July 21: Neil Armstrong
July 22: William Harper (Rhodesian...
July 20: Siege of Berwick (1333)
21 Jul 2019 21 Jul '19
Neil Armstrong (1930–2012) was an astronaut and aeronautical engineer who was the first person to walk on the Moon. He was a United States Naval Aviator who served in the Korean War and later worked as a civilian test pilot for experimental aircraft. Armstrong joined the NASA Astronaut Corps in the second group, selected in 1962; he made his first spaceflight as command pilot of Gemini 8 in March 1966, becoming NASA's first civilian astronaut to fly in space. During this mission with pilot David Scott, he completed the first docking of two spacecraft. In July 1969, Armstrong and Apollo 11 Lunar Module pilot Buzz Aldrin performed the first crewed Moon landing, while Michael Collins remained in lunar orbit in the command module. Stepping onto the lunar surface, Armstrong said: "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind." He was later awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Space Medal of Honor and the Congressional Gold Medal. Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Armstrong> _______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries: 905: Louis III, Holy Roman Emperor, was captured during his attempt to restore Carolingian power over Italy by King Berengar I and blinded. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_the_Blind> 1925: American high school biology teacher John T. Scopes was found guilty of violating Tennessee's Butler Act by teaching evolution in class. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopes_Trial> 1969: During the Apollo 11 mission, Buzz Aldrin stepped out of the Lunar Module Eagle and photographed human boot-prints on the Moon. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzz_Aldrin> 1973: Mossad agents killed a Moroccan waiter in Lillehammer, Norway, mistakenly believing he had been involved in the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillehammer_affair> 2012: Turkish adventurer Erden Eruç became the first person in history to complete a solo human-powered circumnavigation of the Earth. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erden_Eru%C3%A7> _____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day: aventurine: 1. A kind of brownish glass containing gold-coloured spangles. 2. (mineralogy, by extension) A variety of translucent quartz, spangled throughout with scales of yellow mica. <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/aventurine> ___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day: Electro-magnetic discoveries have recreated the simultaneous "field" in all human affairs so that the human family now exists under conditions of a "global village." We live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums. … The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village. --Marshall McLuhan <https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan>