This Day in History

On July 23, 1829, William Austin Burt received a patent for his “typographer,” a forerunner of the typewriter.

On this date:

In 1885, Ulysses S. Grant, the 18th president of the United States, died in Mount McGregor, New York, at age 63.

In 1914, Austria-Hungary presented a list of demands to Serbia following the killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serb assassin; Serbia’s refusal to agree to the entire ultimatum led to the outbreak of World War I.

In 1945, French Marshal Henri Petain, who had headed the pro-Axis Vichy government during World War II, went on trial, charged with treason. (He was convicted and condemned to death, but the sentence was commuted to life in prison. On this date in 1951, Petain died in prison.)

In 1962, the first public TV transmissions over Telstar 1 took place during a special program featuring live shots beamed from the United States to Europe, and vice versa.

In 1967, five days of deadly rioting erupted in Detroit as an early morning police raid on an unlicensed bar resulted in a confrontation with local residents that escalated into violence that spread into other parts of the city; 43 people, mostly blacks, were killed.

In 1982, actor Vic Morrow and two child actors, 7-year-old Myca Dinh Le and 6-year-old Renee Shin-Yi Chen, were killed when a helicopter crashed on top of them during filming of a Vietnam War scene for “Twilight Zone: The Movie.” (Director John Landis and four associates were later acquitted of manslaughter.)

In 1984, Vanessa Williams became the first Miss America to resign her title, after nude photographs of her taken in 1982 were published in Penthouse magazine.

In 1986, Britain’s Prince Andrew married Sarah Ferguson at Westminster Abbey in London. (The couple divorced in 1996.)

In 1996, at the Atlanta Olympics, Kerri Strug made a heroic final vault despite torn ligaments in her left ankle as the U.S. women gymnasts clinched their first-ever Olympic team gold medal.

In 1997, the search for Andrew Cunanan, the suspected killer of designer Gianni Versace and others, ended as police found his body on a houseboat in Miami Beach, an apparent suicide.