August 31

In 1869, on the 31st, Mary Ward, a prominent British scientist, was traveling to a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society in a steam-powered automobile that had been designed and built by two of her cousins. The vehicle was traveling at the breakneck speed of 4 mph when, as luck would have it, she fell out of the passenger compartment and was run over by the vehicle. She died almost instantly, did not pass Go, and went directly in to the record books as the first person to die because of an automobile accident.