Today in history, July 10
Today in history, July 10
USA TODAYWed, June 24, 2026 at 7:25 PM UTC
0
Today in history, July 10
July 10
Today in history
Today is July 10. On this date in:
1212: The Great Fire of Southwark burned through London, tearing through Southwark and burning the London Bridge, which had just been rebuilt in stone. An estimated 3,000 people are believed to have perished.
1890: Wyoming joined the Union as the 44th state after U.S. President Benjamin Harrison signed its statehood bill.
1893: Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, a Black American surgeon, performed the first successful open-heart surgery in the United States on James Cornish at Chicago's Provident Hospital and Training School for Nurses, which he founded; it was the nation's first Black-owned and operated hospital.
1921: Violence erupted in Belfast, Northern Ireland, between the Irish Republican Army and the British government in which 20 people were killed with at least 100 people injured and 200 homes destroyed. The event became known as Belfast's Bloody Sunday.
1925: The Scopes Monkey Trial began in Dayton, Tennessee, with jury selection. John Thomas Scopes, a high school science teacher, was accused of breaking Tennessee state law by teaching evolution.
1940: The Battle of Britain began as German forces bombed shipping convoys in the English Channel, attacking its ports and radar stations. The siege and fighting lasted three months and 3 weeks.
1962: Volvo safety engineer Nils Bohlin of Sweden was granted patent number 3,043,625 from the U.S. Patent Office for his three-point seat-belt system for use in automobiles. The design, which Volvo first rolled out in 1959, is considered one of the most important safety innovations of all time, having saved hundreds of thousands of lives globally.
Advertisement
1962: The Telstar 1, designed and developed by AT&T, was launched by NASA. It was the world's first active communications satellite, able to transmit live television signals and telephone conversations between the United States and France.
1966: Martin Luther King Jr. held a rally attended by thousands at Soldier Field in Chicago to give a speech about the injustices and discrimination many Blacks faced in housing. The event became known as Freedom Sunday.
1973: After 300 years of being a British colony, the Bahamas became a fully independent and sovereign nation.
1985: French secret service agents sunk a Greenpeace ship called "Rainbow Warrior" with two underwater bombs while it docked at the Port of Auckland, New Zealand. France initially denied its involvement but was later forced to apologize and pay reparations to New Zealand, Greenpeace and the family of the sole person to die in the bombing.
1991: Boris Yeltsin was sworn into office as the first elected president of Russia.
2011: British weekly tabloid News of the World published its final issue, ending nearly 168 years in print. The shutdown came after an investigation revealed that the paper hacked the phones of celebrities, politicians and crime victims.
2018: The final four boys and their coach were safely rescued from the Tham Luang Nang Non cave system in the Chiang Rai province of northern Thailand. 12 boys and their coach were part of a 13-member soccer team who explored the cave on June 23 but were trapped after heavy rainfall blocked their exit.
2019: The last Volkswagen Beetle A5 model ever produced rolled off the assembly plant in Puebla, Mexico, ending production of the modern Beetle. First conceived in 1938 for Adolf Hitler's Germany as "the people's car," the vehicle holds the title of the longest production run of a single car in automotive history.
– USA TODAY Network
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Today in history, July 10
Source: “AOL Breaking”
