If the words April 15 make you cringe, then you must be one of the thousands of Americans who wait until the last minute to file their income taxes. Or maybe you are an incarnation of one of the thousands who died on the Titanic, which sank on April 15, 1912. Either way, it’s not a pleasant day for you.

Our current system of tax collection was born on February 3, 1913, when Congress passed the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution implementing the personal income tax law. They chose March 1 of the following year as the filing deadline. The deadline was changed to March 15 in 1918. Later Congress decided that the IRS needed more time to process the returns so they pushed the deadline back to to April 15 in 1955.