Friday, July 25th "2025" Daily Prep
Welcome to day 206, known as National Tequila Day, National Day of Motoring, Samaritans Awareness Day, Tell An Old Joke Day. 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 (70), Somali-American model, actress (Star Trek 6) and wife of David Bowie before his death in 2016, born in Mogadishu, Somalia.
1967 – Matt LeBlanc (58), American actor (Lost In Space), best known for his role as Joey Tribbiani in Friends, 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 (51), British Grammy award winning record producer, musician and songwriter (Adele, Florence and the Machine, Rihanna), born in Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire.
1979 – Ali Carter (46), 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
2020 – Peter Green (b. 1946), English blues rock guitarist, singer-songwriter and founder of Fleetwood Mac.
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.
1909 – Frenchman Louis Blériot won the Daily Mail prize for the first successful flight across the English Channel. He made the trip in 37 minutes, landing close to Dover Castle. His success delighted the French but worried the British, who felt that they had suddenly become vulnerable to air attack.
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.
2002 – The Queen opened the Commonwealth Games in Manchester. Around one million visitors are thought to have gone to Manchester to see the event live and the world television audience was estimated to top one billion.
2009 – The last British survivor of the World War I trenches, Harry Patch, died, aged 111. He was honoured at a service at Wells Cathedral, in Somerset and was later buried in a private service at Monkton Coombe church near Bath. There is a memorial to him at Cathedral Green, close to Wells Cathedral. In 2007 he became the UK’s oldest author when he collaborated with Richard van Emden to write The Last Fighting Tommy, a detailed account of his life.
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. He never officially read the scoreline with which he was indelibly associated – ‘East Fife 4. Forfar 5.’ but in October 2011 fans across the country raised their hopes during a clash which finished, disappointingly, East Fife 4 Forfar 3. On Sunday, 22nd July 2018 that result finally happened for the first time in the fixture’s history when the Scottish League Cup Group B tie between the sides went to penalties after a 1-1 draw. The final score after the penalty shootout was East Fife 4 Forfar 5!
2019 – An asteroid, dubbed “City Killer,” came closer to Earth than the moon and was almost undetected.
OTD in 2019: An asteroid
Astonished astronomers reported the object flew past the Earth at 15 miles per second and was 43,500 miles from Earth at its closest point.
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).
1980 – AC/DC released their sixth internationally released studio album Back In Black, the first AC/DC album recorded without former lead singer Bon Scott who died on 19 February 1980 at the age of 33.
1987 – Terence Trent D’arby went to No.1 on the UK album chart with ‘Introducing The Hardline According to Terence Trent D’arby’.
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
306 AD – The death, in York, of Constantius Chlorus (aged 56), father of Constantine the Great and the second emperor to die in York. The year before his death he crossed over into Britain, travelled to the far north of the island and launched a military expedition against the Picts, claiming a victory against them and the title Britannicus Maximus II.
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.
1795 – The first stone of the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct was laid. The aqueduct carries the Llangollen Canal over the valley of the River Dee in Wrexham in north east Wales. It is a Grade I Listed Building, a World Heritage Site and is the longest and highest aqueduct in Britain.
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.