On This Day in History: September 12

A delightfully cheerful, toddler-friendly tropical jungle scene featuring a happy cartoon monkey swinging joyfully by its tail and hands from a sturdy twisting tree vine. Flanked by broad tropical palm leaves, delicate fluttering butterflies, and gentle round rainforest bubbles, the playful primate smiles warmly against a sun-dappled forest canopy.

Celebrating classic jungle adventures and the wonder of tropical rainforest wildlife! In 1912, American author Edgar Rice Burroughs introduced the world to the legendary adventures of Tarzan, first published in the popular pulp magazine The All-Story. Burroughs's stories of the boy raised by great apes captured the imagination of generations of young readers worldwide, fostering early love for wildlife conservation, lush wilderness exploration, and playful jungle animals swinging through the tree canopies.

A charming, storybook-style vintage computer science scene featuring a friendly desktop computer with a smiling monitor face glowing warmly from its desk. Surrounded by playful floating starbursts and sparkling digital pixels, the friendly terminal rests beside a chunky mechanical keyboard, a cozy curtained classroom window, and a neat stack of classic punched cards ready to input code.

Commemorating the revolutionary creation of the BASIC programming language, first developed at Dartmouth College in 1964 by mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz! Designed specifically as the 'Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code,' BASIC transformed computing history by making coding friendly, readable, and accessible to students for the very first time. In the subsequent personal computing boom of the 1970s and 1980s, BASIC became the foundational language on classroom and home computers, inspiring millions of children to write their very first lines of interactive software.

A dramatic, high-energy cosmic exploration scene depicting the spherical Soviet Luna 2 space probe as it approaches and impacts the desolate, cratered surface of the Moon. Bristling with metallic antenna rods and scientific sensor bays, the probe kicks up a billowing plume of powdery lunar regolith upon contact, with deep impact craters, rugged lunar mountain ranges, and planet Earth gleaming like a radiant blue marble in the star-studded blackness of space.

On September 12, 1959, the Soviet Union launched Luna 2 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on a historic lunar trajectory! Traveling over 380,000 kilometers across space, Luna 2 became the very first human-made spacecraft in history to successfully reach and impact the surface of another celestial body when it struck the Moon's Mare Imbrium region on September 14, 1959. Equipped with onboard magnetometers, scintillation counters, and micrometeorite detectors, Luna 2 confirmed that the Moon possessed no strong magnetic field, marking a monumental breakthrough in the early Space Age.

A magnificent and deeply historic Indian independence movement scene depicting Mahatma Gandhi leading a determined procession of satyagrahis along a sunlit coastal pathway in Gujarat. Walking barefoot with his iconic wooden bamboo lathi, round spectacles, and simple khadi dhoti, Gandhi is accompanied by women and men carrying woven salt baskets and clay water urns, marching beside towering coconut palm trees as the morning sun rises majestically over the glistening Arabian Sea.

Commemorating the transformative power of Mahatma Gandhi's 1930 Dandi March (Salt Satyagraha), a 240-mile non-violent march from Sabarmati Ashram to the coastal shores of Dandi that galvanized India's freedom struggle against the colonial British salt monopoly! By picking up a fistful of natural salt on April 6, 1930, Gandhi demonstrated that peaceful mass civil disobedience could shake an empire. The global momentum generated by the march led directly to Gandhi traveling to London, where on September 12, 1931, he arrived to champion Indian independence and human equality before world leaders at the historic Second Round Table Conference.