"Incline" portion of the Granite Railway, Pine Hill Quarry to Neponset River, Quincy, Norfolk County, Massachusetts.

What is believed to be the first recorded railroad accident in U.S.
history occurred when four people were thrown off a vacant car
on the Granite Railway near Quincy, Massachusetts.

The victims had been invited to view the process of transporting
large and weighty loads of stone when a cable on a vacant car
snapped on the return trip, throwing them off the train and over
a 34-foot cliff. One man was killed and the others were seriously
injured.

Granite Railway memorial in East Milton Square.

A lifeboat full of survivors from the ill-fated Andrea Doria
which is sinking in the background.

At 11:10 p.m. on July 25, 1956, 45 miles south of Nantucket
Island, the Italian ocean liner Andrea Doria and the Swedish
ocean liner Stockholm collided in a heavy Atlantic fog. Fifty-
one passengers and crew were killed in the collision, which
ripped a great hole in the broad side of the Italian vessel.

The badly damaged Stockholm limped into New York
and offloaded its passengers, along with survivors
from the Andrea Doria. It proceeded to the Bethlehem
Steel Shipyard in New Jersey where it was fitted with
a brand new bow.

An Air France Concorde jet crashed upon takeoff in Paris on
July 25, 2000, killing 109 passengers and crew onboard as
well as four people on the ground.

The Concorde, the world’s fastest commercial jet, had enjoyed
an exemplary safety record up to that point, with no crashes
in the plane’s 31-year history.

Air France Flight 4590 left DeGaulle Airport for New York with
nine crew members and 96 German tourists who were planning
to take a cruise to Ecuador.

Concorde jets went back into service in November 2001, but a
series of minor problems prompted both Air France and British
Airways to end Concorde service permanently in October 2003.

On July 25, 1978, Louise Joy Brown, the world’s first baby to
be conceived via in-vitro fertilization (IVF)was born at Oldham
and District General Hospital in Manchester, England, to parents
Lesley and Peter Brown.

Today, IVF is considered a mainstream medical treatment for
infertility. Hundreds of thousands of children around the world
have been conceived through the procedure, in some cases
with donor eggs and sperm.

At 12:51 EDT on July 24, 1969, Apollo 11, the U.S. spacecraft that
had taken the first astronauts to the surface of the moon, safely
returned to Earth.

The American effort to send astronauts to the moon had its origins
in a famous appeal President John F. Kennedy made to a special
joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961.
        
        

The Apollo 11 astronauts are, from left, Neil Armstrong,
Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin. They were quarantined
after splashdown to ensure they did not bring back any contamination from the moon. (Image credit: NASA)