- 198th Day of 2013 / 167 Remaining
- 67 Days Until The First Day of Autumn
- Sunrise:6:02
- Sunset:8:29
- 14 Hours 27 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise:3:25pm
- Moon Set:1:10am
- Moon’s Phase:68 %
- The Next Full Moon
- July 22 @ 11:16am
- Full Buck Moon
- Full Thunder Moon
- Full Hay Moon
July is normally the month when the new antlers of buck deer push out of their foreheads in coatings of velvety fur. It was also often called the Full Thunder Moon, for the reason that thunderstorms are most frequent during this time. Another name for this month’s Moon was the Full Hay Moon.
- Tides
- High:7:09am/6:33pm
- Low:12:44am/11:58pm
- Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
- Normal To Date:0.0
- This Year:0.0
- Last Year:0.0
- Annual Seasonal Average:23.80
- Holidays
- National Peach Ice Cream Day
- Wrong Way Corrigan Day
- Constitution Day-South Korea
- Munoz Rivera Day-Puerto Rico
- On This Day In …
- 1815 --- Napoleon Bonaparte surrendered to the British at Rochefort, France.
- 1862 --- National cemeteries were authorized by the U.S. government on this day. Arlington National Cemetery, located just outside Washington, D.C. in Virginia, is one of the most honored in the country. In addition to those who died in battle, other war veterans, including U.S. Presidents and government leaders, are buried there. Arlington National Cemetery also houses the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, in honor of those who lay unidentified on the battlefields of freedom.
- 1867 --- Harvard School of Dental Medicine was founded in Boston, Massachusetts. It was the first dental school in the U.S.
- 1901 --- Dr. Willis Carrier installed a commerical air conditioning system at a Brooklyn, NY printing plant. The system was the first to provide man-made control over temperature, humidity, ventilation and air quality. It was originally installed to help maintain quality at the printing plant and for the first two decades of the 20th Century, Carrier’s invention was used primarily to cool machines, not people. The development of the centrifugal chiller by Carrier in the early 1920s led to comfort cooling for movie theaters (remember the marquees with “It’s cool inside”?) and, before long, air conditioning came to department stores, office buildings and railroad cars.
- 1918 --- Russia's Czar Nicholas II, his wife and their five children were executed by the Bolsheviks.
- 1938 --- Douglas Corrigan, was an unemployed airplane mechanic. It was on this foggy day, that Doug left Floyd Bennett Field in New York, supposedly headed for Los Angeles. He landed his 1929 Curtiss Robin monoplane about 28 hours later - not in California but in Ireland at Dublin’s Baldonnel Field. Corrigan made the 3,150-mile flight without benefit of a radio or navigational equipment other than a compass. His explanation for the monumental mistake was that he was following the wrong end of the compass needle. (Folks were never sure whether his feat was a mistake or moxie.) He was, however, welcomed home as a hero (ticker tape parade and all) and known forever more as ‘Wrong Way’ Corrigan.
- 1941 --- The longest hitting streak in baseball history ended when the Cleveland Indians pitchers held New York Yankee Joe DiMaggio hitless for the first time in 57 games.
- 1941 --- Brigadier General Soervell directed Architect G. Edwin Bergstrom to have basic plans and architectural perspectives for an office building that could house 40,000 War Department employees on his desk by the following Monday morning. The building became known as the Pentagon.
- 1944 --- An ammunition ship explodes while being loaded in Port Chicago, California, killing 332 people on this day in 1944. The United States' World War II military campaign in the Pacific was in full swing at the time. Poor procedures and lack of training led to the disaster. Port Chicago, about 30 miles north of San Francisco, was developed into a munitions facility when the Naval Ammunition Depot at Mare Island, California, could not fully supply the war effort. By the summer of 1944, expansion of the Port Chicago facility allowed for loading two ships at once around the clock. The Navy units assigned to the dangerous loading operations were generally segregated African-American units. For the most part, these men had not been trained in handling munitions. Additionally, safety standards were forgotten in the rush to keep up frenetic loading schedules. On the evening of July 17, the SS Quinault Victory and SS E.A. Bryan, two merchant ships, were being loaded. The holds were being packed with 4,600 tons of explosives--bombs, depth charges and ammunition. Another 400 tons of explosives were nearby on rail cars. Approximately 320 workers were on or near the pier when, at 10:18 p.m., a series of massive explosions over several seconds destroyed everything and everyone in the vicinity. The blasts were felt as far away as Nevada and the resulting damage extended as far as San Francisco. Every building in Port Chicago was damaged and people were literally knocked off their feet. Smoke and fire extended nearly two miles into the air. The pilot of a plane flying at 9,000 feet in the area claimed that metal chunks from the explosion flew past him. Nearly two-thirds of the people killed at Port Chicago were African-American enlisted men in the Navy--15 percent of all African-Americans killed during World War II.
- 1945 --- President Harry S. Truman, Soviet leader Josef Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill began meeting at Potsdam in the final Allied summit of World War II.
- 1954 --- The Brooklyn Dodgers made history as the first team with a majority of black players.
- 1954 --- The first Newport Jazz Festival was held on the grass tennis courts of the Newport Casino in Newport RI. Eddie Condon and his band played Muskrat Ramble as the opening number of the world’s first jazz fest.
- 1955 --- Disneyland, Walt Disney's metropolis of nostalgia, fantasy, and futurism, opens on July 17, 1955. The $17 million theme park was built on 160 acres of former orange groves in Anaheim, California, and soon brought in staggering profits. Today, Disneyland
hosts more than 14 million visitors a year, who spend close to $3 billion. In the early 1950s, Walt Disney began designing a huge amusement park to be built near Los Angeles. He intended Disneyland to have educational as well as amusement value and to entertain adults and their children. Land was bought in the farming community of Anaheim, about 25 miles southeast of Los Angeles, and construction began in 1954. In the summer of 1955, special invitations were sent out for the opening of Disneyland on July 17. Unfortunately, the pass was counterfeited and thousands of uninvited people were admitted into Disneyland on opening day. The park was not ready for the public: food and drink ran out, a women's high-heel shoe got stuck in the wet asphalt of Main Street USA, and the Mark Twain Steamboat nearly capsized from too many passengers. Disneyland soon recovered, however, and attractions such as the Castle, Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, Snow White's Adventures, Space Station X-1, Jungle Cruise, and Stage Coach drew countless children and their parents. Special events and the continual building of new state-of-the-art attractions encouraged them to visit again.
- 1959 --- Mary Leakey discovered the oldest human skull in Tanganyika (Tanzania). It is about 1.8 million years old.
- 1967 --- The Jimi Hendrix Experience opened for The Monkees at The Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in New York.
- 1968 --- The Beatles’ feature-length cartoon, Yellow Submarine, premiered at the London Pavilion. The song, Yellow Submarine, had been a #2 hit for the supergroup (9/17/66) and was the inspiration for the movie.
- 1975 --- Apollo spaceship docked with a Soyuz spacecraft in orbit in the first superpower linkup of its kind.
- 1981 --- Two skywalks suspended from the ceiling over the atrium lobby at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City, MO collapsed, killing 114 people. Five years later, two design engineers were convicted for their gross negligence.
- 1997 --- After 117 years, the Woolworth Corp. closed its last 400 stores.
- 1998 --- Just after seven in the evening, the inhabitants of the West Sepik area of Papua New Guinea felt the tremors from a magnitude 7.1 earthquake. Eye-witnesses reported that minutes later the villages were hit in quick succession by three tsunami (tidal waves) reaching heights of 14 meters (45 feet: taller than a four-story building), followed by two smaller waves. More than 2,000 people were killed and some 10,000 left homeless.
- Birthdays
- Angela Merkel
- James Cagney
- Diahann Carroll
- Donald Sutherland
- Spencer Davis
- Connie Hawkins
- Lucie Arnaz
- Erle Stanley Gardner
- John Jacob Astor
- Luis Munoz Rivera
- Art Linkletter
- Phyllis Diller
- Camilla Bowles
- Phoebe Snow