Today in History
Today’s highlight:
On July 23, 1829, William Austin Burt received a patent for his “typographer,” a forerunner of the typewriter.
On this date:
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.
1948: American pioneer filmmaker D.W. Griffith died in Los Angeles at age 73.
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 Black, were killed.
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 charges.
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 near-disaster occurred because the fuel had been erroneously measured in pounds instead of kilograms at a time when Canada was converting to the metric system.
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.
2003: A new audiotape purported to be from toppled dictator Saddam Hussein called on Iraqis to resist the U.S. occupation. 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. The driver, James Bradley
Jr., was sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty to transporting the immigrants resulting in death.
Ten years ago: The Office of Management and Budget predicted the budget deficit would reach a record $1.47 trillion in the current fiscal year. The actual figure for fiscal 2010 turned out to be $1.29 trillion. Ford Motor Co. said it had made $2.6 billion from April through June 2010, its fifth straight quarterly profit.
Five years ago: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump paid a visit to the Mexico border, where he predicted Hispanics would love him, adding, “They already do.”
One year ago: Boris Johnson won the contest to lead Britain’s governing Conservative Party, putting him in line to become the country’s prime minister the following day.