May 14: Lewis and Clark Push Off, Israel Is Born, and Skylab Falls Upward

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May 14, 1804, is the day the Lewis and Clark expedition pushed off from Camp Dubois at the mouth of the Missouri River, beginning the journey that would end at the Pacific Ocean 16 months later. It is also the day, 144 years later, that David Ben-Gurion stood in Tel Aviv and declared the existence of the State of Israel, with the British Mandate for Palestine expiring at midnight. These are two of the most consequential journeys in modern history — one across a continent, one through the compressed time of a declaration read aloud in a museum 11 minutes before the Sabbath began. Both changed the map. Both changed the map in ways that involved enormous displacement of the people who had been living there.

The calendar gives you the date; the complications are on you to work through.

Lewis and Clark Push Off

The Corps of Discovery departed from Camp Dubois, across the Missouri River from St. Louis, on May 14, 1804. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark commanded approximately 40 men — soldiers, frontiersmen, Clark’s enslaved servant York, and eventually the Shoshone woman Sacagawea and her husband Toussaint Charbonneau. Their mission, assigned by President Thomas Jefferson, was to explore the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase territory, find a practical route to the Pacific Ocean, and document the plants, animals, peoples, and geography they encountered.

Jefferson’s instructions to Lewis were precise and extensive: he was to observe and document everything. Lewis had been trained by the leading scientists of Philadelphia specifically for this expedition. The journals they kept — both Lewis and Clark wrote extensively, in prose that is by turns scientifically precise, exhausted, and vivid — documented 178 plants and 122 animals previously unknown to Western science, encountered 71 Native American nations, and mapped terrain that no American mapmaker had ever documented. The expedition returned on September 23, 1806, having lost only one man — Sergeant Charles Floyd, who died of what was probably a ruptured appendix two months into the journey. Floyd would have died anywhere; the wilderness did not kill him.

The expedition has been celebrated as a triumph of exploration, and it was. It has also been described, in Native American scholarship, as the advance party of dispossession — the first systematic documentation of a region that the U.S. government would spend the next century clearing of its existing inhabitants. Both things are true and the second does not cancel the first, though it complicates any simple reading of Lewis and Clark as heroes of a heroic age.

The river that Lewis and Clark entered — the Missouri — is the longest river in North America, running 2,341 miles from its headwaters in Montana to its confluence with the Mississippi near St. Louis. It is nicknamed Big Muddy for its extraordinary sediment load. It is also one of the most engineered rivers on the continent: dammed, channelized, and managed across most of its length in ways that have fundamentally altered the ecosystems Lewis and Clark documented. The passenger pigeon whose flocks they observed, darkening the sky, is extinct. The black-footed ferret they documented is one of the most endangered mammals in North America. The great plains bison herds have been reduced from an estimated 30-60 million to approximately 500,000, most of them in managed herds.

Israel, 1948: The Declaration in Eleven Minutes

On May 14, 1948, at 4:00 p.m. local time in Tel Aviv — chosen because the British Mandate expired at midnight and the Jewish Sabbath began at sundown, leaving approximately eleven minutes — David Ben-Gurion read aloud the Israeli Declaration of Independence in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. He read for 32 minutes (the eleven minutes were the time between the formal ceremony’s beginning and sundown, which forced him to compress the reading; sources differ on the exact timing). The hall held about 250 invited guests. The declaration was followed immediately by Hatikva, the Jewish national anthem, played by the Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra.

Eleven minutes after the declaration, the Sabbath began. Eleven minutes after that, at 6:11 p.m. Washington time, President Truman recognized the new state — the first head of state to do so, making the recognition so fast that his own State Department officials weren’t informed in advance. Secretary of State George Marshall had argued against recognition; he thought it would damage U.S. relationships in the Arab world. Truman overruled him. The Soviet Union recognized Israel three days later.

The declaration was followed, within hours, by the invasion of the new state by the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and smaller contingents from other Arab states. The 1948 Arab-Israeli War — the Israeli War of Independence, or to Palestinians and Arab historians, the Nakba (the Catastrophe) — lasted until armistice agreements in 1949. By its end, approximately 700,000 Palestinians had fled or been expelled from their homes, creating a refugee population whose descendants now number in the millions. Israel controlled more territory than the 1947 UN partition plan had allocated. The Palestinian state that the partition plan had also proposed was never established.

The declaration that Ben-Gurion read in those eleven minutes is a remarkable document. It opens with a history of the Jewish connection to the land of Israel, describes the Zionist movement, references the Holocaust, and then commits the new state to “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex” and to guaranteeing “freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture.” The gap between those commitments and subsequent Israeli policy toward its Arab citizens and the Palestinian population of the occupied territories is a subject of ongoing political and legal debate — but the commitments themselves are in the document, which is worth reading rather than summarizing.

Skylab, 1973

On May 14, 1973, NASA launched Skylab — the first and, until the International Space Station, only American space station — atop a Saturn V rocket from Kennedy Space Center. It did not go well. Sixty-three seconds after launch, the micrometeorite and thermal shield tore away, taking one of the two solar panel wings with it and jamming the other. By the time Skylab reached orbit, it was overheating dangerously, generating only 25 watts of power — when it needed 6,200 — and in danger of becoming an expensive piece of orbital debris.

The first crewed mission, Skylab 2, launched eleven days later carrying astronauts Pete Conrad, Paul Weitz, and Joseph Kerwin. Their primary mission, before any of the planned science could begin, was to fix the station. They deployed a parasol-like thermal shade through a scientific airlock, reducing internal temperatures from 125°F to 75°F. Conrad and Kerwin performed a spacewalk to free the jammed solar panel, using bolt cutters and their own physical leverage to deploy it. The station was saved.

Skylab ultimately supported three crewed missions over nine months, conducting 2,000 hours of scientific experiments, demonstrating that humans could live and work in microgravity for extended periods (up to 84 days at that point), and returning remarkable solar observations from the Apollo Telescope Mount. NASA always planned to reboost Skylab into a higher orbit before the Space Shuttle — scheduled to fly in 1979 — could bring a reboost module. The Shuttle was delayed until 1981. Solar activity increased beyond predictions, causing the atmosphere to expand and increase drag on the station. Skylab began falling. On July 11, 1979, it re-entered the atmosphere and distributed debris across the Australian outback and the Indian Ocean. The town of Esperance, Western Australia, issued NASA a $400 fine for littering. NASA paid it in 2009.

Bobby Darin and the Bio He Couldn’t Write

Bobby Darin was born Walden Robert Cassotto on May 14, 1936, in the East Harlem neighborhood of New York City. The name Bobby Darin was chosen partly from a phone book. He spent his career navigating the tension between the commercial entertainer he was expected to be — the Rat Pack-adjacent Las Vegas performer who recorded “Mack the Knife” and “Beyond the Sea” — and the person he apparently suspected he might actually be.

He found out who he was at 32. His mother, Nina Maffin Cassotto, died in 1968, and among her papers he discovered that the woman he had believed to be his sister, Vivien Fern Walden, was actually his mother. Nina had raised him as her son to conceal what would have been a family scandal — Vivien was unmarried, the father’s identity uncertain. Bobby Darin learned, at 32, that his entire biography was wrong. He had been performing a persona built on a false foundation, and now the foundation was gone.

He died four years later, on December 20, 1973, from complications following open-heart surgery. He was 37. He had known since childhood that he had a congenital heart defect — it had been a constant presence in his life — and had reportedly told friends that he did not expect to live past 30. He lived to 37. He had enough time to find out the truth and not enough to fully figure out what to do with it.

“Mack the Knife” — his biggest hit, a cover of the Brecht-Weill “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer” from The Threepenny Opera — is a song sung from the perspective of a cheerful narrator describing the crimes of a violent criminal. The cheerfulness is the point. Darin recorded it in a single take, after the scheduled session was cancelled and he had thirty minutes of studio time he hadn’t expected. It won him the 1960 Grammy for Record of the Year and Song of the Year.

Facebook Goes Public, 2012

On May 14, 2012, Facebook filed with NASDAQ for an initial public offering at $38 per share, valuing the company at approximately $104 billion — the largest technology IPO in American history to that point. The opening day was a debacle: technical glitches at NASDAQ delayed trading by 30 minutes, thousands of orders were lost or delayed, and the stock barely moved from its offering price. It closed at $38.23 — a gain of 0.6 percent. NASDAQ later agreed to pay $10 million to settle SEC charges related to the technical failures.

The IPO was widely considered a disappointment. Within a month, the stock had fallen to $25. Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth dropped by billions. Analysts wrote obituaries for the company’s growth story. Within three years, the stock had tripled from its IPO price. Facebook’s advertising business — then still developing — became one of the most profitable in corporate history. The company that many wrote off in May 2012 was worth over a trillion dollars a decade later.

The lesson that everyone drew from the Facebook IPO was wrong in the direction of pessimism. The lesson that Facebook subsequently demonstrated was, depending on your politics, either that visionary companies should ignore short-term market sentiment, or that companies whose business model is built on surveilling users and selling that data can generate extraordinary profits regardless of what the public thinks of them. Both readings are defensible.

Also on This Day

• 1643: Five-year-old Louis XIV becomes King of France following the death of his father Louis XIII. He reigns for 72 years — the longest confirmed reign of any major monarch in European history — and does not formally take personal control of the government until 1661, when Cardinal Mazarin dies. For the first 18 years, his mother Anne of Austria governs as regent.
• 1796: Edward Jenner administers the first smallpox vaccine to James Phipps, an eight-year-old boy, using cowpox material. Jenner then deliberately infects Phipps with smallpox to test the vaccine — an experiment that would not pass any modern ethics review. Phipps does not develop smallpox. The experiment works. The practice of vaccination eventually eradicates smallpox from the planet in 1980.
• 1986: The Simpsons characters make their first appearance, as animated shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show. The episode is not initially noticed. The characters are rough, the animation crude. Within four years, The Simpsons has its own prime-time show and will become the longest-running American animated series and prime-time scripted television series in history.
• 1955: Eight Eastern Bloc countries sign the Warsaw Pact in Warsaw — the Soviet-led military alliance that serves as the counterpart to NATO. The alliance holds for 36 years, dissolving in 1991 as the Soviet Union collapses. Several of its former members join NATO within two decades.

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