July 25
1616: Physician, alchemist and chemist Andreas Libavius dies. He accepted the Paracelsian principle of using occult properties to explain phenomena with no apparent cause, but rejected the conclusion that a thing possessing these properties must have an astral connection to the divine.
1748: Astronomer Charles Messier's interest in astronomy is stimulated by an annular solar eclipse visible from his hometown.
1808: Mathematician Johann Benedict Listing born. He will introduce the term "topology", first in correspondence, then in a famous article published in 1847.
1837: The first commercial use of an electrical telegraph is successfully demonstrated in London by William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone.
1842: Physician and surgeon Dominique Jean Larrey dies. He was an important innovator in battlefield medicine and triage, and is often considered the first modern military surgeon.
1920: Chemist and X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin born. She will make contributions to the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid).
2017: Dennis Paulson of Mars observes a minute of silence in memory of the Viking 2 orbiter, which was turned off forty-one years ago, after returning almost 16,000 images in about 700–706 orbits around Mars.
