April 26
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April 26 is the 117th day of the year (118th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 248 days remaining after April 26 until the end of the year.
[change] Births
- 1785 – John James Audubon, American painter (died 1851)
- 1786 – William Hovell, English explorer of Australia (died 1875)
- 1886 – Gabdulla Tukay, Tatar poet (died 1913)
- 1889 – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Austrian-born philosopher (died 1951)
- 1892 – John Murray, Australian army officer (died 1951)
- 1894 – Rudolf Hess, Nazi leader (died 1987)
- 1900 – Charles Richter, American seismologist (someone who studies earthquakes), creator of the Richter scale (died 1985)
- 1938 – Duane Eddy, American guitar player
- 1960 – Roger Andrew Taylor, British drum player (Duran Duran)
- 1975 – Joey Jordison, American musician (Slipknot)
[change] Deaths
- 1865 – John Wilkes Booth, the man who killed United States President Abraham Lincoln (b. 1838).
- 1920 – Srinivasa Ramanujan, Indian mathematician (b. 1887)
- 1938 – Edmund Husserl, German philosopher (b. 1859)
- 1984 – Count Basie, American musician (b. 1904)
- 1999 – Jill Dando, British TV presenter (b. 1961)
- 2005 – Maria Schell, Austrian actress (b. 1926)
[change] Events
- 1478 – The Pazzi attack Lorenzo de' Medici and kill his brother Giuliano during High Mass in the Florence Cathedral.
- 1607 – English colonists of the Jamestown settlement make landfall at Cape Henry, Virginia.
- 1865 – American Civil War: Confederate General Joseph Johnston surrenders his army to General William Tecumseh Sherman near Durham, North Carolina.
- 1865 – Union cavalry troopers corner John Wilkes Booth, President Lincoln's assassin, in a barn in Virginia. Booth is shot dead by cavalryman Boston Corbett.
- 1925 – Paul von Hindenburg defeats Wilhelm Marx in the second round of the German presidential election to become the first directly elected Reichspräsident, the head of state of the Weimar Republic.
- 1933 – The Gestapo, the official secret police force of Nazi Germany, is established.
- 1937 – Spanish Civil War: Guernica, Spain is bombed by German Luftwaffe.
- 1942 – The worst-ever mining accident in history kills 1,549 miners in an explosion at the Honkeiko Colliery, Manchuria.
- 1946 – Father Divine, a controversial religious leader who claims to be God, marries the much-younger Edna Rose Ritchings, a celebrated anniversary in the International Peace Mission movement.
- 1954 – The Geneva Conference, an effort to restore peace in Indochina and Korea, begins.
- 1962 – NASA's Ranger 4 spacecraft crashes into the Moon.
- 1964 – Tanganyika and Zanzibar merge to form Tanzania.
- 1986 – In Ukraine, a nuclear reactor at the Chornobyl (Chernobyl) nuclear plant explodes, creating the world's worst nuclear disaster.
- 1991 – Seventy tornadoes break out in the central United States. Before its end, Andover, Kansas would record the year's only F5 tornado (see The Andover, Kansas Tornado).
- 1994 – South Africa holds its first multiracial elections.
- 1994 – A China Airlines Airbus A-300-600R crashes at Nagoya Airport, Japan killing 264.
- 2002 – 19-year-old Robert Steinhäuser shoots and kills 17 people at his school in Erfurt, Germany.
- 2005 – Under international pressure, Syria withdraws the last of its 14,000 troop military garrison in Lebanon, ending its 29-year military domination of that country.
