popular symphonic creation is the Bolero – designed on an obstinate rhythm that persisted until the end of the work. Ravel presented a large melody made up of two musical periods on the flute, after which he always resumed the same melodic line and successively superimposed an instrument at a fourth and an octave.

1876: Alexander Graham Bell receives a patent for an invention he calls the telephone

Alexander Graham Bell spoke for the first time on a prototype telephone in 1876. His controversial invention changed mankind forever.

In 1874 Bell began work on a harmonic telegraph apparatus. Bell believed that several leaf springs at different frequencies could convert current into sound, but he had no model.

Bell received funding from Gardiner Hubbard and Thomas Sanders. In March 1875 Bell visited Joseph Henry, director of the Smithsonian Institution, and asked him for an electrical device with several springs through which he hoped to transmit the voice. Henry believed that Bell somehow had the beginnings of a great invention.

Graham Bell talking on the phone PHOTO: Archives

After meeting the engineer Thomas Watson, Bell entered the final phase of implementing his idea. The first moment when the two knew they were on the right track was on June 2, 1875.

Elisha Gray was also experimenting and used a water transmitter. On February 14, 1876 Gray filed a patent for a … telephone. That same morning, Bell also submitted the application.

The phone evolved really fast. On August 3, the same year, Bell demonstrated a conversation at a distance of 8 kilometers. The invention of the telephone was so simple, but it also contains an anecdote that might have changed the face of telecommunications today. Bell and his partners offered to sell the telephone patent to Western Union (the world's largest telegraph company) for $100,000. Company officials considered the phone to be just a toy. Two years later, even if he had given 25 million dollars he would not have been able to enjoy this patent.

[1945:TraianTandinRomanianwriterofdetectivenovelswasborn

Commissioner Traian Tandin, one of the most famous Romanian criminalists, who also participated in the capture of the famous Râmaru, died at the age of 75 in 2020. Many famous criminals were caught by Tandin, who retired in 2000.

He worked as a forensic officer in the Judicial Service of the General Police Inspectorate until 2000, when he was retired with the rank of colonel. He wrote books inspired by his adventures as an officer and was editor-in-chief of Poliţia Româna magazine, He worked on the “Râmaru” case with the famous criminalist Ceacanica, elucidated over 2000 judicial mysteries and did not give up until he found out the truth about the great errors made by the judiciary during the communist regime.

Commissioner Traian Tandin PHOTO: Romanian Police

Traian Tandin is one of the most famous criminalists of the communist period, and his passion was to unravel mysteries, from today or from a hundred years ago”, the quoted source says.

Dan Antonescu, criminologist specialist, claims that Traian Tandin was a very good judiciary and one of the few officers who had the courage to face the leadership of the Capital Militia. “There was an officer who hired the former head of the Capital Militia from Ceausescu's time, Marin Bărbulescu, who was an extremely vindictive individual. He faced him because he knew he was well trained, a good craftsman. And this was also seen in his books where, in the case of crimes, he very faithfully described the experiences of the victims, the perpetrators and the policemen later involved in the elucidation of the respective files“, stated Dan Antonescu.

1999: Stanley Kubrick, American film director, died

Stanley Kubrick (July 26, 1928—March 7, 1999) was an Academy Award-winning American film director, screenwriter, and producer who lived in England for the last 40 years of his career.

Kubrick was renowned for the care with which he chose his subjects, his slow working method, the variety of genres he tackled, and his perfectionism.

He is also recognized as one of the most innovative and influential film directors in cinema history.

Stanley Kubrick, director PHOTO: Archives

He directed a number of highly acclaimed, often controversial films, films that were perceived as a reflection of his obsessive and perfectionist nature.

His films are characterized by the presence of elements of surrealism, expressionism, but also an ironic pessimism, being also some of the most original, provocative and visionary ever made.

Seven of his sixteen films as a director are featured in the IMDb Top 250 list.

2004: Nicolae Cajal, Romanian doctor, died

Born on October 1, 1919, in Bucharest, Nicolae Cajal became a doctor of medicine and surgery of the Bucharest Faculty of Medicine in 1946 and a doctor of sciences in 1958. Cajal was director of the Institute of Virology of the Romanian Academy from 1967, of which he was a corresponding member from 1963.

In 1990, he was elected full member of the Romanian Academy. From February 3, 1990 until February 2, 1994, he was vice-president of the Romanian Academy, leading the medical sciences section of this forum since 1994.

Nicolae Cajal, academic PHOTO: The truth (archive)

He was a member of some international specialized societies, in some being part of the management group: vice-president and then president of the European Association for the Study of Poliomyelitis, president of the European Society for the Study and Combat of Viruses, vice-president of the Infectious Pathology Society.

He was a member of the Royal Society of Medicine – London, the International Society of Comparative Pathology, the French Society of Microbiology, the New York Academy of Sciences, etc. Cajal represented the Federation of Jewish Communities in the CPUN (February 9 – May 11, 1990). On May 20, 1990, he was elected senator of Bucharest, as an independent, on the FSN list (legislature June 9, 1990 – October 14, 1992). He was president of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania, elected on June 13, 1994.

2009: NASA launched the Kepler spacecraft

The Kepler Mission, according to the original English Kepler Mission, was a space mission, a space station, a special spacecraft and a photometer-type space telescope created and built by NASA to search for Earth-like planets in other solar systems.

The Kepler space station observed and recorded the brightness of more than 100,000 stars over the course of about 3-4 years to detect the periodic transit of the planets of a star, a method of detecting the planets of a certain star called the transit method. The space mission is named after the German astronomer Johannes Kepler.

The spacecraft was launched on March 7, 2009 for a planned 3.5-year mission. After nine and a half years of operation, the telescope's feedback control system was exhausted, and NASA announced the retirement of the Kepler mission on October 30, 2018 (after 9 years, 7 months, 23 days).

2022: The Covid-19 virus has caused 6 million deaths

As of March 7, 2022, the global death toll from Covid-19 exceeded 6 million. To date, of the more than 700 million detected, approximately 7 million people have died.

COVID-19 is the disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2).

The COVID-19 epidemic, which began in late 2019 and spread globally in early 2020, caused severe social and economic disruption before the Director-General of WHO determined in 2023 that COVID-19 no longer constituted a public health emergency of international concern.

The Covid virus has claimed millions of lives

2024: Sweden became the 32nd member state of NATO

Sweden officially became a member of NATO on March 7, 2024. Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson handed the official documentation to the US government, the last step in the accession process, reports Reuters.

Sweden became a member of NATO PHOTO: Shutterstock

The Swedes reconsidered their traditional neutrality after Russia invaded Ukraine four years ago, but the process of joining the alliance was delayed first by Turkey and then by Hungary.