July 1900 - July 2, 1900 (Monday)

July 2, 1900 (Monday)

• Starting at 8:03 pm, the first rigid airship flew from the Manzell district of Friedrichshafen, Germany, near Lake Constance. Luftschiff Zeppelin 1 (or LZ1), with Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin and four others aboard, flew at an altitude of 1,300 feet (400 m), going 3.75 miles (6.04 km) in 18 minutes before being forced to land due to a broken part.
• From China came dispatches that, fortunately, proved to be wrong. According to some reports, the foreign legations in Beijing had been overrun and burned, and "the public execution of foreigners has been in progress since June 20." The New York Times published the rumors on page 7. The London Daily Mail printed a similar dispatch on July 16, 1900, and a memorial service was planned for St. Paul's Cathedral, then cancelled after the veracity of the Shanghai cable was questioned. Still, as rumors continued to be received from dispatches, the consensus was that it was unlikely that the heavily outnumbered foreigners could hold out against the Chinese armies.
• David Sarnoff, 9, arrived in the New York after emigrating from Uzlyany in Russia, and went to work selling newspapers. After becoming an office boy at American Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co., Sarnoff worked his way up and in 1916, would write a memo outlining his vision of making the radio as common a household item "as the piano or the phonograph". Over the next several decades, Sarnoff oversaw the spread of radio and then television across the world.