July 25th "2024" Daily Prep
Welcome to day 207 of the year! Known as The Feast of St. James, National Wine and Cheese Day. If you were born today you were likely conceived the week of November 1st in the previous year. Your star sign is Leo and your birthstone is Ruby.
2000 – Air France Flight 4590, a Concorde passenger jet on an international charter flight from Paris to New York, crashed shortly after takeoff, killing all 109 people on board and four on the ground.
Todays birthdays
1955 – Iman (69), Somali-American model, actress (Star Trek 6) and wife of David Bowie before his death in 2016, born in Mogadishu, Somalia.
1967 – Matt LeBlanc (57), American actor (Friends, Lost In Space), born in Newton, Massachusetts, United States.
1970 – Lord Nicholas Windsor (54), youngest son of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, born in King’s College Hospital, Denmark Hill, London.
1974 – Paul Epworth (50), British Grammy award winning record producer, musician and songwriter (Adele, Florence and the Machine, Rihanna), born in Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire.
1979 – Ali Carter (45), English professional snooker player (twice World Championship runner-up 2008 and 2012, losing both finals to Ronnie O’Sullivan), born in Colchester, Essex.
Famous deaths
1980 – Peter Sellers (b. 1925), English actor and comedian (The Goon Show, The Pink Panther).
The day today
1907 – Sir Robert Baden-Powell began setting up his experimental camp on Brownsea Island near Poole to test the feasibility of Scouting.
1959 – A hovercraft, the SR.N1, designed by Christopher Cockerell, made its first English Channel crossing from Dover to Calais. The acronym SR.N1 stood for Saunders-Roe Nautical 1.
1978 – Louise Joy Brown, the first test-tube baby in Britain, was born at Oldham Hospital in Greater Manchester. It had taken 12 years of research by gynaecologist Patrick Steptoe and Dr Robert Edwards to make the birth possible. Louise weighed 5lb 12 oz and was delivered by caesarean section.
1999 – Lance Armstrong wins the first of seven consecutive Tour de France tournaments, but all titles are later wiped and he is disqualified for drug cheating.
2013 – The retirement, aged 77, of James Alexander Gordon, voice of the classified football results for 40 years. He pioneered the much-mimicked technique of raising his tone for the winning side’s score, and dropping it in sympathy for the losers.
Today in music
1964 – The Beatles third album ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ started a twenty-one week run at the top of the UK charts. This was the first Beatles album to be recorded entirely on four-track tape, allowing for good stereo mixes.
1971 – T Rex were at No.1 on the UK singles chart with ‘Get It On’, the group’s second UK No.1 which spent four weeks at the top of the charts. In the US it was retitled Bang A Gong, (Get It On).
1998 – Jamiroquai went to No.1 on the UK singles chart with ‘Deeper Under Ground’, their thirteenth hit and first UK No.1.
2010 – Paul McCartney’s former wife, Heather Mills, told the press that the trauma and pain she went through after losing her leg in a traffic accident was nothing compared to the way she felt after she and the former Beatle split up.
2014 – The pop star parodist, Weird Al Yankovic became the first comedy act to hit the top spot for more than 50 years.
Today in history
1603 – James VI of Scotland was crowned as King James I of England, bringing the Kingdom of England and Scotland into personal union with political union occurring in 1707.
1797 – Horatio Nelson loses more than 300 men and his right arm during the failed conquest attempt of Tenerife (Spain).
1814 – The chief engineer at the Killingworth colliery, George Stephenson, unveiled Blücher, his steam powered locomotive that could haul eight carriages loaded with 30 tons of coal at the break-neck speed of 4 mph.
1837 – The first commercial use of an electrical telegraph is successfully demonstrated in London by William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone.
1843 – The death of Charles Macintosh, Scottish chemist and inventor. He invented waterproof clothing, hence the term Macintosh or Mac.