25 July

 10 weird and wonderful things which happened on 25 July:

James I

1. A British army surgeon named James Barry died on this date in 1865 at the age of 70; whereupon it was discovered that Dr Barry was a woman, making her the first woman doctor in the British Isles.
2. James VI of Scotland was crowned James I of England on this date in 1603.
3. On this date in 1948, Bread rationing ended in Britain.
4. In 1872, a shower of rain included thousands of black worms, about the size of Honey Bees.
5. In 1909, French car headlamp maker and aviator Louis Bleriot towed a 28 hp monoplane behind a white Horse to a field in Calais. He climbed into the cockpit and allegedly asked, "Where is England?" before taking off. 37 minutes later, he crash landed in Northfall Meadow, Dover, England. It was the world's first international overseas flight, which netted Blériot the £1,000 prize the Daily Mail had offered to the first person to fly the Channel in either direction. The wooden plane, held together with Piano wire, was classified as yacht by customs officers.
6. In 1959, the first-ever crossing of the English Channel by Hovercraft took place. Sir Christopher Cockerell took two hours and three minutes to reach France (86½ minutes slower than Bleriot.).
7. In 1998 Louis Bleriot III attempted to re-enact his grandfather's cross Channel flight, using one of Bleriot's three surviving aircraft. He crashed into a lake 37 seconds after take off.
8. In 1871, William Schneider invented the merry-go-round, aka the Carousel in Davenport, Iowa.
9. On this date in 2000 at Charles de Gaulle Airport, an Air France Concorde crashed into a hotel in Gonesse north of Paris, killing 100 passengers, 9 crew, and 4 on the ground. It was the first time Concorde had ever crashed. It was thought a tyre had been punctured by a metal strip on the runway, and fragments had started an engine fire. Alice Brooking from Kent had a lucky escape when she jumped from her Hotel window seconds before the explosion.
10. In 1979, President Carter issued a letter absolving Dr. Samuel Mudd, the physician who’d treated John Wilkes Booth for a broken leg, of any role in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

I write Fiction, too.

There is a whole new universe of superheroes to discover in my novels. The Ultraheroes Universe includes at least one alternative dimension, good guys, bad guys, secrets, romance and more.

For more information visit My Books Page

For even more information visit My website