This Day In History : July 15

2006 United States

Twitter is launched

Twitter, a social media platform known for its microblogging capabilities, was officially launched on July 15, 2006. The platform was created by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams. Initially, the idea for Twitter emerged from a brainstorming session at Odeo, a podcasting company founded by Williams and Stone.

Also on This Day in History July 15

Discover what happened on July 15 with HISTORY's summaries of major events, anniversaries,
famous births and notable deaths.

Births on This Day, July 15
  • 1817 John Fowler

    English engineer who built the London Metropolitan Railway

  • 1928 Carl R. Woese

    American microbiologist

  • 1926 Raymond Gosling

    British scientist involved in DNA structure research

  • 1933 John Hopfield

    American physicist and neuroscientist (Hopfield network)

  • 1943 Jocelyn Bell Burnell

    Irish astrophysicist (discovered radio pulsars)

Deaths on This Day, July 15
  • 1997 Gianni Versace

    Italian fashion designer who founded Versace

  • 1936 Richard Dixon Oldham

    Irish geologist and seismologist who discovered evidence for the existence of the Earth's liquid core 

  • 1916 Ilya Mechnikov

    Russian zoologist and bacteriologist known as the "father of natural immunity" (Nobel 1908)

  • 1919 Emil Fischer

    German chemist, discovered Fischer esterification (Nobel Prize 1902)

  • 1939 Eugen Bleuler

    Swiss psychiatrist (introduced the term schizophrenia to describe the disorder previously known as dementia praecox)

2003

The Mozilla Foundation is established

The Mozilla Foundation was established on July 15, 2003, in the United States. It was created to support and lead the open-source Mozilla project, which is best known for developing the Firefox web browser. The foundation promotes an open and accessible internet and oversees the development of various software projects aimed at maintaining the internet as a public resource.
1870

Georgia becomes the last of the Confederate states to be readmitted to the Union

Georgia became the last of the Confederate states to be readmitted to the Union on July 15, 1870. This marked the end of the Reconstruction era's state reintegration process following the American Civil War.
1799

The Rosetta Stone is found in the Egyptian village of Rosetta

The Rosetta Stone was found in the Egyptian village of Rosetta (modern-day Rashid) on July 15, 1799, by French soldiers who were part of Napoleon Bonaparte's campaign in Egypt. The stone was crucial in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs, as it contains the same text in three scripts: Greek, Demotic, and hieroglyphic.
1975

Soyuz 19 and Apollo 18 launched

The Soyuz 19 and Apollo 18 missions were part of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP), which was the first international manned spaceflight. They were launched on July 15, 1975. Soyuz 19 was launched by the Soviet Union, and Apollo 18 was launched by the United States.
Holiday
Special day
Discover invention