May 25
Today is
National Missing Children's Day.
Today is also
Towel Day.
240 BC – First recorded
perihelion passage of
Halley's Comet.
1865 – In Mobile, Alabama, 300 are killed when an
ordnance depot explodes.
1895 – The playwright, poet, and novelist Oscar Wilde is convicted of "committing acts of
gross indecency with other male persons" and sentenced to serve two years in prison.
1914 – The House of Commons of the United Kingdom passes the
Home Rule Bill for
devolution in Ireland.
1925 –
Scopes Monkey Trial:
John T. Scopes is indicted for teaching Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in Tennessee.
1935 –
Jesse Owens of Ohio State University breaks three world records and ties a fourth at the Big Ten Conference Track and Field Championships in Ann Arbor, Michigan
1950 – A
Chicago Surface Lines streetcar crashes into a fuel truck, killing 33 people.
1953 – At the
Nevada Test Site, the United States conducts its first and only
nuclear artillery test.
The first
public television station in the United States officially begins broadcasting as KUHT from the campus of the University of Houston, in Texas.
1955 – In the United States, a night-time
F5 tornado strikes the small city of Udall, Kansas, killing 80 and injuring 273. It is the deadliest tornado to ever occur in the state and the 23rd deadliest in the U.S.
1961 - U.S. President John F. Kennedy announces before a special joint session of the Congress his goal to initiate a project to put a "man on the Moon" before the end of the decade.
1962 – The
Old Bay Line, the last overnight steamboat service in the United States, goes out of business.
1968 – The
Gateway Arch in Saint Louis is dedicated.
1977 –
Star Wars is released in theaters.
Chinese government removes a decade old ban on the works of William Shakespeare.
1979 –
American Airlines Flight 191, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10, crashes during takeoff at
O'Hare International Airport killing all 271 on board and two people on the ground.
1979 – Etan Patz, six years old, disappears from the street just two blocks away from his home in New York City, prompting an international search for the child, and causing U.S. President Ronald Reagan to designate May 25 as
National Missing Children's Day (in 1983).
1982 –
HMS Coventry is sunk during the
Falklands War.
1986 –
Hands Across America takes place.
2001 –
Erik Weihenmayer, 32 years old, of Boulder, Colorado, becomes the first blind person to reach the summit of Mount Everest.
2002 –
China Airlines Flight 611 disintegrates in mid-air and crashes into the Taiwan Strait. All 225 people on board are killed.
2011 – Oprah Winfrey airs her last show, ending her twenty-five-year run of
The Oprah Winfrey Show.
2012 – The
Space X 'Dragon' becomes the first commercial spacecraft to successfully rendezvous with the International Space Station.
Births
1803 – Ralph Waldo Emerson; 1889 – Igor Sikorsky; 1897 – Gene Tunney; 1903 – Binnie Barnes; 1921 – Hal David; 1925 – Jeanne Crain; 1926 – Claude Akins; 1927 – Robert Ludlum; 1929 – Beverly Sills; 1936 – Tom T. Hall; 1939 – Dixie Carter; 1943 – Jessi Colter; 1943 – Leslie Uggams; 1944 – Frank Oz; 1947 – Karen Valentine; 1955 – Connie Sellecca; 1958 – Paul Weller; 1963 – Mike Myers; 1969 – Anne Heche; 1970 – Octavia Spencer; 1973 – Demetri Martin; 1976 – Cillian Murphy; 1978 – Brian Urlacher; 1994 – Aly Raisman
Deaths
1899 – Rosa Bonheur; 1919 – Madam C. J. Walker; 1990 – Vic Tayback; 2007 – Charles Nelson Reilly