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THE SATYR

20th-Century Chronicles Week of July 14–20 Year I · No. 1

A weekly chronicle of history picked by the Fnalysis team. Here's a sample. Subscribe now! — €2/month

On this day
July 17, 1955 — Anaheim, California

Disneyland opens its doors, and everything that can go wrong does, on the very same day

The day Walt Disney would go down in history as "Black Sunday" started with an arithmetic problem: twice as many tickets had been printed as planned, so a park designed for 15,000 visitors got more than 28,000. That same day, a plumbers' strike forced Disney to choose between working drinking fountains or working restrooms. He chose the restrooms.

The freshly laid asphalt on Main Street was still soft from the heat and started trapping visitors' high heels. A gas leak forced the temporary closure of Fantasyland and Adventureland. And to top off the day, a tiger and a panther — part of the park's attractions — got into a fight with each other right on Main Street. The happiest place on Earth would take weeks to recover from its own opening.

Sleeping Beauty Castle, Disneyland

Fig. 1 — Disneyland's castle. Source: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA).

On this day
July 17, 1938 — Atlantic Ocean

A pilot files a flight plan from New York to California and lands in Ireland instead, blaming the compass

Douglas Corrigan filed a flight plan from Brooklyn to Long Beach, California. He took off, flew for 28 hours, and landed in Ireland. His official explanation was that fog and a faulty compass had led him off course. Nobody quite believed it, and ever since he's been known as "Wrong Way" Corrigan.

Portrait of Douglas "Wrong Way" Corrigan, circa 1942

Fig. — Douglas Corrigan. Source: Library of Congress (no known copyright restrictions).

On this day
July 20, 1968 — London, United Kingdom

Jane Asher breaks off her engagement to Paul McCartney live on TV, without telling him first

Actress Jane Asher announced on the BBC show "Dee Time" that her engagement to the Beatle was over, before McCartney himself even knew. She closed the interview with a line that any comedy writer would sign today: "Perhaps we'll get married when we're about 70."

Paul McCartney

Fig. — Paul McCartney. Source: Wikimedia Commons (official White House photograph, public domain).

On this day
July 18, 1936 — Chicago
Oscar Mayer Wienermobile

The Wienermobile is born, a 27-foot truck shaped like a giant hot dog

Oscar Mayer rolled out its new promotional vehicle. Almost ninety years later, the company still builds new versions of it and hires recent graduates every summer to drive it around the country with the official title of "Hotdogger."

On this day
July 14, 1973 — California
Phil and Don Everly, the Everly Brothers

A brother duo ends their twenty-year career because one of them smashed his guitar on the ground

Phil Everly, of the Everly Brothers, snapped mid-concert, smashed his guitar, and walked off without a word. His brother Don finished the show alone and announced that "the Everly Brothers are dead." They wouldn't play together again for a decade.

Fig. — Phil and Don Everly. Source: Wikimedia Commons (public domain, no U.S. copyright notice).

On this day
July 19, 1941 — United States
William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, creators of Tom and Jerry, in 1965

A cat and a mouse fight on screen for the first time, with no names yet

"The Midnight Snack" premiered, the first short of the pair who would go on to become Tom and Jerry. Inside the studio, they were provisionally called "Jasper" and "Jinx."

Fig. — William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, the pair's creators, in 1965. Source: Wikimedia Commons. (No stills from the short are used: the characters are still under copyright to Warner Bros./MGM.)

On this day
July 16, 1935 — Oklahoma City
Early parking meters tested in Washington, D.C., 1938

Parking a car starts costing money for the first time in history

The "Park-O-Meter No. 1" was installed, the world's first parking meter. From then on, leaving your car on the street stopped being free across much of the planet.

Fig. — Early parking meters tested in Washington, D.C., 1938 (same era, different city). Source: Library of Congress (no known copyright restrictions).

On this day
July 18, 1976 — Montreal
Nadia Comăneci

A gymnast achieves perfection, and the scoreboard doesn't even know how to write it

Nadia Comăneci scored the first perfect 10 in Olympic history. The electronic scoreboard, never designed to display a 10, could only show "1.00."

On this day
July 14, 1911 — Washington, D.C.
Harry Atwood taking off from the South Lawn of the White House, July 1911

A pilot lands his plane on the White House lawn, and the president comes out to congratulate him

Harry Atwood, an exhibition pilot for the Wright brothers, landed on the South Lawn of the White House after flying in from Boston. President Taft came out to greet him and handed him a gold medal on the spot.

Fig. — Harris & Ewing, 1911. Source: Library of Congress (no known copyright restrictions).

And one more thing

  • July 16, 1992: Ross Perot withdraws from the U.S. presidential race, claiming rival operatives planned to sabotage his daughter's wedding with a doctored photo. The explanation became a national punchline.
  • July 20, 1968: "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida," by Iron Butterfly, charts as the first-ever "heavy metal" song. It charted, yes. At number 117.
  • July 20, 1969: By his own account, Buzz Aldrin became, out of pure necessity, the first person to urinate on the Moon during the Apollo 11 moonwalk.

On this day

  • July 14, 1918 — BornJay Wright Forrester, American computer engineer and systems scientist, pioneer of magnetic-core memory and system dynamics (d. 2016).
  • July 14, 2000 — DiedPepo (René Ríos), Chilean cartoonist, creator of "Condorito" (b. 1911).
  • July 15, 1848 — BornVilfredo Pareto, Italian economist and sociologist, author of the Pareto principle (d. 1923).
  • July 15, 1930 — BornStephen Smale, American mathematician and computer scientist.
  • July 15, 2013 — DiedJohn T. Riedl, American computer scientist and academic (b. 1962).
  • July 16, 1967 — BornWill Ferrell, American actor and comedian.
  • July 16, 2002 — DiedJohn Cocke, American computer scientist, RISC architecture pioneer (b. 1925).
  • July 16, 2014 — DiedHeinz Zemanek, Austrian computer scientist (b. 1920).
  • July 16, 2023 — DiedKevin Mitnick, the most famous American hacker of the 1990s (b. 1963).
  • July 17, 1790 — DiedAdam Smith, Scottish economist and philosopher, father of modern economics (b. 1723).
  • July 17, 1917 — BornPhyllis Diller, American comedian and actress.
  • July 17, 1932 — BornQuino (Joaquín Salvador Lavado), Argentine-Spanish cartoonist, creator of "Mafalda" (d. 2020).
  • July 18, 1950 — BornJack Dongarra, American computer scientist specializing in high-performance computing, later a Turing Award winner.
  • July 18, 2024 — DiedBob Newhart, American comedian and actor (b. 1929).
  • July 19, 1956 — BornMark Crispin, American computer scientist, creator of the IMAP email protocol (d. 2012).
  • July 19, 2007 — DiedRoberto Fontanarrosa, Argentine cartoonist and humorist (b. 1944).
  • July 20, 2023 — DiedJacques Delors, French economist and politician, former President of the European Commission (b. 1925).

Crypto world: this calendar week doesn't currently record any verifiable births or deaths of notable figures from the crypto industry. It's a young field — we'll keep filling this in week by week.

One real historical fact for each day of the week, no explanations, no morals. Published every Monday. Subscribe to The Satyr — €2/month →

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