Charles S Peterson (born 1818)

In 1818, in the year that Charles S Peterson was born, on December 3rd, Illinois was admitted as the 21st U.S. state. Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and Barack Obama were from Illinois. Ronald Reagan was the only U.S. President who was born and raised in Illinois.

In 1825, on March 4th, John Quincy Adams was sworn in as the sixth President of the United States. His father, John Adams, was the second President of the United States and he was the only President who didn't win outright in the general election but was voted in by the House of Representatives.

In 1837, on February 25th, in Philadelphia, the Institute for Colored Youth (ICY) - the oldest African-American university in the United States - was founded. It was the first institution for the higher education of black people in the United States. Founded by Quaker Richard Humphreys who gave $10,000 to establish the school, it still exists today - although the location has moved and it has been renamed Cheyney University. Humphreys was concerned about the struggles of free African Americans to make a living.

In 1905, the German born physicist, Albert Einstein, proposed the Special Theory of Relativity: 1) that observers can never detect uniform motion except relative to other objects and that 2) unlike the velocity of massive objects, the speed of light is a constant and is the same for all observers independent of their constant velocity toward or away from the light source. Not such simple concepts that lead to the equation everyone now knows: E = mc2.

In 1937, on May 28th, the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge opened to cars. Taking 5 years to build, the 4,200-foot-long suspension bridge was an engineering marvel of its time - 11 men died during construction. The "international orange" color was chosen because it resisted rust and fading. To the present, it is the symbol of the City that is known throughout the world.