Template:On This Day (nonfiction)/April 25

• 

  1599: Oliver Cromwell born. He will become a military and political leader and later Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland.

• 

  1710: Astronomer, instrument maker, and author James Ferguson born.

• 

  1744: Astronomer, physicist, and mathematician Anders Celsius dies. In 1742 he proposed the Celsius temperature scale which today bears his name.

• 

  1770: Priest and physicist Jean-Antoine Nollet dies. In 1746 he gathered about two hundred monks into a circle about a mile (1.6 km) in circumference, with pieces of iron wire connecting them. He then discharged a battery of Leyden jars through the human chain and observed that each man reacted at substantially the same time to the electric shock, showing that the speed of electricity's propagation was very high.

• 

  1817: Printer, bookseller, and inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville born. He will invent the phonoautograph, which records an audio signal as a photographic image.

• 

  1840: Mathematician and physicist Siméon Denis Poisson dies. His memoirs on the theory of electricity and magnetism constitute a new branch of mathematical physics.

• 

  1874: Businessman and inventor Guglielmo Marconi born. He will share the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun "in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy".

• 

  1903: Mathematician and academic Andrey Kolmogorov born. He will make significant contributions to the mathematics of probability theory, topology, intuitionistic logic, turbulence, classical mechanics, algorithmic information theory and computational complexity.

• 

  1960: The United States Navy submarine USS Triton completes Operation Sandblast, the first submerged circumnavigation of the globe.

• 

  1983: Pioneer 10 travels beyond Pluto's orbit.