June 25th
 

1876 ~ Col. George A. Custer and his 7th Cavalry were wiped out in the Battle of Little Big Horn.

1894 ~ Birthday of Hermann Oberth, Physicist & one of the founding fathers of Rocketry and Astronautics.

1903 ~ Birthday of George Orwell, Writer.

1950 ~ The Korean War began when North Korea invaded South Korea.

1975 ~ Birthday of Vladimir Kramnik, Russian chess player.

1991 ~ Croatia and Slovenia declared their independence from Yugoslavia.

1993 ~ Kim Campbell became the first female Prime Minister of Canada.

1997 ~ An unmanned cargo ship crashed into Russia's Mir space station, knocking out half of the station's power and rupturing a pressurized laboratory.

1997 ~ Death of Jacques-Yves Cousteau, French Explorer, Scientist & Inventor.

1998 ~ The U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Line Item Veto Act of 1996 unconstitutional.

June 26th
 

1824 ~ Birthday of Lord Kelvin, Physicist. In 1900, he gave a lecture titled Nineteenth-Century Clouds over the Dynamical Theory of Heat and Light. Talk about prescient!

1898 ~ Birthday of Willy Messerschmitt, Aircraft Designer.

1933 ~ Birthday of Claudio Abbado, Conductor.

1934 ~ Initial flight of the first practical helicopter, the Focke-Wulf 61. You must scroll down a bit through the Hanna Reitsch page to get to the FW-61 entry, but her write up of her experience it is an interesting read.

1959 ~ Queen Elizabeth and President Eisenhower inaugurated the St Lawrence Seaway.

1963 ~ President Kennedy visited West Berlin, where he offered American solidarity to the citizens of West Germany: "Ich bin ein Berliner".

1964 ~ The Beatles released the album A Hard Day's Night.

1997 ~ The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Communications Decency Act violated the First Amendment, and thus unconstitutional.

2003 ~ The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that gender-based sodomy laws are unconstitutional in Lawrence v. Texas.

2007 ~ Death of Liz Claiborne, Belgian born fashion designer.

June 27th
 

1829 ~ Death of James Smithson, English scientist and philanthropist.

1838 ~ Birthday of Paul von Mauser, Weapon Designer.

1880 ~ Birthday of Helen Keller, spokeswoman for the Deaf and Blind.

1905 ~ Mutiny on the battleship Potemkin.

1950 ~ The U.S. decided to send armed forces to fight in the Korean War.

1954 ~ The world's first nuclear power station went on line in Obninsk, near Moscow.

1957 ~ First British Smoking Causes Lung Cancer report released.

1967 ~ The world's first ATM installed in Enfield, London.

1984 ~ Pierre Trudeau won the Albert Einstein Peace Prize.

2001 ~ Death of Jack Lemmon, Actor & Film Director.

1838 ~ Birthday of Paul von Mauser, Weapon Designer.

One of my favourite people.

June 28th
 

1577 ~ Birthday of Peter Paul Rubens, Flemish Baroque Painter.

1712 ~ Birthday of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Franco-Swiss Philosopher.

1880 ~ The Australian bushranger Ned Kelly was captured at Glenrowan.

1914 ~ Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria and his wife Sophia were killed by a Serbian nationalist, the casus belli of World War I.

1919 ~ The Treaty of Versailles was signed, ending World War I.

1926 ~ Birthday of Mel Brooks, Filmmaker.

1992 ~ Death of Mikhail Tal, eighth World Chess Champion.

1996 ~ The Citadel voted to admit women, ending a 153-year-old men-only policy at the South Carolina military school.

2001 ~ Death of Mortimer Adler, Philosopher & co-founder of Great Books of the Western World.

2004 ~ The U.S.-led coalition transferred sovereignty to the interim Iraqi government.

June 29th
 

1861 ~ Death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Poet. “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways…”

1895 ~ Death of Thomas Henry Huxley, Scientist. "Darwin's Bulldog"

1922 ~ France granted 1 km² at Vimy Ridge "freely, and for all time, to the Government of Canada, the free use of the land exempt from all taxes".

1963 ~ Birthday of Anne-Sophie Mutter, Violinist.

1971 ~ Birthday of Kaitlyn Ashley, Porn Actress.

1974 ~ Isabel Peron is sworn in as first female president for Argentina.

1974 ~ Mikhail Baryshnikov defects from the USSR to Canada while on tour with Bolshoi Ballet.

1995 ~ U.S. Space Shuttle Atlantis docked with Russian space station Mir.

2003 ~ Death of Katharine Hepburn, Actress.

2007 ~ Apple released the iPhone.

Five years of iPhone? Seems like a lifetime.

The rate of change in our daily technologies is remarkable!

June 30th
 

1905 ~ During his annus mirabilis, Albert Einstein published the article On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies (PDF) in which he introduced special relativity.

That must have been an exciting period to be a physicist!

1908 ~ Tunguska impact event occurred in Siberia.

1934 ~ Night of the Long Knives, Adolf Hitler's violent purge of his political rivals in Germany took place.

1936 ~ ''Gone with the Wind'' by Margaret Mitchell published.

1943 ~ Birthday of Florence Ballard, American Singer (The Supremes).

1971 ~ The crew of the Soyuz 11 spacecraft died when the landing capsule depressurized after separating from the main craft.

1990 ~ East and West Germany merged their economies.

1997 ~ The UK returns sovereignty over Hong Kong to the PRC.

2003 ~ Death of Buddy Hackett, American comic.

2007 ~ Death of Ingmar Bergman, Swedish Film-maker.

Screenless 3D by 2020?

Seven plus years? No, I believe that technology will not be generally available by then.

Routine voice input, and 'almost intelligent' assistants, perhaps.

Here you go Mzee.

July 1st
 

1646 ~ Birthday of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, German Mathematician & Philosopher.

1863 ~ The American Civil War battle of Gettysburg began.

1906 ~ Birthday of Estée Lauder, Cosmetics Pioneer.

1916 ~ On the first day of the Battle of the Somme 18,000 British soldiers were killed, and 40,000 wounded.

1925 ~ Death of Erik Satie, French Composer.

1963 ~ The British Government admitted that former diplomat Kim Philby had worked as a Soviet agent.

1980 ~ "O Canada" became the national anthem of Canada.

2000 ~ Death of Walter Matthau, Actor.

2004 ~ Cassini-Huygens was successfully inserted into orbit around Saturn.

2004 ~ Death of Marlon Brando, Actor.

July 2nd
 

1906 ~ Birthday of Hans Bethe, German-born Physicist., awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 1967.

1937 ~ Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared over the Pacific Ocean.

1947 ~ Something the Army Air Force later said was a weather balloon crashed near Roswell, N.M. Eyewitness accounts gave rise to speculation it might have been an alien spacecraft.

1961 ~ Death of Ernest Hemingway, Author, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 1954.

1964 ~ President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act.

1966 ~ France began nuclear weapons testing at Moruroa in the South Pacific.

1982 ~ Larry Walters attached 45 helium balloons to a lawn chair and ascended into history and to a height of 11,000 feet.

1997 ~ Death of Jimmy Stewart, Actor.

1999 ~ Death of Mario Puzo, Author (The Godfather).

2007 ~ Death of Beverly Sills, Opera Soprano.

July 3rd
 

1863 ~ The final day of the battle of Gettysburg.

1883 ~ Birthday of Franz Kafka, Czech-born German author.

1935 ~ Death of André Citroën, Automobile Pioneer.

1938 ~ World speed record, 126 mph, set for a steam railway locomotive, by the Mallard.

1962 ~ Algeria became independent after 132 years of French rule.

1969 ~ Death of Brian Jones, English musician (The Rolling Stones).

1969 ~ A test flight of the Soviet N1 rocket ended in a spectactular failure.

1971 ~ Death of Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors.

1986 ~ Death of Rudy Vallee, Singer, Actor, Bandleader, & Entertainer.

1988 ~ USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655 over the Persian Gulf.