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)

Cyrus Ingerson Scofield (August 19, 1843 – July 24, 1921)

Scofield was an American theologian, minister, and writer whose
best-selling annotated Bible popularized dispensationalism and
futurism among fundamentalist Christians.

1917 edition of the Scofield Bible.

ED DANAHUE

On July 23, 1885, just after completing his memoirs, Civil War
hero and former president Ulysses S. Grant died of throat
cancer.

The successes of Grant’s tenure while in office (March 4, 1869 
– March 4, 1877) included passage of the Enforcement Act in
1870, which temporarily curtailed the political influence of the
Ku Klux Klan in the post-Civil War South, and the 1875 Civil
Rights Act, which attempted to desegregate public places
such as restrooms, “inns, public conveyances on land or
water, theaters, and other places of public amusement.”