Today in History, July 29th
On July 29, 1958, President Eisenhower signed the law creating NASA. Plus the royal wedding of Charles and Diana and the debut of The Lord of the Rings.
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July 29 is best known for 1958, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the law that created NASA, America’s civilian space agency. The date also saw Prince Charles marry Lady Diana Spencer in 1981 and the first volume of The Lord of the Rings come out in 1954.
The big story: Eisenhower signs the law creating NASA (1958)
The Space Age arrived with a beep from the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union put Sputnik I in orbit. It weighed 183 pounds, was roughly the size of a basketball and circled Earth every 98 minutes. A month later, Sputnik II carried a dog named Laika into space. America’s answer, a Vanguard rocket, blew up shortly after launch in December 1957. The U.S. finally reached orbit with Explorer I on January 31, 1958. Washington decided it needed a single civilian agency to run its space work, built largely from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and pieces of other government offices. On July 29, 1958, Eisenhower signed the bill establishing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Its first big goal was to send a person into orbit and bring him home safely, and seven men were picked as astronauts for Project Mercury. Not bad for an agency born of a scare.
More events on July 29
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1836 | The Arc de Triomphe in Paris was inaugurated quietly, with only 11 people present. King Louis-Philippe called off the planned ceremony over fears of an assassination attempt. |
| 1858 | U.S. envoy Townsend Harris got Japan to sign the Harris Treaty, which gave the United States trading and diplomatic privileges. |
| 1872 | Nathaniel P. Langford and James Stevenson made the first ascent of the Grand Teton in Wyoming. |
| 1900 | The anarchist Gaetano Bresci assassinated King Umberto I of Italy in Monza. |
| 1921 | Adolf Hitler became leader of the Nazi Party. |
| 1954 | The Fellowship of the Ring, the first part of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, was published. |
| 1957 | The International Atomic Energy Agency was created. |
| 1965 | The first 4,000 paratroopers of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division arrived in Vietnam at Cam Ranh Bay. |
| 1967 | A rocket fired by accident aboard the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal, off Vietnam, started a fire that killed 134 service members. |
| 1981 | Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. |
| 1996 | Carl Lewis won his fourth straight Olympic gold medal in the long jump, the ninth and last Olympic gold of his career. |
| 2005 | Astronomers announced the discovery of Eris, first hailed as a 10th planet and later classed as a dwarf planet. |
Born on July 29
- 1805: Alexis de Tocqueville, French political thinker and author of Democracy in America, born in Paris.
- 1905: Clara Bow, silent-film star known as the “It Girl,” born in Brooklyn, New York.
- 1905: Dag Hammarskjöld, Swedish statesman and the second secretary-general of the United Nations, born in Jönköping, Sweden.
- 1938: Peter Jennings, Canadian-born journalist and longtime anchor of ABC’s evening news, born in Toronto.
Keep reading
Sources
- NASA created, History.com
- On This Day: July 29, Encyclopaedia Britannica
- This Day in History: July 29, History.com
- Alexis de Tocqueville, Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Clara Bow, Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Dag Hammarskjöld, Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Peter Jennings, Encyclopaedia Britannica
