July 16

Today is the Day of Trinity. 1739: Charles de Cisternay DuFay, discoverer of positive and negative electricity and repulsion between like charges, died. 1867: Reinforced concrete was patented by Joseph Monier of France. 1926: The first underwater color photographs appeared in National Geographic magazine. 1945: The U.S. detonated the first atomic bomb in a test at the Trinity test site in Alamogordo, NM. 1948: The world's first production turboprop aircraft, the Vickers Viscount, made its maiden flight. 1951: Dan Bricklin, co-writer of, VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet computer program, was born. 1957: Marine Maj. John Glenn set a transcontinental speed record when he flew a jet from CA to NY in 3 hours, 23 minutes and 8 seconds. 1969: Apollo 11 blasted off from Cape Kennedy, FL, and began the first manned mission to land on the moon. 1979: Saddam Hussein became president of Iraq. 1994: The first of 21 fragments of the comet Shoemaker-Levy hit Jupiter, creating a 1200-mile wide fireball 600 miles high. 1997: The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) closed above 8,000 for the first time. 1999: John F. Kennedy, Jr., his wife and her sister, died when their plane that Kennedy was piloting crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. 2002: John Cocke, who invented the Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC), died.