July 25
1843: Scottish chemist
Charles
Macintosh, inventor of the rubberized raincoat that bears his name, died. 1857:
Frank Julian
Sprague, prodigious electrical design engineer, was born. 1909:
Louis Blériot made the first successful crossing the English Channel
in his Blériot XI monoplane. 1920: English chemist
Rosalind
Franklin, who made the image of the DNA helix structure, was born. 1946: The
first underwater nuclear explosion took place with the "Baker" atomic bomb during
"Operation Crossroads" at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. 1956: The
Italian liner Andrea Doria collided with the Swedish ship Stockholm off the
New England coast, claiming the lives of 51 people. 1959: The
SR.N1 hovercraft
became the first hovercraft to cross the English Channel. 1969:
Sen.
Ted Kennedy pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of the crime at Chappaquiddick,
where he left Mary Jo Kopechne to drown in the car he drove off a bridge while drunk.
1978: Louise
Joy Brown, the first test tube baby, was born in Oldham, England. 1987:
Charles
Draper, "the father of inertial navigation," died. 1984: Soviet cosmonaut
Svetlana Savitskaya became the first woman to walk in space.
| Jan
| Feb | Mar |
Apr | May |
Jun | Jul |
Aug | Sep |
Oct | Nov |
Dec |
Note: These
historical tidbits have been collected from various sources, mostly on the Internet.
As detailed in
this article, there
is a lot of wrong information that is repeated hundreds of times because most websites
do not validate with authoritative sources. On RF Cafe, events with
hyperlinks have been verified. Many years ago,
I began commemorating the birthdays of notable people and events with
special RF Cafe logos.
Where available, I like to use images from postage stamps from the country where
the person or event occurred. Images used in the logos are often from open source
websites like Wikipedia, and are specifically credited with a hyperlink back to
the source where possible.
Fair Use laws permit
small samples of copyrighted content.
|