Thomas Jefferson, third president of the USA, is remembered on his birthday anniversary.
Great Tthinkers Datebook: April 13.
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), 3rd US president (1801-1809), was born on April 13, on his father's plantation in Goochland (now in Albemarle County), Virginia. He graduated from William and Mary College.
He married Martha Wayles Skelton and they had six children.
When he was chosen to write the Declaration of Independence, he was just 33 years old.
Aside from being a writer, Thomas Jefferson was said to be a strict politician, lawyer, naturalist, musician, scientist, philosopher, and more. His house was filled with scientific gadgets and inventions, and kept accounting on the most obscure details of anything, including the daily fluctuation of the barometric pressure. Quite picky indeed.
He designed his own more accurate astronomical clock after missing the 1811 start of the solar eclipse. And more? Jefferson in later life composed all his papers with a device that allowed him to write with two pens at the same time for the simple purpose of keeping copies of all the papers he produced and passed through his hands.
Although Thomas Jefferson did not invent the idea of human rights, he was the first to propose founding a new nation on the basis of this very human rights. In the founding document, Jefferson wrote the now famous words,
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."
