July 22 1784: Friedrich Bessel, of Bessel function fame, was born. 1844: Rev. William Archibald Spooner, inventor of "spoonerisms," was born. 1873: Louis Pasteur received a patent for the manufacture of beer and treatment of yeast. 1918: Lightning killed 504 sheep in Utah's Wasatch National Park. 1926: Babe Ruth caught a baseball at Mitchell Field that had been dropped from an airplane flying at 250 feet. 1930: Aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss died. 1933: Wiley Post ended his around-the-world flight after traveling 15,596 miles in 7 days, 18 hours and 45 minutes in his single-engine Lockheed Vega 5B. 1942: Gasoline rationing using coupons began for WWII conservation. 1956: Air Force Capt. Frank Everest set a new unofficial world's speed record of Mach 2.87 (1,900 mph) in the Bell X-2 rocket plane. 1976: Arthur Compton, who won a Nobel Prize for his discovery of the Compton Effect, where x-ray wavelengths change when colliding with electron in metal, died. 1979: The first Sony Walkman went on sale. 1989: 11 year old Tony Aliengena became the youngest pilot to fly around the world, taking nearly seven weeks and 21,567 miles. 2000: Astronomers at the University of Arizona announced that they had found a 17th moon orbiting Jupiter. 2003: Uday and Qusay Hussein were killed in a gun battle in Iraq. |