1900: First Tour de France cycle race begins in Paris.
1903: First successful flight of a heavier-than-air craft at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, conducted by the Wright Brothers.
1941: Adolf Hitler ordered the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union.
1969: Apollo 11 mission launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
1980: The Moscow Olympic games open amidst a U.S.-led boycott.
1992: Italian anti-corruption judge Paolo Borsellino was killed by a car bomb in Palermo, Sicily.
2012: The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN discovers the Higgs boson particle, dubbed the "God particle".