Today in History: July 10

1509: John Calvin (Jean Chauvin) is born, the son of a lawyer, in Noyon, France.  He’ll go on to become perhaps the first major Christian leader to endorse the lending of money at interest.

1584: Law student Balthasar Gérard, in response to a 25,000-crown contract put out by Emperor Philip II, assassinates Dutch rebel leader William “the Silent” of Orange.  He’s caught and tortured to death, but Philip grants three large estates to his family and raises them to the peerage.

1832: President Jackson vetoes a bill for re-chartering the Second Bank of the United States, a step that will ultimately lead to inflated state-bank currency and the Panic of 1837.

1871: Valentin-Louis-Georges-Eugène-Marcel Proust is born at Auteuil, near Paris.  He’ll invent a new literary genre: the seven-volume novel in which which hardly anything happens.

1913: Death Valley, California, suffers the hottest temperature ever recorded in the United States:  134° F, or 56.7° C.

1962: AT&T’s privately owned Telstar is launched; it’s the world’s first communications satellite.  It’s built by the company’s Bell Labs, and NASA is paid $3 million to launch it.

1985: Reeling from attacks by outraged brand loyalists, Coca-Cola announces it will, in fact, continue to sell its original formula under the name “Coca-Cola Classic.”

2002: Peter Paul Rubens’s “The Massacre of the Innocents” is sold at Sotheby’s in London for £49.5million ($76.2 million).