January 4 » Utah is admitted as the 45th U.S. state.
January 18 » An X-ray generating machine is exhibited for the first time by H. L. Smith.
March 1 » Battle of Adwa: An Ethiopian army defeats an outnumbered Italian force, ending the First Italo-Ethiopian War.
April 6 » In Athens, the opening of the first modern Olympic Games is celebrated, 1,500 years after the original games are banned by Roman emperor Theodosius I.
July 9 » William Jennings Bryan delivers his Cross of Gold speech advocating bimetallism at the 1896 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
November 27 » Also sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss is first performed.
Day of death July 20, 1959
The temperature on July 20, 1959 was between 11.0 °C and 23.7 °C and averaged 17.6 °C. There was 14.3 hours of sunshine (89%). The almost cloudless was. The average windspeed was 3 Bft (moderate breeze) and was prevailing from the north-northwest. Source: KNMI
February 9 » The R-7 Semyorka, the first intercontinental ballistic missile, becomes operational at Plesetsk, USSR.
March 30 » Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, flees Tibet for India.
June 14 » Dominican exiles depart from Cuba and land in the Dominican Republic to overthrow the totalitarian government of Rafael Trujillo. All but four are killed or executed.
July 24 » At the opening of the American National Exhibition in Moscow, U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev have a "Kitchen Debate".
August 11 » Sheremetyevo International Airport, the second-largest airport in Russia, opens.
August 31 » A parcel bomb sent by Ngô Đình Nhu, younger brother and chief adviser of South Vietnamese President Ngô Đình Diệm, fails to kill King Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia.
When copying data from this family tree, please include a reference to the origin: Hendrik Dreyer, "Dreyer Tree", database, Genealogy Online (https://www.genealogieonline.nl/dreyer-tree/I16703.php : accessed February 3, 2026), "Marthinus Christoffel Fourie (1876-1959)".
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