July 1, 1867: The British North America Act of 1867 takes effect as the Province of Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia join into confederation to create the modern nation of Canada. Sir John A. Macdonald is sworn in as the first Prime Minister of Canada. This date is commemorated annually in Canada as Canada Day, a national holiday.
01 July 1987: in New York City, radio station WFAN was launched as the very first all-sports radio station exactly thirty five years ago today.
WFAN, AM 660 and FM 101.9, is owned by Audacy and can be listened to on your streaming device. At this minute, I’m in San Francisco and streaming on WFAN at 0520 Pacific in the morning are Jerry Recco and Sal Licata.
The WFAN call sign was suggested by the wife of “The Fan’s” first program director, John Chanin. The first live voice heard on WFAN was that of Suzyn Waldman, with a sports update, followed by the first show, which was hosted by Jim Lampley.
WFAN’s original morning show was hosted by Greg Gumbel. Programming also included a morning show with Ed Coleman and Mike Francesa, and an afternoon drive time show with Pete Franklin, who in Cleveland had become one of the first polarizing, outrageous talk show hosts.
Ann Liguori is also one of the original hosts and was the first woman to host a show on the station. “Hey Liguori, What’s the Story” aired the first weekend the station was on the air in 1987 and continued until 2008.
01 July 1979: Sony introduced the Walkman. The original was the Sony Walkman TPS-L2.
The original 1979 Sony Walkman TPS-L2, released on 01 July 1979
July 2, 1839: Twenty miles off the coast of Cuba, 53 rebelling African slaves led by Joseph Cinqué take over the slave ship Amistad.
July 2, 1937: Amelia Earhart (b. 24 Jul 1897) and Fred Noonan (b. 04 Apr 1893) are last heard from over the south Pacific Ocean while on their circumnavigation flight. 1½ years later, on January 5, 1939 they were officially declared dead.
On 20 May 1937: Earhart and Noonan departed Oakland, California to fly west to east and circumnavigate the globe. They first flew east to Miami and then south to Brazil, to cross the Atlantic Ocean between Natal, Brazil and Saint-Louis, Senegal.
Kelly Johnson of the Lockheed Skunkworks advised them on engine and altitude settings for their heavily modified Lockheed Electra 10E which was financed by Purdue University.
On 07 Jun 1937: Earhart and Noonan crossed the Atlantic Ocean on a 1,727 nautical mile leg between Brazil and Senegal.
On 02 Jul 1937: at 10AM local time in New Guinea, Earhart and Noonan departed Lae, New Guinea for Howland Island, 2,222 nautical miles away in the Northern Phoenix Islands of what is today the United States Minor Outlying Islands, near Tarawa.
2,222 nautical miles was their longest leg to date since departing Oakland. They were scheduled to arrive the next morning, 02 July (after crossing the International Date Line). They never arrived. Howland Island is a tiny patch of land in the Central Pacific Ocean, about 640 acres in size, with dimensions of 1.40 x 0.55 miles and a maximum height of 10’.
A navigation error is the suspected cause for their disappearance. A bit of irony is that Fred Noonan was a late crew addition. The original navigator, Harry Manning, was an expert radio operator and if he had been on the fateful flight the outcome may well have been different.
At 8:43 AM Itasca time (USCGC Itasca), Earhart reported, “KHAQQ TO ITASCA. WE ARE ON THE LINE 157 337, WE WILL REPEAT MESSAGE. WE WILL REPEAT THIS ON 6210 KILOCYCLES. WAIT. WE ARE RUNNING ON LINE NORTH AND SOUTH.”
Radio signal triangulation located Earhart’s possible transmissions for several days after 02 July, coming from Gardner Island, now Nikumaroro.
Days earlier Amelia Earhart had said,
“Not much more than a month ago, I was on the other shore of the Pacific, looking westward. This evening, I looked eastward over the Pacific. In those fast-moving days, which have intervened, the whole width of the world has passed behind us, except this broad ocean. I shall be glad when we have the hazards of its navigation behind us.”
— Amelia Earhart, several days before she left for Howland Island and disappeared
July 3, 1886: The New York Tribune becomes the first newspaper to use a Linotype machine, eliminating typesetting by hand.
July 3, 1988: The USS Vincennes (CG-49), a US Navy guided missile cruiser, fired on and downed a civilian Airbus A300, Iran Air Flight 655, over Iran territorial waters in the Persian Gulf. The flight, with 290 people aboard, was en route from THR to DXB with a stopover at BND. On the BND-DXB leg, normally a 28-minute flight, about 7 minutes after departing Bandar Abbas International Airport the plane was fired on twice by the Vincennes. There were no survivors.
THR = Mehrabad International Airport, Tehran
BND = Bandar Abbas International Airport, Iran
DXB = Dubai International Airport
July 4, 1802: The USMA at West Point NY was founded.
It is the oldest of the five US service academies:
1802-07-04 USMA West Point NY
1845-10-10 USNA Annapolis MD
1876 USCGA New London CT
1943 USMMA Kings Point NY
1954-04-01 USAFA Colorado Springs CO
July 4, 1939: Lou Gehrig, recently diagnosed with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, informs a crowd at Yankee Stadium that he considers himself “The luckiest man on the face of the earth”, then announces his retirement from major league baseball.
July 4, 1817: construction of the Erie Canal began in Rome NY. When completed in 1825 it connected Buffalo to Albany and was 363 miles long. It was the second-longest canal in the world.
The Erie Canal covers an elevation difference of 565’ over 34 locks. Beginning at the Black Rock Lock in Buffalo, at Lake Erie and at an elevation of 569’, the end of the canal at the Troy Federal Lock on the Hudson River is at an elevation of 4’.
This page on canals.ny.gov lists the locks with map links to each:
https://www.canals.ny.gov/wwwapps/boating/locks.asps
According to https://www.worldlistmania.com/longest-canals-artificial-river-world the Erie Canal is the 7th longest canal in the world today. The 1,104-mile Jing-Hang Grand Canal in China, with 24 locks connecting Beijing and Shanghai in 1825, it was the longest canal in the world. Today it still is the world’s longest. Its high point is 140’ in elevation in the mountains of Shandong, and when the pound lock system was invented in the 10th century during the Song Dynasty of 960-1279, boats could navigate this change in elevation.
July 4, 1872: Calvin Coolidge, 30th President of the United States, was born in Plymouth Notch VT. 150 years ago today! Coolidge is the only POTUS to have been born on Independence Day.
Coolidge attended Black River Academy in Ludlow VT and St. Johnsbury Academy in St. Johnsbury VT, then Amherst College in Amherst MA before apprenticing as a lawyer in Northampton MA. After marrying Grace Goodhue in 1903, he had two sons, John Calvin Coolidge (1906-2000), and Calvin Jr (1908-1924, from blood poisoning).
A summary of Coolidge’s service:
1898: City Council, Northampton MA
1900: City Solicitor, Northampton MA
1903: Clerk of the Courts, Hampshire County MA
1906: Massachusetts House of Representatives
1910: Mayor, Northampton MA
1912: State Senator, Hampshire County MA
1913: President, Massachusetts Senate
1915: Lieutenant Governor, Massachusetts
1919: Governor, Massachusetts
1920: Vice President, United States (Warren Harding, d. at 57, cardiac arrest)
1923: President, United States
Coolidge died suddenly in 1933 at the age of 60 from a blood clot. He is buried in the Plymouth Notch Cemetery with his wife, Grace, and children John and Calvin, jr.
July 5, 1946: Micheline Bernardini models the first modern bikini at a swimming pool in Paris. Clothing designer Louis Réard names the swimsuit after the Bikini Atoll, where the first public test of a nuclear bomb had taken place four days before. His skimpy design is risqué, exposing the wearer’s navel and much of her buttocks. No runway model will wear it, so he hired a nude dancer from the Casino de Paris named Micheline Bernardini to model it at a review of swimsuit fashions.
Today, Micheline Bernardini is 94. She was 19 in this photo from 05 Jul 1946:
July 5, 1975: American Arthur Ashe became the first African-American to win Wimbledon.
… and …
July 5, 1980: Swede Björn Borg became the first person to win Wimbledon for the fifth straight time. Borg won Wimbledon in 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, and 1980.
July 5, 1915: The Liberty Bell left Philadelphia to travel to the San Francisco World’s Fair. It is the last time the Liberty Bell leaves Philadelphia. This was the first and only time the bell traveled west of St Louis.
Some five million Americans saw the bell on its 1915 train journey. It is estimated that nearly two million kissed it at the fair, with an uncounted number viewing it. In previous travels its crack had gotten worse. Since its return in 1915 it has never left Philadelphia.
The bell, commissioned in 1751, is inscribed with,
“Proclaim LIBERTY Throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants Thereof”
Lev. XXV. v X.
This inscription is from the Bible, from the Old Testament book of Leviticus chapter 25, verse 10. Leviticus is the third book of the Torah (the Pentateuch).
Maybe this will work:
July 6, 1942: Anne Frank and her family go into hiding in the “Secret Annexe” above her father’s office in an Amsterdam warehouse.
July 6, 1415: in Konstanz, Germany, the Czech theologian and church reformer Jan Hus was burned at the stake for heresy against the doctrines of the Catholic Church. He was one of the very first church reformers.
As he was burning Hus could be heard singing Psalms. Among his dying words, Hus predicted that God would raise others whose calls for reform would not be suppressed; this was later taken as a prophecy about Martin Luther (born 68 years after Hus’s death).
His ashes were scattered in the Rhine River.
July 7, 1959: Venus occults the star Regulus. This extremely rare event is used to determine the diameter of Venus and the structure of the Venusian atmosphere. The next occurrence will be on October 1, 2044.
July 7, 1892: The Katipunan was formed as a secret society in the Philippines whose focus was to start a revolution for Philippine independence from Spain. Andrés Bonifacio, known as the Father of the Philippine Revolution, was one of the founders of the Katipunan.
Founded by Filipino patriots Deodato Arellano, Andrés Bonifacio, Valentin Diaz, Ladislao Diwa, José Dizon, and Teodoro Plata, the Katipunan was a secret organization until it was discovered in 1896. This discovery led to the outbreak of the Philippine Revolution.
The Philippine Revolution, also called the Tagalog War, was fought from August 24, 1896 to June 12, 1898. The result was the expulsion of Spain from the Philippines. June 12, 1898 is the Philippine Independence Day.