Today’s snapshot of what is going on locally
Turn to the Community Page today and every day for upcoming area activities and a look at local history.
Today is Tuesday, July 23, the 204th day of 2019. There are 161 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History
On July 23, 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.
On this date
In 1829, William Austin Burt received a patent for his “typographer,” a forerunner of the typewriter.
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 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 1983, an Air Canada Boeing 767 ran out of fuel while flying from Montreal to Edmonton; the pilots were able to glide the jetliner to a safe emergency landing in Gimli, Manitoba. (The neardisaster occurred because the fuel had been erroneously measured in pounds instead of kilograms at a time when Canada was converting to the metric system.)
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.