Monthly Archives: July 2012

1858 – Lyman Blake of Abington, MA, patented the shoe manufacturing machine.

1885 – Louis Pasteur, famous for discovering the pasteurization process, made history by accomplishing the first effective antirabies inoculation (on a boy bitten by an infected dog).

1905 – John Walker’s fingerprints were the first to be exchanged by police officials in Europe and the U.S.  Law enforcement units in London and St. Louis, MO, completed the process.

1928 – The New York Strand Theatre presented The Lights of New York, the first all talking motion picture.  The film’s transitions used 24 titles to explain them.  The film told a gangster tale and introduced the phrase, “Take him for a ride.”

1942 –Anne Frank, a 13-year-old Jewish girl, and her family took refuge in a secret sealed-off area of an Amsterdam warehouse in Nazi-occupied Holland.

1944 – In Hartford, CT, a fire broke out under the big top of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, killing 167 people and injuring 682 others.  The cause of the fire remained unknown until 1950, when a man named Robert D. Segee of Circleville, OH, confessed to starting it.  He was sentenced to 2 consecutive terms of 22 years in prison, the maximum penalty in Ohio at the time.

1948 – Frieda Hennock became the first woman to serve as commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, when President Harry S. Truman appointed her.

1957 – Althea Gibson became the first black tennis star to win the Wimbledon women’s singles tennis title.

1976 – In Annapolis, MD, the United States Naval Academy admitted women for the first time.

1810 – P.T. (Phineus Taylor) Barnum, co-founder of Barnum & Bailey Circus, was born in Bethel, CT.

1853 – Cecil John Rhodes, diamond tycoon and founder of the Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University, was born in Bishop’s Stortford, England.  The African country of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) was named after him.

1865 – William Booth founded the Salvation Army in London, England.

1865 – The United States Secret Service was created.  At first, the agency was only responsible for protecting against the counterfeiting of U.S. currency.  In 1901, following the assassination of President William McKinley, the Secret Service began protecting the President of the U.S.

1946 – French fashion designer Louis Réard unveiled the first two-piece women’s swimsuit at a press party.  Réard called his creation a bikini.

1947 – Larry Doby became the first Black baseball player in the American League when he joined the Cleveland Indians.

1950 – Nineteen-year-old Army Private Kenneth Shadrick became the first American casualty in the Korean War.

1951 – Dr. William Shockley announced that he had invented a working and efficient junction transistor at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ.

1969 – Rod Laver became the first man to win four Wimbledon tennis titles.

1975 – Arthur Ashe defeated Jimmy Connors to become the first Black man to win Wimbledon.

1991 – Regulators in seven countries, including the U.S., shut down BCCI (Bank of Credit and Commerce International).  The institution and four of its units were indicted for fraud, theft and money laundering from corrupt activities.  In July 1990, 5 former officials of BCCI had been convicted in Tampa, FL, for laundering $32 million in cocaine profits for Colombia’s Medellín drug cartel.

1996 – Scientists at the Roslin Institute in Scotland announced they had successfully cloned a mammal from an adult cell, a sheep named Dolly.