The following events occurred in July 1969: July 1, 1969 (Tuesday) The formal investiture of the United Kingdom's Prince Charles as the Prince of Wales took place at Caernarvon Castle in Wales, as the crown prince's mother, Queen Elizabeth II, placed the coronet (a small crown) on in his head. For the first time, the ceremony was televised live to British viewers, and was seen by an estimated half a billion viewers in the United States and in the British Commonwealth. Charles had been made Prince of Wales (and the Earl of Chester) on July 26, 1958, when he was nine years old (the position had been vacant since 1936, when the previous Prince of Wales ascended the throne as King Edward VIII, but the investiture ceremony waited another 11 years before Charles's 21st birthday. Prior to the ceremony, Welsh nationalists exploded bombs to protest the English prince's installation as a sovereign of Wales, and two employees of the town of Abergele, both members of the nationalist group Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru, were killed while attempting to plant a gelignite bomb using nitroglycerin in a local hotel; eight hours after the ceremony, a British Army soldier was killed by a bomb when he started an Army van. Assignment of a "service number" for United States Army and United States Air Force personnel was discontinued more than 50 years after the first Army service number had been issued on February 28, 1918, though the U.S. Marines would continue to use numbers until the end of 1970 and the U.S. Navy until the end of 1971. The identifier, more commonly referred to as part of the "name, rank and serial number" was replaced instead with the service member's Social Security number for all people sworn in after midnight of June 1. Besides eliminating the 8-digit service number, the Army and Air Force also retired the prefixes (such as "RA" for "regular Army" for volunteers, "US" for draftees, "ER" for enlisted reservists, "O" for officer and "WA" for "women's Army"). In at least one location, the Richards-Gebaur Air Reserve Station in Missouri, induction was delayed so that one recruit could be sworn in before midnight on Monday and given the last service number, and another a few minutes later on Tuesday to be "given a Social Security number as his service number". July 2, 1969 (Wednesday) The Ireland cricket team surprised the world of