Moments in Time: QWERTY
The History Channel
On June 23, 1868, Christopher Latham Sholes patented the QWERTY typewriter, the first version of which he constructed using an old table, a circular piece of glass, a telegraph key and piano wire.
On June 24, 2021, 98 people died when a 12-story, beachfront condominium collapsed in Surfside, Florida, near Miami. Engineers believed the cause of the disaster was a structural column or concrete slab giving way, and workers eventually cleared more than 18 million pounds of concrete and rubble from the site.
On June 25, 1947, Anne Frank's diary account of her life in hiding during the Holocaust was first published, under the title "Het Achterhuis: Dagboekbrieven 14 Juni 1942--1 Augustus 1944." After reading it her father confessed that the book revealed a side of his daughter he had never known, saying that he "had no idea of the depth of her thoughts and feelings."
On June 26, 1974, a pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit chewing gum became the first grocery item scanned with a Universal Product Code, or UPC, at a supermarket in Troy, Ohio.
On June 27, 1922, the American LIBRAry Association (ALA) awarded the first Newbery Medal, honoring the year's best children's book, to "The Story of Mankind" by Hendrik Willem van Loon.
On June 28, 1904, Helen Keller, who'd been left deaf and blind since an illness at just 19 months old, graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was the first deaf-blind person to earn a bachelor's degree. Later, she would also become the first woman to be awarded an honorary degree from Harvard University.
On June 29, 2003, Katharine Hepburn, a four-time Academy Award winner for Best Actress and one of Hollywood's great screen legends, died of natural causes at the age of 96, at her home in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. In 1999, the American Film Institute had named her the greatest female actress in the history of American cinema, and after her death, the lights on Broadway were dimmed for an hour to mark her passing.