On August 1, 1861, Robert FitzRoy, a British naval officer who
had been researching ways to predict the weather, published
the first known weather forecast in The Times.

The report, which included a prediction of 62 degrees and clear
skies in London, was largely accurate.

Fitzroy—who had captained the famed HMS Beagle, which
sailed around the world with naturalist Charles Darwin—
had become concerned about the massive loss of life at
sea, with more than 7,400 shipwrecks near the British
coast over a five-year period.

After the initial August 1 forecast, weather reports quickly became
very popular and syndicated in publications around England. It
wasn’t just fishermen and sailors, traditionally affected by the
weather, who availed themselves of the forecasts.

People involved in organizing events like county fairs and flower
shows obsessively followed them as well. Some people even
used the forecasts for more speculative purposes, like picking
which horse to bet on in races, depending on how the weather
might affect track turf.

Ranger 7, an unmanned U.S. lunar probe, took the first close-up
images of the moon—4,308 in total—before it hit the lunar surface northwest of the Sea of Clouds. The images were 1,000 times as
clear as anything ever seen through earth-bound telescopes.

On the morning of July 31, 1975, James Riddle Hoffa, one of
the most influential American labor leaders of the 20th century,
was officially reported missing after he failed to return home
the previous night.

President Lyndon Johnson (left) signed the Social Security Amendments with former President Harry Truman and his
wife Bess present. 

On July 30, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed Medicare,
a health insurance program for elderly Americans, into law.

At the bill-signing ceremony, which took place at the Truman
Library in Independence, Missouri, former President Harry
Truman was enrolled as Medicare’s first beneficiary and
received the first Medicare card.

Johnson wanted to recognize Truman, who, in 1945, had
become the first president to propose national health
insurance, an initiative that was opposed at the time by
Congress.

On July 30, 2003, the last of 21,529,464 Volkswagen Beetles
built since World War II rolled off the production line at
Volkswagen’s plant in Puebla, Mexico.