July 19, 1843

The SS Great Britain, designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Thomas Guppy, Christopher Claxton and William Patterson for the Great Western Steamship Company and built in a specially adapted dry dock at Bristol, is launched, becoming the first ocean-going craft with an iron hull or screw propeller. At the time of her launch she was by far the largest ship in the world (length 322 ft), over 100 feet longer than her rivals. On 26 July 1845, the ship undertook her maiden voyage to New York, a journey completed in 14 days. She originally carried 120 first-class passengers, 132 second-class passengers and 130 officers and crew. With restorations in 1970 and again in 1998, she is on display in the dry dock in the Great Western Dockyard, in which she had been built.

July 19, 1799 : Rosetta Stone found

On this day in 1799, during Napoleon Bonaparte's Egyptian campaign, a
French soldier discovers a black basalt slab inscribed with ancient
writing near the town of Rosetta, about 35 miles north of Alexandria.
The irregularly shaped stone contained fragments of passages written
in three different scripts: Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Egyptian
demotic. The ancient Greek on the Rosetta Stone told archaeologists
that it was inscribed by priests honoring the king of Egypt, Ptolemy
V, in the second century B.C. More startlingly, the Greek passage
announced that the three scripts were all of identical meaning. The
artifact thus held the key to solving the riddle of hieroglyphics, a
written language that had been "dead" for nearly 2,000 years.

When Napoleon, an emperor known for his enlightened view of education,
art and culture, invaded Egypt in 1798, he took along a group of
scholars and told them to seize all important cultural artifacts for
France. Pierre Bouchard, one of Napoleon's soldiers, was aware of this
order when he found the basalt stone, which was almost four feet long
and two-and-a-half feet wide, at a fort near Rosetta. When the British
defeated Napoleon in 1801, they took possession of the Rosetta Stone.

Several scholars, including Englishman Thomas Young made progress with
the initial hieroglyphics analysis of the Rosetta Stone. French
Egyptologist Jean-Francois Champollion (1790-1832), who had taught
himself ancient languages, ultimately cracked the code and deciphered
the hieroglyphics using his knowledge of Greek as a guide.
Hieroglyphics used pictures to represent objects, sounds and groups of
sounds. Once the Rosetta Stone inscriptions were translated, the
language and culture of ancient Egypt was suddenly open to scientists
as never before.

The Rosetta Stone has been housed at the British Museum in London
since 1802, except for a brief period during World War I. At that
time, museum officials moved it to a separate underground location,
along with other irreplaceable items from the museum's collection, to
protect in from the threat of bombs.

On July 20:

1969 - Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin became the first men to walk on the Moon.

July 21 1970:

After 11 years of construction, the Aswan High Dam across the Nile River in Egypt is completed on July 21, 1970.
More than two miles long at its crest, the massive $1 billion dam ended the cycle of flood and drought in the Nile River region,
and exploited a tremendous source of renewable energy, but had a controversial environmental impact.

July 22, 1934

John Dillinger attended the film Manhattan Melodrama at the Biograph Theater in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago with his girlfriend, Polly Hamilton, and Anna Sage, who was facing deportation charges. Sage worked out a deal with Melvin Purvis of the FBI to set up an ambush for Dillinger and drop the deportation charges against her. When they exited the theater that night, Sage tipped off the FBI agents who opened fire into Dillinger's back, killing him. Dillinger was struck three times, twice in the chest, one actually nicking his heart, and the fatal shot, which entered the back of his neck and exited just under his right eye. According to Purvis, Dillinger died without saying a word. Sage had identified herself to agents by wearing an agreed-upon orange and white dress, which due to the night lights, led to the enduring notion of the "Lady in Red" as a betraying character.