May 14th Through Time: Vaccines, Voyages & Voices from the Past

On May 14th, 1796, a country doctor named Edward Jenner took fluid from a sore on a milkmaid’s hand and scratched it into the arm of an eight-year-old boy. That single, terrifying act of faith would eventually save billions of lives. Just yesterday, in our last episode, we were talking about the English ships arriving on the muddy shores of Virginia. Well, today, May 14th, 1607, is the day they officially founded Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America, planting a flag that would change the continent forever. These moments... these single days...

they don't just happen. They are built. They are chosen. And their echoes are all around us. And May 14th is a day just packed with these foundational moments. Take 1948. On this day, in Tel Aviv, David Ben-Gurion stood up and declared the establishment of the State of Israel. It was the formal end of the British Mandate, and the beginning of something entirely new and impossibly complex. President Truman and the United States recognized the new nation within minutes. Neighboring Arab nations did not. The ensuing conflict began almost immediately, and in so many ways, it has never stopped.

A declaration on a single afternoon that redrew the map and set the stage for generations of struggle and identity. It is a stark reminder that history is not a story that ends. It's a conversation that continues, often at high volume. Then you have another kind of beginning, a journey into the unknown. On May 14th, 1804, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark pushed their boats into the Missouri River just outside of St. Louis. Their mission, from President Thomas Jefferson, was to find a water route to the Pacific Ocean and explore the vast, unmapped territory of the Louisiana Purchase.

They were gone for more than two years, covering six thousand miles of wilderness, encountering dozens of Native American tribes, and documenting hundreds of new species of plants and animals. They were charting a continent, but they were also charting an idea of what America could be—stretching from sea to shining sea. It was an act of national imagination made real by mud, and sweat, and sheer endurance. And then we look up. On May 14th, 1973, NASA launched Skylab. It was America's very first space station. A workshop and a home in orbit. For the astronauts who lived there, it was a place of groundbreaking science—studying the sun, the Earth, and the effects of long-duration spaceflight on the human body.

It was a magnificent, rickety, brilliant piece of engineering that ultimately fell back to Earth a few years later, but not before it proved that humanity could, in fact, live and work among the stars. It was the next step after the moon, a bridge to the International Space Station and everything that has come since. And of course, a day this significant had to give us some remarkable people. The man who created Star Wars, George Lucas, was born on this day in 1944. Think about that. The mind that gave us hyperspace and the Force shares a date with the launch of America's first space station.

It feels right. So does the birthday of Sofia Coppola, a filmmaker who so beautifully captures a sense of modern melancholy and style. And Cate Blanchett, an actress who seems to be able to embody anyone, from Queen Elizabeth the First to Bob Dylan. And then there's David Byrne, the brilliant, quirky frontman of Talking Heads, also born today in 1952. He once explained how he wrote the song "(Nothing But) Flowers," a song where the narrator laments the disappearance of Pizza Huts and 7-Elevens, replaced by nature. He said, "I started imagining, ‘What if all this beautiful countryside, the strip malls and other things we think of as ugly, were gone?

We’d kind of miss it.'" That's the mind of a true artist—finding the strange, human truth in the landscape we build for ourselves. And in a final, bizarre twist of the digital age, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, was also born on this day in 1984. A day of explorers, filmmakers, and nation-builders also gave us the architect of the social network that would redefine how we all connect... or disconnect. And as with all days, we also mark the closing of a chapter. May 14th is the day we lost two legends of the silver screen. In 1987, the luminous Rita Hayworth, and in 1998, the one and only Frank Sinatra.

Two titans of a certain kind of 20th-century American glamour, their influence still felt in music and film today. But I want to go back. I want to go back to that doctor, and that little boy. Because what Edward Jenner did on May 14th, 1796, is one of the single most important events in human history. And I don't think that's an exaggeration. To understand why, you have to understand smallpox. It wasn't just a disease. It was a monster. It killed, on average, thirty percent of the people it infected. It blinded others. It left survivors scarred for life. It was a global terror that had plagued humanity for thousands of years.

There was no cure. There was no treatment. There was only fear. Jenner was a country doctor, and he noticed something. He heard the folk wisdom. Milkmaids, who often contracted a mild disease called cowpox from the animals they tended, seemed to be immune to smallpox. They never got it. Where others saw an old wives' tale, Jenner saw a possibility. A hypothesis. He believed that the cowpox infection somehow protected them. But to prove it... to prove it, he had to experiment. So he found a milkmaid named Sarah Nelmes with fresh cowpox lesions on her hand. And he found an eight-year-old boy, James Phipps, the son of his gardener.

He took the pus from Sarah’s hand and he deliberately infected James with cowpox. The boy got a slight fever, felt unwell for a day or two, and then recovered. But that was only the first step. The second step is the one that takes your breath away. A few weeks later, Jenner intentionally exposed James Phipps to smallpox. He deliberately tried to give the boy the deadliest disease known to man. He did it multiple times. And the boy never got sick. He was immune. Can you imagine the courage? Or the recklessness? The sheer, world-changing gamble of that moment? Today, it would be a bioethical nightmare.

But in 1796, it was a miracle. Jenner published his findings. He called it "vaccination," from the Latin word for cow, vacca. The idea spread like wildfire. Within eighteen months, twelve thousand people in England had been vaccinated. And the number of deaths from smallpox dropped by two-thirds. Two-thirds. It was the beginning of the end for a monster. It took another 180 years of global effort, but in 1980, the World Health Organization officially declared that smallpox had been eradicated from the face of the Earth. The only human disease we have ever completely wiped out.

It all started with one doctor, one boy, and one observation on May 14th. It's a direct line from that day to the polio vaccine, the measles vaccine, and yes, the COVID-19 vaccines that have shaped our recent lives. It was the day humanity learned how to teach its own body to fight back. And that other great beginning of May 14th... the declaration of the State of Israel. It’s a moment that feels both ancient and shockingly modern. For centuries, the Jewish diaspora had dreamed of a return to a homeland. After the horrors of the Holocaust, that dream became an urgent, desperate necessity for hundreds of thousands of survivors.

The political maneuvering that led to May 14th, 1948, was incredibly complex, involving the decline of the British Empire, the rise of the United States as a world power, and the United Nations' partition plan. When David Ben-Gurion stood at that podium in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, it was the culmination of all of that. He read the Declaration of Independence, a document establishing a new Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, the land of Israel. The feeling in that room, and among Jewish communities around the world, was one of pure ecstasy. A triumph after two thousand years of exile and persecution.

But outside that room, the feeling was very different. For Palestinians, it was the Nakba—the catastrophe. The establishment of Israel meant their displacement, the loss of their homes and their land. For the neighboring Arab states, it was an unacceptable intrusion. The ink was barely dry on the declaration when the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq invaded. That immediate conflict set the pattern. A moment of creation for one people was a moment of destruction for another. And that is the brutal, inescapable reality of that day. Unlike Jenner's vaccine, which was a clear victory of humanity against nature, the founding of Israel was a profoundly human event—full of hope, trauma, ambition, and tragedy all at once.

And looking back from today, we can see that the fundamental conflict of that moment—two peoples, one land, both with deep and legitimate claims to it—was not resolved. It was cemented. The history of that single afternoon is still being written in headlines every single day. So what does a day like May 14th teach us? We see a vaccine that saved the world. We see a nation born into conflict. We see an expedition to map a continent and a station to map the stars. We see the birth of storytellers who will define our myths. It’s a day of beginnings. Some of those beginnings are clear triumphs.

Some are complex tragedies. But all of them are acts of creation. They are moments where people refused to accept the world as it was, and took a deliberate step to build something new. Whether it was a cure, a country, a map, or a story. History isn't just a collection of dates. It's a study in causation. It’s the long, tangled thread that connects a milkmaid’s hand to a world free of smallpox, that connects a declaration in a museum to decades of conflict, that connects a journey up a river to the shape of a nation. These beginnings are never clean. They are always fraught with risk and unintended consequences.

But they are how the future is made. One decisive, irreversible day at a time.