On This Day

Today in History, March 13th

On March 13, 1781, William Herschel discovered Uranus, the first planet found by telescope. Plus Alexander II's death and Pope Francis.

By Today in History Updated November 10, 2026 3 min read Sources checked

Published March 13, 2026 · Last updated November 10, 2026

March 13 is best known for 1781, when William Herschel spotted the planet Uranus from England, the first planet found with a telescope. The date also saw the assassination of Russia’s Czar Alexander II in 1881 and the election of Pope Francis in 2013.

The big story: Herschel Finds a New Planet (1781)

William Herschel made his living in music. Born in Hanover, he had settled in England and become the organist at a fashionable chapel in Bath. At night, though, he swept the sky with telescopes he built himself, grinding the mirrors by hand. On March 13, 1781, during a careful survey of the stars, he noticed an object that did not behave like a star. He first took it for a nebulous star or possibly a comet. It turned out to be a planet, the first one ever found with a telescope. Herschel wanted to name it the “Georgian Planet” after King George III, who rewarded him with a yearly pension that let him give up music for astronomy. Other astronomers preferred a name from mythology, and the German astronomer Johann Bode’s suggestion, Uranus, is the one that stuck.

More events on March 13

Year	What happened
1852	Uncle Sam made his first appearance in an American publication, in a Frank Bellew cartoon in the humor magazine The Lantern.
1865	Facing long odds, the Confederacy reluctantly approved the use of Black soldiers in its armies.
1881	Russia’s Czar Alexander II, who had abolished serfdom in 1861, was killed in St. Petersburg by a bomb thrown by a member of the revolutionary group People’s Will.
1884	Forces of the Mahdi began the siege of Khartoum in Sudan, held by an Egyptian garrison under Charles George Gordon.
1942	The U.S. Army’s Quartermaster Corps began training dogs for its new War Dog Program, better known as the K-9 Corps.
1961	President John F. Kennedy proposed a 10-year aid program for Latin America, later called the Alliance for Progress.
1986	Soviet cosmonauts Leonid Kizim and Vladimir Solovyev launched toward the new Mir space station and became its first residents.
2012	Encyclopædia Britannica announced it would stop publishing its printed edition.
2013	Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina was elected pope and took the name Francis, becoming the first pope from the Americas.
2020	Breonna Taylor, an EMT, was shot and killed by police during a raid on her apartment in Louisville, Kentucky. Her death set off protests and calls for police reform.

Born on March 13

1741: Joseph II, Holy Roman emperor and reforming Habsburg ruler.
1781: Karl Friedrich Schinkel, German architect of Berlin’s Altes Museum.
1855: Percival Lowell, Boston astronomer whose search for a planet beyond Neptune led to the discovery of Pluto.
1941: Mahmoud Darwish, Palestinian poet.