July 22 · This Day in America
Fifty thousand people crowd a Brooklyn airfield to watch a single engine come out of the dusk. Wiley Post, an Oklahoma roughneck who lost an eye in an oilfield accident and bought his first plane with the insurance money, brings his Lockheed Vega Winnie Mae down after circling the entire planet by himself: 15,596 miles in seven days, eighteen hours, and forty-nine minutes. He had no navigator. He flew it on a compass, a primitive autopilot, and a radio direction finder, fighting sleep over Siberia and the North Atlantic with no one to spell him. Two years earlier he had done it with a navigator aboard; now he had done it solo and faster. A one-eyed mechanic from the oil patch had drawn a line all the way around the world and proved a single determined person could close it.
Source: airandspace.si.edu
Also on this day · 1934
John Dillinger, the bank robber the new FBI has named Public Enemy No. 1, walks out of a Chicago movie house into a summer night and a ring of federal agents. A brothel madam facing deportation had tipped them off; the press turned her into "the lady in red." Dillinger runs for an alley and is shot down before he reaches it. The man who had made fools of police across the Midwest was finished in under a minute, and J. Edgar Hoover's bureau had its legend.
Source: www.fbi.gov