February 16 in History

The Council of Lithuania unanimously adopted the Act of Independence on February 16, 1918, declaring Lithuania a sovereign democratic republic free from all previous political ties with other nations. The twenty signatories knew the declaration was largely symbolic: German troops still occupied the country, and neither Russia nor Germany recognized Lithuanian sovereignty. The declaration drew its legitimacy from the Lithuanian National Council's claim to represent the will of the people, expressed through a congress held in Vilnius in September 1917. Independence became a practical reality only after Germany's collapse in November 1918, when Lithuania formed its own army and government. The new state survived a Polish seizure of Vilnius in 1920 and a Bolshevik invasion, establishing itself as a functioning republic before Soviet occupation in 1940 extinguished its sovereignty for fifty years. Lithuania re-declared independence in 1990, explicitly citing the 1918 Act as its legal foundation.

Howard Carter unsealed the burial chamber of Tutankhamun's tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings on February 16, 1923, revealing the first virtually intact royal tomb ever found. Carter had been searching for the tomb for six years, funded by Lord Carnarvon, who died of an infected mosquito bite five months after the opening, spawning the 'Curse of the Pharaohs' legend. The tomb contained over 5,000 artifacts, including the iconic gold death mask weighing 24 pounds of solid gold. Tutankhamun himself was a minor pharaoh who died around age nineteen, but the sheer volume and quality of his grave goods suggested that major pharaohs' tombs must have contained treasures beyond imagination before they were looted in antiquity. The discovery sparked a global 'Egyptomania' craze and transformed archaeology from a gentleman's hobby into a media spectacle. Carter spent ten years cataloging the contents.

Wallace Carothers, a brilliant but depressive organic chemist at DuPont, synthesized the first nylon polymer in 1935 and patented it on February 16, 1937. Nylon was the world's first fully synthetic fiber, produced entirely from coal, water, and air rather than biological materials like silk, cotton, or wool. DuPont introduced nylon stockings to the public in 1940, selling four million pairs in the first four days. When World War II began, nylon production was diverted entirely to military use: parachutes, tire cords, ropes, and flak vests. Women's stockings became so scarce that a black market emerged, and 'nylon riots' broke out when limited supplies returned after the war. Carothers never saw any of it. He swallowed a capsule of potassium cyanide in a Philadelphia hotel room on April 29, 1937, two months after receiving his patent. He was forty-one. His invention generated billions for DuPont and launched the entire synthetic materials industry.

Fidel Castro assumed the premiership of Cuba on February 16, 1959, six weeks after his guerrilla forces toppled the US-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. Castro initially denied being a communist, telling American journalists he favored democracy and free elections. Within two years, he had nationalized all foreign-owned property, aligned Cuba with the Soviet Union, and declared the revolution socialist. The shift pushed the Cold War into the Western Hemisphere. The Kennedy administration's failed Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 humiliated the US and pushed Castro further into Moscow's orbit. The Soviet Union responded by placing nuclear missiles on the island, triggering the October 1962 crisis that brought the world closer to nuclear war than at any other point in history. Castro ruled Cuba for forty-nine years, outlasting ten American presidents and surviving over 600 CIA assassination attempts by his government's count.

British sailors from HMS Cossack boarded the German supply ship Altmark in Norwegian waters and liberated 299 British merchant seamen held captive below decks. The daring raid violated Norwegian neutrality and enraged Hitler, who used the incident to justify his invasion of Norway two months later, dramatically expanding the scope of the war in Scandinavia.

The nuclear submarine USS Triton departed New London, Connecticut, on February 16, 1960, with orders to circumnavigate the globe entirely submerged. Captain Edward Beach commanded a crew of 183 men on an 84-day voyage covering 41,519 miles, following roughly the same route Ferdinand Magellan had taken 440 years earlier. The Triton never surfaced, though it briefly raised its sail to transfer a sick sailor to another vessel. The mission, codenamed Operation Sandblast, was timed to coincide with the May 1960 Paris summit between Eisenhower and Khrushchev, intended as a dramatic demonstration of American naval capability. When the summit collapsed after the U-2 incident, the propaganda value was diminished, but the military implications were clear: the US Navy could project power to any ocean in the world without ever revealing its submarine's position. The Triton was the only US submarine built with two nuclear reactors.