March 12

1824 German physicist Gustav Kirchhoff, who formulated Kirchhoff's Laws of current and voltage in closed circuits, was born. 1831: Auto maker Clement Studebaker, the world's largest producer of horse-drawn vehicles, was born. 1894: Coca-Cola was sold in bottles for the first time. 1914: George Westinghouse, founder of Westinghouse Electric Company and inventor of railway braking systems, died. 1923: Astronaut Wally Schirra, the only man to fly in Mercury, Gemini and Apollo spaceships, was born. 1925: Japanese Nobel laureate Leo Esaki, who pioneered work on electrons tunneling in solids, was born. 1929: G.L. Pierce received a patent for the basketball. 1942: Nobel laureate Sir William Bragg, after whom Bragg's Law of diffraction is named, died. 1951: Dennis the Menace first appeared in the funny pages. 1970: U.S. Senate voted to lower the voting age from 21 to 18 years old. 1998: Astronomers debunked a warning that a mile-wide asteroid might collide with Earth on 10/26/2028, saying the calculations were off by 600,000 miles.