July 16 History, Fun Facts, and Trivia

July 16 Observances

July 16 is Guinea Pig Appreciation Day, World Snake Day, National Corn Fritter Day, National Fresh Spinach Day, and National Personal Chef Day. World Snake Day and Guinea Pig Appreciation Day sharing a calendar date is either ironic or a reminder that the food chain does not observe holidays. Guinea pigs are appreciated. Snakes are also appreciated, by fewer people, but sincerely.

Guinea Pig Appreciation Day

Guinea pigs are not from Guinea and are not pigs. They are rodents native to the Andes region of South America, domesticated by indigenous peoples for food and in some cases religious ceremonies for thousands of years before European traders brought them to Europe in the 16th century. The origin of the name remains genuinely unclear. Leading theories involve trade routes through Guinea, a corruption of “Guiana,” and the fact that they were sometimes sold in England for a guinea coin. None of these explanations is fully satisfying.

Scientists have used guinea pigs as laboratory test subjects since the 17th century. Their immune systems respond to certain pathogens in ways similar to humans, making them useful for early vaccine research, including work on tuberculosis and diphtheria. By the 20th century, the term “guinea pig” had entered common language as a synonym for any human test subject. Ironically, guinea pigs have largely been replaced in most modern research by mice and rats, so they lost even that distinction.

Trivia: Guinea pigs are the only rodents that make a sound called a “wheek,” a high-pitched squeal used specifically to communicate with humans. They do not make this sound with each other. It appears to be a behavior they developed exclusively in response to domestication.

What Happened on July 16?

July 16 is the day the District of Columbia became the U.S. capital, the day the first nuclear weapon was successfully tested in the New Mexico desert, the day Apollo 11 launched for the Moon, the day Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 began crashing into Jupiter, the day JFK Jr.’s plane went down over the Atlantic, and the day The Catcher in the Rye was published. It is a date that swings between the cosmic and the catastrophic with very little in between.

If you were born on July 16, you were likely conceived the week of October 23 of the prior year.

July 16 History Highlights

622 — The Islamic calendar, a lunar calendar of 354 days, begins its count from the Hijra, the migration of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina. This date is considered Year 1 of the Islamic calendar. Because the Islamic year is approximately 11 days shorter than the Gregorian year, Islamic calendar dates cycle through all seasons over a 33-year period, which is why Ramadan, for example, falls at different times of the year in different decades.

1661 — The Swedish bank Stockholms Banco issued the first European banknotes, printed paper currency intended to circulate as legal tender. The concept had existed in China for centuries but was new to Europe. Stockholms Banco collapsed within a few years due to issuing more notes than it had silver to back them, establishing a tradition that some central banks have continued in spirit ever since.

1769 — Father Junipero Serra founded California’s first Spanish mission, Mission San Diego de Alcala, on the site of what is now San Diego. Serra established 21 missions along the California coast, forming the backbone of Spanish colonial infrastructure in the region. His legacy is deeply contested: he was canonized by Pope Francis in 2015 and has been the subject of significant protest from Native American communities who document the forced labor and cultural destruction the mission system imposed.

1790 — The District of Columbia was established as the permanent capital of the United States through the Residence Act, signed by President Washington. The location along the Potomac River was a political compromise between northern and southern states. Washington D.C. covers 68 square miles and has a larger population than Wyoming or Vermont, yet has no voting representation in Congress, a situation its license plates have described since 2000 as “Taxation Without Representation.”

1935 — The world’s first parking meter, the Park-O-Meter, was installed in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. It cost a nickel for one hour. The inventor, Carlton Cole Magee, created it after a local newspaper campaign about downtown parking congestion. Oklahoma City initially installed 150 of them. Drivers complained immediately. They have not stopped since.

1941 — Joe DiMaggio recorded a hit in his 56th consecutive game, a Major League Baseball record that still stands more than 80 years later. The streak ran from May 15 to July 17, 1941. Statistical analyses suggest DiMaggio’s streak is the single most improbable record in professional sports. Pete Rose holds the National League record at 44 games, and that has not been seriously challenged either.

1945 — The United States successfully detonated the world’s first nuclear weapon in the Trinity test near Alamogordo, New Mexico. The device, a plutonium implosion bomb code-named “The Gadget,” released energy equivalent to approximately 21 kilotons of TNT. Project director J. Robert Oppenheimer later recalled that the moment brought to mind a line from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The Hiroshima bomb was dropped 21 days later.

1951 — Little, Brown and Company published The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. It sold 75 million copies and spent 30 weeks on the bestseller list in its first year. Salinger became so disturbed by the attention that he eventually retreated to rural New Hampshire and refused all interviews and publication for the rest of his life, a decision that made the book more famous rather than less.

1969 — Apollo 11 launched from Kennedy Space Center at 9:32 AM Eastern time, carrying astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin toward the Moon. The Saturn V rocket that propelled them was 363 feet tall, generated 7.6 million pounds of thrust, and remains the most powerful rocket ever successfully flown. Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the Moon on July 20. Collins orbited above, alone, for 21 hours. He later said it was peaceful.

1974 — During a live morning television broadcast in Sarasota, Florida, news anchor Christine Chubbuck stopped her broadcast and said, “In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts, and in living color, you are going to see another first: an attempted suicide.” She then died by suicide on air. She was 29 years old and had been struggling with depression. The incident is one of the most documented cases of on-air tragedy in broadcasting history. The two films made about her life, both released in 2016, treat the subject with care and seriousness.

1994 — Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 began a series of collisions with Jupiter that lasted through July 22, marking the first time humans directly observed a collision between two solar system bodies. The largest fragment, designated Fragment G, released energy estimated at 600 times the combined yield of every nuclear weapon on Earth. The impact sites were visible to amateur telescopes for months. The event significantly advanced planetary defense research.

1999 — John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, and her sister Lauren Bessette died when the small plane Kennedy was piloting crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off Martha’s Vineyard at night. Kennedy had logged 310 flight hours but was not instrument-rated. Investigators attributed the crash to spatial disorientation in hazy conditions. Kennedy was 38 years old and had been considered a likely future candidate for public office.

Billboard Number One on July 16

• 1966: “Hanky Panky” — Tommy James and the Shondells (No. 1: July 16-29, 1966). Originally recorded by the Shondells in 1963 without Tommy James, who joined the band later. A Pittsburgh DJ started playing the old recording in 1966 and regional demand was so strong that James reassembled the band to capitalize on it. They had not planned a comeback. The chart did not care.
• 1977: “Da Doo Ron Ron” — Shaun Cassidy (No. 1: July 16-22, 1977). A cover of the 1963 Crystals original produced by Phil Spector. Cassidy was one of the biggest teen idols of the late 1970s, leveraging his role in The Hardy Boys television series. His half-brother is David Cassidy, who had done the same thing six years earlier.
• 2011: “Party Rock Anthem” — LMFAO featuring Lauren Bennett and GoonRock (No. 1: July 16 through August 26, 2011). Six weeks at the top and one of the most streamed songs of the early digital era. LMFAO consisted of Redfoo and SkyBlu, who are respectively the son and grandson of Motown founder Berry Gordy. They disbanded in 2012 at the height of their commercial success.

Born on July 16

• Shoeless Joe Jackson (1887-1951) — American baseball player and one of the greatest natural hitters in the sport’s history, with a career batting average of .356, the third highest ever recorded. He was banned from baseball for life following the 1919 Black Sox scandal, in which eight Chicago White Sox players were accused of intentionally losing the World Series in exchange for money from gamblers. Jackson was acquitted at trial but Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis banned him anyway. He has never been inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. The debate continues.
• Orville Redenbacher (1907-1995) — American farmer and entrepreneur who spent decades crossbreeding popcorn varieties before developing a hybrid that popped lighter and fluffier than any other on the market. He founded his popcorn company in 1970 and appeared in his own commercials well into his 80s, becoming one of the most recognizable advertising faces in America. The kernel-mailing story in the quotes section is documented. He genuinely did that.
• Barbara Stanwyck (1907-1990) — American actress with one of the most versatile careers in Hollywood history, spanning from silent films to 1980s television. She was nominated for four Academy Awards and received an honorary Oscar in 1982. Her performance in Double Indemnity (1944) is considered one of the defining portrayals of the femme fatale in noir cinema. She never won a competitive Academy Award, which remains one of the more glaring omissions in Oscar history.
• Ginger Rogers (1911-1995) — American actress, dancer, and singer who made ten films with Fred Astaire between 1933 and 1949, becoming one of Hollywood’s most beloved partnerships. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for Kitty Foyle (1940), a dramatic role that surprised audiences who knew her primarily as a dancer. The famous line about doing everything Astaire did “backwards and in high heels” is widely attributed to her but actually originated in a 1982 Frank and Ernest comic strip by Bob Thaves. Rogers embraced the quote anyway, which is fair enough.
• Bess Myerson (1924-2014) — American model, actress, and game show panelist who became Miss America 1945, the first Jewish woman to win the title. Her win came at the end of World War II and carried significant cultural weight. She went on to serve as New York City’s Commissioner of Consumer Affairs under Mayor John Lindsay. Her later life included a highly publicized corruption trial in 1988 from which she was acquitted.
• Desmond Dekker (1941-2006) — Jamaican singer and songwriter who became one of the first Jamaican artists to achieve international success, with “Israelites” reaching No. 1 in the UK in 1969 and cracking the U.S. top 10. He was an early influence on The Clash and the British ska revival. He is sometimes called the “Father of Reggae” internationally, though that title has other claimants in Jamaica.
• Stewart Copeland (1952) — American drummer and co-founder of The Police alongside Sting and Andy Summers. His distinctive style combined rock drumming with reggae and ska rhythms, influencing a generation of drummers. The Police released five albums between 1978 and 1983, all of which went platinum. Copeland and Sting have had a famously contentious relationship for most of the intervening decades. He has also composed orchestral works and film scores.
• Phoebe Cates (1963) — American actress best known for Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and the Gremlins films. She retired from acting in the early 1990s to raise her children with husband Kevin Kline and has given very few interviews since. She later opened a boutique in Manhattan called Blue Tree. She has been consistently unbothered by the fact that half the internet wants her to come back.
• Will Ferrell (1967) — American comedic actor and writer, Saturday Night Live cast member from 1995 to 2002, and star of Elf (2003), Anchorman (2004), Talladega Nights (2006), and Step Brothers (2008), among many others. He graduated from the University of Southern California with a degree in sports information. He co-founded Gary Sanchez Productions, which has produced multiple successful film and television projects.
• Barry Sanders (1968) — American running back for the Detroit Lions from 1989 to 1998, widely considered one of the greatest players in NFL history. He rushed for 15,269 career yards, second all-time at the time of his retirement. He retired abruptly before the 1999 season at age 30, one season away from potentially breaking Walter Payton’s all-time rushing record, saying simply that he had lost his passion for the game. He has never fully explained his decision and has never expressed regret about it.
• Larry Sanger (1968) — American philosopher and co-founder of Wikipedia alongside Jimmy Wales in 2001. He coined the name “Wikipedia.” He left the project in 2002 over disagreements about editorial standards and has since been one of its most prominent critics, arguing it has become systematically biased. He later founded competing reference projects including Citizendium and Encyclosphere.
• Corey Feldman (1971) — American actor who was one of the most recognizable child stars of the 1980s, appearing in The Goonies (1985), Stand by Me (1986), and The Lost Boys (1987). He has spoken extensively about the abuse he and fellow child actor Corey Haim experienced in Hollywood during that era and has been an advocate for child protection in the entertainment industry. He is also, by his own accounting, an icon and an industry.

Birthday Quotes from July 16 Birthdays

“I do everything the man does, only backwards and in high heels.”

“I try to feed my hunger rather than my appetite.”

“I ain’t afraid to tell the world that it don’t take school stuff to help a fella play ball.”

“Every once in a while, someone will mail me a single popcorn kernel that didn’t pop. I’ll get out a fresh kernel, tape it to a piece of paper, and mail it back to them.”

“No matter how much you screw up your life, you can fix it.”

“Things will get better if you just hold out long enough.”

“I’m more than an actor. I’m an icon, an industry.”

Random Trivia and Shower Thoughts for July 16

• A group of heirs is called an Expectation. This is technically true and sounds like something from a Victorian novel, which is probably where it comes from.
• The newspaper serving Frostbite Falls, Minnesota, home of Rocky and Bullwinkle, is the Picayune Intelligencer. The show’s creators named the town after Frostbite Falls, a real location in Minnesota. The newspaper’s name is a joke that combines two real newspaper naming conventions from the 19th century.
• “Do You Realize??” by The Flaming Lips is the official state rock song of Oklahoma. It was selected by the Oklahoma legislature in 2009 after a public vote. The song contains the lyric “Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?” Oklahoma legislators were apparently comfortable with this.
• Beauty and the Beast (1991) was the first animated film nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. It lost to The Silence of the Lambs. The Academy subsequently created the Best Animated Feature category in 2002, partly to prevent animated films from competing directly with live-action films, a move that has been interpreted in two different ways, depending on who you ask.
• The base of the Great Pyramid of Giza covers approximately 13 acres. The pyramid was the tallest man-made structure on Earth for approximately 3,800 years, from its completion around 2560 BC until the construction of Lincoln Cathedral in England around 1300 AD.
• Joseph Conrad’s birth name was Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski. He was Polish, learned English as his third language after Polish and French, and went on to write Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim in English. He did not speak English fluently until his mid-twenties.
• “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.” — Yogi Berra. Berra’s malapropisms, called Yogi-isms, are collected in multiple books. His other contributions include “It ain’t over till it’s over,” “When you come to a fork in the road, take it,” and “You can observe a lot by just watching.”
• The S.O.S. in S.O.S. soap pads stands for Save Our Saucepans. The company was founded in 1917 by a salesman who gave housewives steel wool pads coated with soap as a sales gimmick. His wife named them. The international distress signal S.O.S. does not actually stand for anything, despite popular belief.
• Why are laser blasts in science fiction movies slower than bullets? Because you cannot dramatically dodge something that travels at the speed of light. Cinema made a practical decision, and nobody in the audience complained for long.
• LMFAO consisted of Redfoo and SkyBlu, who are the son and grandson of Motown founder Berry Gordy. They disbanded in 2012 at the peak of their commercial success. “Party Rock Anthem” had just spent six weeks at No. 1. Sometimes people just walk away.
• Barry Sanders retired in 1998, one year away from potentially breaking the all-time NFL rushing record. He never gave a full explanation. He has never expressed regret. He remains one of the most quietly defiant figures in American sports history.
• On July 16, 2186, astronomers predict the longest total solar eclipse in 10,000 years will occur, lasting approximately 7 minutes and 29 seconds. Mark your calendars. Set multiple reminders.

• Today in History
• Number One Hits
• Award Winners
• Conception Songs