19th July

EVENTS:

• 1843 – Brunel’s steamship the SS Great Britain is launched, becoming the first ocean-going craft with an iron hull or screw propeller and becoming the largest vessel afloat in the world.
• 1870 – Franco-Prussian War: France declares war on Prussia.
• 1900 – The first line of the Paris Métro opens for operation.
• 1903 – Maurice Garin wins the first Tour de France.
• 1943 – World War II: Rome is heavily bombed by more than 500 Allied aircraft, inflicting thousands of casualties.
• 1952 – The 1952 Summer Olympics, officially known as the Games of the XV Olympiad, were opened in Helsinki, Finland.
• 1983 – The first three-dimensional reconstruction of a human head in a CT is published.
• 1989 – United Airlines Flight 232 crashes in Sioux City, Iowa killing 111.
• 2014 – Gunmen in Egypt’s western desert province of New Valley Governorate attack a military checkpoint, killing at least 21 soldiers. Egypt reportedly declares a state of emergency on its border with Sudan.
• 2024 ─ A faulty software update by CrowdStrike, an American cybersecurity company, causes global computer outages.
• 2024 ─ The International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered a ruling stating that Israel should end its illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories. The ICJ identified that all member states of the UN are under an obligation not to recognize the occupation as legal nor “render aid or assistance” toward maintaining Israel’s presence in the occupied territories.

BIRTHS:

• 1827 – Mangal Pandey, Indian soldier (d. 1857)
• 1876 – John Gunn, England cricketer (d. 1963)
• 1877 – Arthur Fielder, English cricketer (d. 1949)
• 1921 – Rosalyn Sussman Yalow, American physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2011)
• 1938 – Jayant Narlikar, Indian astrophysicist
• 1955 – Roger Binny, Indian cricketer
• 1956 – Mark Crispin, American computer scientist, designed the IMAP (d. 2012)
• 1977 – Ed Smith, English cricketer and journalist
• 1979 – Dilhara Fernando, Sri Lankan cricketer
• 1992 – Jake Nicholson, English footballer

HOLIDAYS and OBSERVANCES:

• Martyrs’ Day (Burma)
• Sandinista Day or Liberation Day (Nicaragua)
• The first day of Lucaria (Roman Empire)