July 11 Trivia, Fun Facts and Pop Culture History
July 11 Observances
July 11 is World Population Day, National Cheer Up the Lonely Day, National Mojito Day, National Blueberry Muffin Day, Free Slurpee Day at 7-Eleven (because 7/11), Make Your Own Sundae Day, National Swimming Pool Day, All American Pet Photo Day, Bowdler’s Day, International Essential Oils Day, and National Rainier Cherries Day. Bowdler’s Day commemorates Thomas Bowdler, who in 1818 published a sanitized edition of Shakespeare with all the inappropriate content removed. He removed quite a lot. The verb “bowdlerize” — meaning to censor or water down a text — comes directly from his name, and is not considered a compliment.
What Happened on July 11?
July 11 is the day Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton, the day Babe Ruth played his first major league game, the day Skylab came crashing back to Earth, the day the world hit 5 billion people, and the day To Kill a Mockingbird was published. It is also the birthday of John Quincy Adams, E.B. White, and Giorgio Armani, which covers presidents, literature, and fashion in a single calendar square.
If you were born on July 11, you were likely conceived the week of October 18 of the prior year.
July 11 History Highlights
1796 — The United States took possession of Detroit from Great Britain under the terms of the Jay Treaty, signed in 1794. Detroit had been a British stronghold even after the Revolutionary War ended in 1783. The handover came 13 years late, which is a long time to wait for real estate you technically already own.
1798 — The United States Marine Corps was re-established by an act of Congress. The Marines had been disbanded after the Revolutionary War and were reconstituted to deal with the Quasi-War with France. The motto Semper Fidelis (Always Faithful) was adopted in 1883. The branch has not been disbanded since.
1804 — Vice President Aaron Burr shot and fatally wounded Alexander Hamilton in a duel at Weehawken, New Jersey. Hamilton fired first, deliberately into the air. Burr did not extend the same courtesy. Hamilton died the following day. Burr was charged with murder in both New York and New Jersey, finished his term as Vice President, and spent the rest of his life under a legal cloud. Hamilton’s face ended up on the ten-dollar bill. The musical came out in 2015.
1889 — Tijuana, Mexico, was officially founded. It sits directly on the U.S.-Mexico border opposite San Diego and has grown into one of the most visited border cities in the world, with approximately 50 million crossings per year at the San Ysidro Port of Entry — the busiest land border crossing on Earth.
1893 — The first cultured pearl was created under the direction of Kokichi Mikimoto in Japan, after years of experimenting with inserting irritants into oysters to stimulate pearl production. He received a patent in 1896 and went on to build the Mikimoto pearl empire. Natural pearls, which had previously required dangerous deep-sea diving, became significantly less valuable almost immediately.
1914 — Babe Ruth made his Major League Baseball debut with the Boston Red Sox as a pitcher, not an outfielder. He was 19 years old. He went on to become the most dominant pitcher in the American League before the Red Sox sold him to the Yankees in 1920 in what Boston fans still call the Curse of the Bambino. The Red Sox did not win a World Series for 86 years afterward.
1921 — Former President William Howard Taft was sworn in as Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, becoming the only person in American history to have served as both President and Chief Justice. Taft himself considered the Chief Justice role the more fulfilling of the two. He served on the Court until a month before his death in 1930.
1960 — To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee was published in the United States. It won the Pulitzer Prize the following year and has never gone out of print. Over 45 million copies have been sold. The character of Dill is widely believed to be based on Lee’s childhood neighbor and lifelong friend, Truman Capote.
1972 — The first game of the 1972 World Chess Championship between challenger Bobby Fischer and defending champion Boris Spassky began in Reykjavik, Iceland. Fischer won the match 12.5 to 8.5, becoming the first American to hold the title. The match was watched by millions worldwide and was framed heavily as a Cold War proxy battle between the U.S. and USSR. Fischer forfeited his title in 1975 rather than defend it under FIDE rules.
1975 — Chinese archaeologists announced the discovery of a 3-acre burial mound containing approximately 6,000 life-size terracotta warriors, dating from 221 to 206 BC, near the ancient capital of Xi’an. The figures were buried to guard the tomb of China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang. The site had been accidentally discovered by farmers digging a well the previous year. The full extent of the burial complex is still being excavated.
1977 — Martin Luther King Jr. was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter, nine years after his assassination. It is the nation’s highest civilian honor.
1979 — America’s first space station, Skylab, re-entered Earth’s atmosphere and broke apart, scattering debris across the Indian Ocean and sparsely populated areas of Western Australia. Skylab had been in orbit since 1973 and was always expected to eventually fall. NASA had hoped to boost it to a higher orbit using the Space Shuttle, but the Shuttle’s development ran behind schedule. No one was hurt. Australia jokingly fined NASA $400 for littering. NASA did not pay.
1987 — The world’s population reached 5 billion people, with Matej Gaspar, born in Yugoslavia, designated as the symbolic 5 billionth person. The United Nations established World Population Day the following year to mark the anniversary.
1991 — A total solar eclipse cast a shadow stretching 9,000 miles from Hawaii to South America, lasting nearly seven minutes in some areas, making it one of the longest total solar eclipses of the 20th century.
2011 — Neptune completed its first full orbit of the sun since its discovery in 1846, a journey of approximately 165 Earth years. The planet was not where astronomers expected Uranus to be, which led to its discovery. It has now lapped the sun exactly once since humans have known it existed.
World Population Day: The Numbers
The global population reached its first billion around 1804 and has grown dramatically since, driven by advances in medicine, sanitation, and agriculture. Here is how long each billion took to arrive:
- 1 Billion — 1804
- 2 Billion — 1927 (123 years)
- 3 Billion — 1960 (33 years)
- 4 Billion — 1974 (14 years)
- 5 Billion — 1987 (13 years)
- 6 Billion — 1999 (12 years)
- 7 Billion — 2012 (13 years)
- 8 Billion — November 2022 (10 years)
Global fertility has dropped from an average of 4.5 children per woman in the early 1970s to below 2.5 by 2015. Average global life expectancy rose from 64.6 years in the early 1990s to 72.6 years by 2019, according to the United Nations. The population is projected to peak somewhere between 9.5 and 10 billion before beginning to decline, possibly before 2100.
Trivia: If you laid every person on Earth end to end, the line would wrap around the equator more than 200 times. Nobody has volunteered to organize this.
Billboard Number One on July 11
- 1960: “Alley-Oop” — Hollywood Argyles (No. 1: July 11-17, 1960). A novelty song about a caveman comic strip character that somehow reached the top of the chart. The Hollywood Argyles were essentially a studio creation assembled around the song. They never had another hit, which feels appropriate.
- 1970: “Mama Told Me (Not to Come)” — Three Dog Night (No. 1: July 11-24, 1970). Written by Randy Newman, who has said it was meant as a deadpan joke about a square kid at a wild party. Three Dog Night played it completely straight and took it to No. 1. Newman did not complain.
- 1987: “Alone” — Heart (No. 1: July 11 through July 31, 1987). Originally written by Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly, who also wrote “Like a Virgin” and “True Colors.” Ann Wilson’s vocal performance is widely cited as one of the defining rock ballad vocals of the decade.
- 2009: “I Gotta Feeling” — The Black Eyed Peas (No. 1: July 11 through October 16, 2009). Fourteen weeks at the top, one of the longest runs of the 2000s. It became the first song to sell one million downloads in a single week in the U.S.
Trivia: “Mama Told Me (Not to Come)” was originally recorded by Eric Burdon and the Animals in 1966 but did not chart. Three Dog Night’s 1970 version reached No. 1. Randy Newman’s own recording, released in 1968, also did not chart. The man who wrote it has the least successful version of his own song.
Born on July 11
- Robert the Bruce (1274) — King of Scotland from 1306 to 1329 and one of the most celebrated figures in Scottish history. He secured Scottish independence from England with a decisive victory at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. His heart was reportedly carried into battle in a casket after his death, fulfilling a wish to go on crusade. It was buried at Melrose Abbey. Scotland takes its history seriously.
- John Quincy Adams (1767) — 6th President of the United States (1825-1829), son of the 2nd President, and the first president whose father was also president. After leaving the White House, he returned to Congress and served for 17 more years, becoming the longest-serving former president in Congress. He collapsed on the House floor at age 80 and died two days later. He was at work.
- E.B. White (1899) — American essayist, journalist, and author of Charlotte’s Web (1952) and Stuart Little (1945). He also co-wrote The Elements of Style with William Strunk Jr., which remains one of the most assigned books in American education. He lived on a farm in Maine and wrote essays about it that hold up better than most 20th-century writing.
- Yul Brynner (1920-1985) — Russian-American actor best known for playing the King of Siam in The King and I, a role he performed over 4,500 times on Broadway and in film, winning both a Tony and an Academy Award. A lifelong smoker, he filmed a posthumous anti-smoking PSA before his death from lung cancer. His quote says everything: “Now that I’m gone, I tell you, don’t smoke.”
- Tab Hunter (1931-2018) — American actor and one of Hollywood’s biggest stars of the 1950s, known for films like Damn Yankees (1958). His studio carefully managed and concealed the fact that he was gay throughout his career. He came out publicly in his 2005 memoir Tab Hunter Confidential, decades after his peak fame. The documentary of the same name followed in 2015.
- Giorgio Armani (1934) — Italian fashion designer who founded his company in 1975 and transformed men’s and women’s fashion by removing the structure from the traditional suit jacket. He is one of the few designers whose name is recognized by people who have no interest in fashion. He dressed Richard Gere in American Gigolo (1980) and changed what a movie wardrobe could mean.
- Leon Spinks (1953-2021) — American boxer who shocked the world by defeating Muhammad Ali in only his eighth professional fight on February 15, 1978, to win the heavyweight title. Ali won the rematch seven months later. Spinks was the only man ever to beat Ali for the title. He passed away in February 2021.
- Richie Sambora (1959) — American guitarist and co-founder of Bon Jovi. He co-wrote some of the band’s biggest hits, including “Wanted Dead or Alive,” “Living on a Prayer,” and “Bad Medicine.” He left the band in 2013 under circumstances neither side has fully explained publicly.
- Suzanne Vega (1959) — American singer-songwriter whose 1987 song “Tom’s Diner” became one of the first songs used to calibrate the MP3 audio format, making it arguably the most important recording in digital music history. She did not receive royalties for that particular use of it.
- Mavis Staples, wait, wrong day. Lil’ Kim (1975) — American rapper and one of the most influential female voices in hip-hop. Her debut album Hard Core (1996) reached platinum status and changed the conversation about women in rap. She was a close collaborator of The Notorious B.I.G.
- Alessia Cara (1996) — Canadian singer-songwriter who won the Grammy for Best New Artist in 2018, the first Canadian solo artist to win that award. Her debut single “Here” (2015), written from the perspective of someone who does not want to be at a party, was streamed over 100 million times.
Birthday Quotes from July 11 Birthdays
“Every morning I awake torn between a desire to save the world and an inclination to savor it. This makes it hard to plan the day. But if we forget to savor the world, what possible reason do we have for saving it? In a way, the savoring must come first.”
“Life is like writing with a pen. You can cross out your past but you can’t erase it.”
“The difference between style and fashion is quality.”
“Elegance is not catching somebody’s eye, it’s staying in somebody’s memory.”
“Now that I’m gone, I tell you, don’t smoke.”
“Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.”
“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a leader.”
Random Trivia and Shower Thoughts for July 11
- The license plate on the Ghostbusters’ car was ECTO-1. The car itself was a 1959 Cadillac Miller-Meteor ambulance/hearse combination. It sold at auction in 2019 for $125,000.
- When you see a couple kissing at the end of a Christmas movie, they are often covered in potato flakes standing in for fake snow. This is either romantic or deeply unsettling, depending on how you look at it.
- The word “unfriend” appeared in print in 1659, more than 350 years before Facebook made it a button.
- “It usually takes me two or three days to prepare an impromptu speech.” — Mark Twain
- Every single one of your favorite things started with you trying something new. #takearisk
- If a statue in the park shows a person on a horse with both front legs raised, the popular belief is that the person died in battle. This is a common claim but not a reliable rule. Many equestrian statues do not follow it at all. Check a plaque instead.
- The “ZIP” in ZIP Code stands for Zone Improvement Plan. Wait, that was yesterday. July 11 is a prime number day. Today is 7/11, and both 7 and 11 are prime numbers. July is the only month where you can have a day that is both the month number and the day number, both being prime. This is almost certainly useless information.
- A prime number is a natural number greater than 1 with no positive divisors other than 1 and itself. Prime days in July include: 7/2, 7/3, 7/5, 7/7, 7/11, 7/13, 7/17, 7/19, 7/23, 7/29, and 7/31. July has more prime days than any other month. Math does not care if you find this interesting.
- When I was a child, I always hoped the alien that found my balloon was happy.
- “…and I would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for those meddling kids.” — Scooby-Doo villains, every episode. (The Voldemort attribution in the source material was creative, but let’s give credit where it’s due.)
- “Cops and women don’t mix. It’s like eating a spoonful of Drano; sure, it’ll clean you out, but it’ll leave you hollow inside.” — Frank Drebin, Police Squad!
- Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner” was used to develop and test the MP3 audio compression format in the late 1980s. Every MP3 file that has ever existed owes something to that song. She was not compensated for this. The engineer who used it, Karlheinz Brandenburg, has said it was chosen because the a cappella vocal was difficult to compress cleanly without distortion.
