TODAY IN HISTORY
1829: William Austin Burt received a patent for his “typographer,” a forerunner of the typewriter.
1885: Ulysses S. Grant, the 18th president of the United States, died in Mount McGregor, New York, at age 63.
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. 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.
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.
1983: An Air Canada Boeing 767 ran out of fuel while flying from Montreal to Edmonton, but the pilots were able to glide the jetliner to a safe emergency landing in Gimli, Manitoba. (The fuel had been erroneously measured in pounds instead of kilograms at a time when Canada was converting to the metric system.)
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.
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.
1999: Space shuttle Columbia blasted off with the world’s most powerful X-ray telescope
and Eileen Collins, the first woman to command a U.S. space flight.
2001: Pope John Paul II urged President George W. Bush in their first meeting, held at Castel Gandolfo, Italy, to bar creation of human embryos for medical research.
2003: Massachusetts’ attorney general issued a report saying clergy members and others in the Boston Archdiocese probably had sexually abused more than 1,000 people over a period of six decades.
2011: Singer Amy Winehouse, 27, was found dead in her London home from accidental alcohol poisoning.
2017: A tractor trailer was found in a Walmart parking lot in San Antonio, Texas, crammed with dozens of immigrants; ten died and many more were treated at a hospital for dehydration and heat stroke. 2009: Michael Jackson’s personal physician, Dr. Conrad Murray, was named in a search warrant as the target of a manslaughter probe into the singer’s death.
2014: The state of Arizona executed Joseph Rudolph Wood, convicted of murdering his ex-girlfriend and her father. (Wood repeatedly gasped as it took nearly two hours for him to die from his lethal injection.)
2018: The New York Daily News cut half of its newsroom staff, including the paper’s editor in chief.