Today in history–February 14

1766: Thomas Malthus, who will become Britain’s first professor of political economy at the East India Company College at Hertford, is born at Surrey, England.

1803: The U.S. Supreme Court holds in Marbury v. Madison that Congressional acts that conflict with the Constitution, or are otherwise thought to be a bad idea by judges, are invalid.

1849: James Knox Polk becomes the first U.S. president to have his photograph taken.  He is the last who has to be talked into doing it.

1854: The first telegraph line reaches the new state of Texas, connecting New Orleans with Marshall, Texas.

1859: Oregon is admitted to the Union as the 33rd U.S. state.

1876: Alexander Graham Bell files a patent application for a new device called the “telephone.”

1903: The United States Department of Commerce and Labor is created.  A decade later it will be split in two.

1912: Arizona is admitted to the union as the 48th state.

1924: The Computer Tabulating Recording Corp. of Binghamton, New York, in business (through a predecessor) since 1896, changes its name to International Business Machines, or “IBM.”

1946: The United Kingdom nationalizes the Bank of England.

1966: Australia switches to decimal currency.

1975: Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, best known as the creator of Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, dies at Remsenberg, Long Island.  He once caught the teacher’s dilemma perfectly:  “Her pupils were at once her salvation and her despair. They gave her the means of supporting life, but they made life hardly worth supporting.”

1984: American ornithologist James Bond, the man for whom Ian Fleming’s famous British spy is named, dies in Philadelphia.  He remains the only person associated with the Bond legend who hasn’t gotten rich.