This Day, That Year – May 12

The first ice cream advertisement appeared in the New York Gazette on this day in 1777, when confectioner Philip Lenzi announced that ice cream was available “almost every day”.

Did you know that:

• Florence Nightingale was an English social reformer, best known as the founder of modern nursing, born on this day in 1820
• Dorothy Hodgkin was a British chemist born on this day in 1910, known for her advanced technique of X-ray crystallography to determine the structure of biomolecules
• Konrad Zuse presented the Z3, the world’s first automatic programmable computer, on this day in 1941