August 17
1807: Robert Fulton's North River Steamboat leaves New York City for Albany, New York, on the Hudson River, inaugurating the first commercial steamboat service in the world.
1927: Mathematician Erik Ivar Fredholm dies. He introduced and analyzed a class of integral equations now called Fredholm equations. Fredholm's work on integral equations and operator theory anticipated the theory of Hilbert spaces.
1929: Captain and pilot Francis Gary Powers born.
1970: Soviet spacecraft Venera 7 launched from Earth. It will become the first successful soft landing on another planet (Venus).
2017: The GW170817 gravitational wave signal is observed by the LIGO/Virgo collaboration. It is the first gravitational wave event observed to have a simultaneous electromagnetic signal, a significant breakthrough for multi-messenger astronomy.