Local

2022: From July 21, water that is flushed down New Town toilets starts getting treated and reused to water the greens in Eco Park and road dividers of the township. Funded by the Newtown Kolkata Green Smart City Corporation and executed by the public health engineering department, this is said to be the first such initiative in Calcutta.

National

1860: Rettamalai Srinivasan is born in Madras Presidency on July 7. He goes on to become an activist, working for the upliftment of scheduled castes. He works closely with Mahatma Gandhi and BR Ambedkar and is considered an icon of the Paraiyar community of south India.

Birla Planetarium

1963: Birla Planetarium is inaugurated on July 2, 1963 by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. It has an astronomical observatory, electronics laboratory for design and fabrication of science equipment and gallery of related paintings and models. This Calcutta planetarium is the first in India and even in the 21st century remains the largest in Asia and the second largest in the world.

2010: On July 15, the Indian government unveils the new rupee symbol ₹. Thus far, the currency is denoted by “Rs,” but the new symbol is chosen through an open competition won by academician and designer D. Udaya Kumar. His design incorporates the Devanagari letter “Ra” and Roman capital letter “R”, symbolising both “Rupiah” in Hindi and “Rupees” in English, making it meaningful to both Indian and global users.

Global

Eunice Newton

1819: Eunice Newton is born in Connecticut on July 17. She grows up to become a women’s rights activist and the first scientist to prove that certain gases warm up when exposed to sunlight, and so rising carbon dioxide levels would increase atmospheric temperature, a phenomenon later known as the greenhouse effect. She also patents several inventions but her contributions are unknown for nearly a century till they are rediscovered in the 1900s.

Sirimavo Bandaranaike

1960: Sirimavo Bandaranaike becomes the world’s first woman Prime Minister (PM) when she takes office on July 21 in Ceylon, a country that is later known as Sri Lanka. Her husband SWRD Bandaranaike was also PM and after his assassination in 1959, she took charge of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party and wins the election. She serves three terms as PM between now and 2000. Her tenure is plagued by high inflation, unemployment, and civil unrest.

France Concorde Crash

2000: A Concorde passenger jet, Air France Flight 4590, prepares to take off from Paris but runs over debris dropped on the runway by the previous aircraft. This causes its tyres to explode and leads to a series of quick damages that makes the plane crash shortly after takeoff. The July 25 accident kills all 109 people on board and four on the ground. It is the only fatal accident by the Concorde.

Sport

1901: Birendranath Sircar is born in Bhagalpur on July 5. He grows up to produce films and founds the studio New Theatres Calcutta. He produces films like Dena Paona, one of the first Bengali talkies, Bhagya Chakra, India’s first film to use playback singing, and the immensely successful 1935 Devdas, directed and acted in by PC Barua. Sircar is later awarded the Dada Saheb Phalke Award and Padma Bhushan.

Walkman

1979: Japanese electronics major Sony releases a portable cassette player on July 1, after Sony co-founder Masaru Ibuka wants to modify the small recorder used by journalists, “Pressman”. The other co-founder, Akio Morita, positions the Walkman in the youth market and creates a global headset culture. The Walkman sells over 250 million units worldwide and becomes so popular in the 1980s that it serves as a generic name for the product.

Nirmal Purja

1983: Nirmal Purja is born in Nepal on July 25. He grows up to become a mountaineer, most famous for having climbed all 14 eight-thousanders (peaks above 8,000m) in a span of six months and six days with the help of bottled oxygen. Purja sets a record with his feat and is also the first to ascend Mt Everest, Makalu and Lhotse in 48 hours.