21 February on the globe: what happened in the world on this day, and who was born

Everything Wikipedia lists for 21 February

The list is the English Wikipedia’s, in its own wording, as it stood in October 2026. 15 events have no place on the map: the sentence links to no place with coordinates, only to places too wide to mark, or to several countries.

What the other Wikipedias remember

For these years the English list has nothing on this day. The events below come from the same day’s lists on Wikipedia in Chinese and were translated for this page.

1. 1953

   Francis Crick and James Watson discover the double-helix structure of deoxyribonucleic acid at the Cavendish Laboratory in England.

   Britain & Ireland · Cavendish LaboratoryTranslated from the list on Wikipedia in ChineseWikipedia: 卡文迪许实验室Show on the globe

Who was born on 21 February

In order of how many Wikipedia editions have an article about each. The first 60 of 176 are shown.

What is celebrated on 21 February

• Armed Forces Day (South Africa)
• Birthday of King Harald V (Norway)
• Christian feast day: Felix of Hadrumetum
• Christian feast day: Pepin of Landen
• Christian feast day: Peter Damian
• Christian feast day: Randoald of Grandval
• Christian feast day: February 21 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
• Father Lini Day (Vanuatu)
• Language Movement Day (Bangladesh)
• International Mother Language Day (UNESCO)
• The first day of the Birth Anniversary of Fifth Druk Gyalpo, celebrated until February 23. (Bhutan)
• The first day of the Musikahan Festival, celebrated until February 27. (Tagum City, Philippines)

A greeting link for someone

Type a name and, if you like, the year of birth. The link opens with a greeting, and beside each event it says how old the person turned that day, or how many years before their birth it happened.

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The name and the year go only into the link you send.

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All 366 days

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How the globe is made

Where the events come from

Each edition of this page uses the day’s list from Wikipedia in its own language: Romanian, English, Spanish, Chinese. The lists are written by volunteers and differ from one edition to the next; the text of each event is Wikipedia’s, with a link to the article. A row that appears twice in a list is shown once. The lists have not been checked event by event: they are Wikipedia’s, mistakes included.

For events before 1582, and for countries that moved to the Gregorian calendar later (Britain in 1752, Russia in 1918), the same day may be counted Old Style in one list and New Style in another.

The chapter “What the other Wikipedias remember” adds up to five events a day from the lists of the other three editions, only for years in which the English list has nothing on that day. They were translated for this page, passed the same filters as the tour, and are not counted among the events of the English list.

How an event gets onto the map

The place comes from Wikidata. If the sentence links to the article about the event itself (a battle, an opening, an earthquake), dated to the same year, the ray stands on its coordinates or on those of its location. Otherwise it stands on the first place the sentence links to: a town, a building, a mountain, an island. This second step can be wrong: sometimes the sentence only mentions the place. That is why the page says, under each event, which place the ray stands on.

When the sentence links to a single state or province, or to a single sea, lake or desert larger than 5,000 km², the globe shows a dashed circle, not a ray. The circle has the area Wikidata gives, with its radius kept between 1.2° and 16°, or a radius of 4.5° when Wikidata gives no area; it says only that the sentence links to that place. Organisations, ships, spacecraft, museum objects, rivers, mountain ranges, languages and continents are never used as places. When a sentence names several states and no exact place, the event stays in the list only.

What the height means

The height of a ray shows how many years have passed, on a logarithmic scale: 10 years, 100 years and 1,000 years are equal steps apart; anything older than about 2,600 years has the tallest ray. The colour runs from pale yellow for recent years to violet for antiquity.

Where the tour stops

In each region the tour stops at up to three events (five in Britain and Ireland), chosen mainly by three things: whether Wikipedia’s editors put the event in the “On this day” box of their main page (the English, Spanish and Chinese editions), how many Wikipedia editions have an article about it, and how many of the four lists include it. Events whose sentence or article is about a war, an attack, a crime or a disaster are left out of the tour; they stay in the whole list, in Wikipedia’s wording. The filter is a list of words and a list of Wikidata types, so it can miss some.

The tour of births names the people with articles in the most editions and leaves aside those whom the list or Wikidata describes as rulers, politicians, commanders, leaders of movements or criminals; they stay in the list.

The Earth and the Sun

The daytime images are NASA’s Blue Marble Next Generation mosaics, one for each month of 2004; the night side is Black Marble 2016. The tilt of the line between day and night is computed for the day; the hour is chosen so that the place being read is in daylight. The latitude where the Sun stands overhead is the average of the four years of the leap cycle; in a given year it can differ by up to 0.4°.

The day you were born

The number ones come from the weekly lists on Wikipedia: Billboard for the United States (from 1940; the Hot 100 from August 1958), the UK Singles Chart (from November 1952), Los 40 Principales for Spain (from July 1966) and, for Romania, the Romanian Top 100 and Airplay 100 (2001–2021, with missing weeks). The page shows the chart of the week in which the day of birth falls, with its date; Billboard and the UK chart are dated at the end of their week. For Romania before 2001 and for China these sources have no weekly chart.

The films are those that reached cinemas in the United States up to ten days before or three days after that day (some of them in a few cinemas at first), from the English Wikipedia’s yearly lists (from 1968), in order of how many editions have an article about them. The events “in those days” are the ones on the neighbouring days’ lists that carry the year of birth, passed through the same filter as the tour.

The day of birth, year included

The Moon, the star sign and the constellation are worked out by the page itself, for noon Universal Time on the day. The lit part of the Moon is rounded and can differ by a few per cent from that at the hour of birth. The sign follows the usual zodiac of twelve equal parts starting at the March equinox; the constellation is the one the Sun actually stood in front of, by the borders set by the International Astronomical Union, and within a day of a border the page does not name it. When the Sun changes sign while it is that day anywhere on Earth, the page gives the moment of crossing, rounded to ten minutes and accurate to within about a quarter of an hour, and the clock time in a few cities, with the time zone and summer time of that year.

The year in the Chinese calendar is the one your device’s own calendar gives for the date, checked against the Hong Kong Observatory’s tables. “All your birthdays” uses the same sources as the rest of the chapter for the same day in every year since the birth: the temperature, well-known launches that took place on that very day, matches of the teams the edition follows, snow deeper than 10 cm and strong geomagnetic storms. The three things at the top and the four on the picture are chosen in a fixed order (the song, the animal, a full Moon, a well-known launch before an ordinary earthquake); on the picture you can change them.

When the link carries a year of birth, the page adds a few things about that exact day. The weather is the Met Office’s Central England temperature record and the readings from New York’s Central Park; the “usual high” is the average of the daily highs of 1961–1990 for that date, with two days either side. The carbon dioxide figure is the monthly mean at the Mauna Loa observatory, where measurements begin in March 1958.

The earthquake is the one with the largest magnitude in the USGS catalogue for that day, counted in Universal Time. Before the 1960s the catalogue has gaps even above magnitude 5.5, so in the older years many days have no earthquake. The page gives only the magnitude and the place: the country the epicentre falls in or, when the epicentre is at sea within 300 km of a coast, the nearest country; farther out, only the ocean.

The launches are those that reached orbit or left for the Moon and the planets, from Jonathan McDowell’s GCAT catalogue. If nothing left that day, the page shows the nearest launch within three days before or after, and says how many days away it was. The geomagnetic storm appears only when the Kp index reached at least 5 in one of the day’s eight three-hour intervals.

The animal comes from GBIF: an observation made by a person (the animal seen or heard, or its tracks), dated to that exact day, with coordinates and a CC0 or CC BY licence. Only a few hundred well-known species are searched (mammals, birds, turtles, butterflies); of those noted that day, mammals and species with articles in many Wikipedia editions come first; birds noted almost every day, and species used recently, wait their turn. Observations dated 1 January are left out, because records without a day are often filed there. An observation shows that the animal was recorded there, not how many animals there were.

The matches are those between national teams. Only matches of England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, the United States, Canada and Australia are shown, along with those at the big final tournaments. The picture to send is drawn in the page from the day’s globe and the facts above, and stays on your device until you send it.

Sources

• Events, births and holidays: the day’s page on Wikipedia, text under CC BY-SA 4.0.
• Coordinates, places of birth and the number of editions: Wikidata (CC0).
• The Earth by day: NASA Blue Marble Next Generation. The Earth by night: NASA Black Marble 2016.
• Borders and regions: Natural Earth.
• World population and births per year: UN World Population Prospects 2024.
• Charts and films: Wikipedia’s lists for Billboard, the UK Singles Chart, Los 40 Principales, Romanian Top 100, Airplay 100 and American films by year (CC BY-SA 4.0).
• Weather: Met Office Hadley Centre, HadCET (Open Government Licence) and NOAA GHCN-Daily, New York Central Park. Carbon dioxide: NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory, Mauna Loa.
• Earthquakes: the USGS catalogue. Launches: Jonathan McDowell, GCAT (CC BY). Kp index: GFZ Potsdam (CC BY 4.0). Matches: International football results, Mart Jürisoo (CC0).
• Animal observations: GBIF, with a link to each record; species names come from Wikidata.

More pages about birthdays

• How common a birthday 21 February is
• The Moon you were born under
• How common each birthday is
• The birthday sky