On This Day (March 27)

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• 1513 – Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de León first sighted Florida, purportedly while searching for the Fountain of Youth in the New World.
• 1794 – To protect American merchant ships from Barbary pirates, the United States Congress passed the Naval Act to establish a naval force of six frigates, which eventually became the United States Navy.
• 1813 - Nathaniel Currier, American illustrator born. (d. 1888) (An American lithographer, who headed the company Currier & Ives with James Ives.)
  
  
  Central-Park, Winter: The Skating Pond, 1862
  
  
• 1845 - Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, German physicist, Nobel Prize laureate born. (d. 1923) (A German physicist, who, on November 8, 1895, produced and detected electromagnetic radiation in a wavelength range today known as x-rays or Röntgen rays, an achievement that earned him the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901.)
• 1863 - Sir Henry Royce, English automobile pioneer born. (d. 1933) (A pioneering car manufacturer, who with Charles Stewart Rolls founded the Rolls-Royce company.)
• 1923 - Sir James Dewar, Scottish chemist died. (b. 1842) (A Scottish chemist and physicist. He is probably best-known today for his invention of the Dewar flask, which he used in conjunction with extensive research into the liquefaction of gases. He also distilled a mean Scotch whiskey.)
• 1964 – The Good Friday Earthquake and subsequent tsunamis devastated Anchorage, Alaska, killing over 130 people.
• 1998 – The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the drug Viagra for use as a treatment for erectile dysfunction, the first pill to be approved for this condition in the United States.
• 2002 – A suicide bomber killed about 30 Israeli civilians and injured about 140 others, many of them Holocaust survivors, at the Park Hotel in Netanya, triggering Operation Defensive Shield two days later.
  
  Picture of the Day
  
  
  
  Panorama of the Court of Honor of the Louvre, the most visited and famous art museum in the world. In the center is I. M. Pei's glass pyramid that serves as the main entrance to the museum. Among its collection of 380,000 objects (including 11,900 paintings) are the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, and Winged Victory of Samothrace.