February 26th in History

History

In 747 BC,  Epoch (origin) of Ptolemy‘s Nabonassar Era.

In 364,  Valentinian I is proclaimed Roman Emperor.

In 1233,  Mongol–Jin War: The Mongols capture Kaifeng, the capital of the Jin Dynasty, after besieging it for months.

In 1266,  Battle of Benevento: An army led by Charles, Count of Anjou, defeats a combined German and Sicilian force led by King Manfred of Sicily. Manfred is killed in the battle and Pope Clement IV invests Charles as king of Sicily and Naples.

In 1606, The Janszoon voyage of 1605–06 becomes the first European expedition to sight Australia, although it is mistaken as a part of New Guinea.

In 1616,  Galileo Galilei is formally banned by the Roman Catholic Church from teaching or defending the view that the earth orbits the sun.

In 1638,  Claude Gaspard Bachet de Méziriac, French mathematician and linguist (b. 1581) dies. He was a French mathematician, linguist, poet and classics scholar born in Bourg-en-Bresse. Bachet was a pupil of the Jesuit mathematician Jacques de Billy at the Jesuit College in Rheims. They became close friends. Bachet wrote the Problèmes plaisants, of which the first edition was issued in 1612, a second and enlarged edition was brought out in 1624; this contains an interesting collection of arithmetical tricks and questions, many of which are quoted in W. W. Rouse Ball‘s Mathematical Recreations and Essays. He also wrote Les éléments arithmétiques, which exists in manuscript; and a translation, from Greek to Latin, of the Arithmetic of Diophantus (1621). It was this very translation in which Fermat wrote his famous margin note claiming that he had a proof of Fermat’s last theorem. The same text renders Diophantus’ term παρισὀτης as adaequalitat, which became Fermat’s technique of adequality, a pioneering method of infinitesimal calculus. Bachet was the earliest writer who discussed the solution of indeterminate equations by means of continued fractions. He also did work in number theory and found a method of constructing magic squares. Some credible sources also name him the founder of the Bézout’s identity. For a year in 1601 Bachet was a member of the Jesuit Order. He lived a comfortable life in Bourg-en-Bresse and married in 1612. He was elected member of the Académie française in 1635.

In 1775, British troops land in Salem, Massachusetts to capture the arsenal of the colonists, but do not succeed.

In 1794,  The first Christiansborg Palace in Copenhagen burns down.

In 1802,  Esek Hopkins, American admiral (b. 1718) dies. Commodore Esek Hopkins  was the only Commander in Chief of the Continental Navy during the American Revolutionary War. He was also an accomplished merchant captain and privateer. Esek Hopkins was born in Scituate, Rhode Island. Before the Revolutionary War he had sailed to nearly every quarter of the earth, commanded a privateer in the French and Indian War, and served as a deputy to the Rhode Island General Assembly. Appointed a brigadier general to command all military forces of Rhode Island in October 4, 1775, he immediately began to strengthen Rhode Island‘s defenses with the help of his deputy, William West. A few months later, December 22, 1775, Hopkins was appointed Commander in Chief of the Continental Navy authorized by the Continental Congress to protect American commerce. Hopkins took command of eight small merchant ships that had been altered as men of war at Philadelphia. After much deliberation about taking on the overwhelming British forces listed in his orders, Hopkins utilized the last portion of his orders. Hopkins sailed south February 17, 1776 for the first U.S. fleet operation that took the fleet to Nassau in the Bahamas. He felt that it would be much more advantageous to seize a prize for the Continental Army than take a chance of destroying the Continental Navy in its infancy. He knew that the British port in Nassau would be poorly guarded and had friends there who would help his cause. The Battle of Nassau, an assault on the British colony there March 3, 1776 was also the first U.S. amphibious landing. Marines and sailors landed in “a bold stroke, worthy of an older and better trained service,” capturing munitions desperately needed in the War of Independence.

In 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte and 1,200 men left his exile on the Isle of Elba to start his 100-day campaign to re-gain France.

In 1832, The Polish constitution was abolished and replaced by one  imposed by Czar Nicholas I.

In 1863, President Lincoln signs the National Currency Act.

In 1869, 15th Amendment guaranteeing right to vote was sent to states. The Fifteenth Amendment (Amendment XV) to the United States Constitution prohibits the federal government and each state from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen’s “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” It was ratified on February 3, 1870, as the third and last of the Reconstruction Amendments.

In 1870, New York City’s first pneumatic-powered subway line was opened to the public.

In 1876,  Japan and Korea sign a treaty granting Japanese citizens extraterritoriality rights, opening three ports to Japanese trade, and ending Korea’s status as a tributary state of Qing Dynasty China.

In 1885, Conference of Berlin, gives Congo to Belgium & Nigeria to England.

In 1901, Chi-hsui and Hsu-cheng-yu, Boxer Rebellion leaders, were publicly beheaded in Beijing in front of a crowd of about 10,000. The two had been in the custody of the Japanese Army, and were remanded to China’s “Board of Punishments” for the executions. According to Lt. Col. Goro Shiba, the Japanese legation’s military attaché, he treated the two condemned men to champagne, and Chi-hsui told him “I do not know what I have done to make me deserving of death, but if beheading me will make the foreign troops evacuate Pekin and my Emperor return, I am satisfied to die. I will die a patriot.”

In 1903,  Richard Jordan Gatling, American inventor, invented the Gatling gun (b. 1818) dies. While being most known for inventing the Gatling gun, Gatling invented and patented a number of other inventions. His inventions include a screw propeller and a wheat drill (a planting device) in 1839, a hemp break machine in 1850, a steam plow (steam tractor) in 1857, the Gatling gun in 1861, a marine steam ram in 1862, and a motor-driven plow (tractor). The hand-cranked Gatling gun was declared obsolete by the United States Army in 1911 . Decades later, after World War II, the mechanical concept was resurrected and wedded to electricity-driven cranking in the M61 Vulcan.

In 1909,  Kinemacolor, the first successful color motion picture process, is first shown to the general public at the Palace Theatre in London.

In 1914,  HMHS Britannic, sister to the RMS Titanic, is launched at Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast.

In 1914, First long-distance phone conversation via underground cable.

In 1917,  The Original Dixieland Jass Band records the first jazz record, for the Victor Talking Machine Company in New York.

In 1917, President Wilson publicly asks congress for the power to arm merchant ships.

In 1919,  President Woodrow Wilson signs an act of the U.S. Congress establishing most of the Grand Canyon as a United States National Park – the Grand Canyon National Park.

In 1920,  The first German Expressionist film and early horror movie, Robert Wiene‘s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, receives its première in Berlin.

In 1924, U.S. steel industry finds claims an eight-hour day increases efficiency and employee relations.

In 1929,  President Calvin Coolidge signs an Executive Order establishing the 96,000 acre Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.

In 1931,  Otto Wallach, German chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1847) dies. He was a German chemist and recipient of the 1910 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on alicyclic compounds. During his work with Friedrich Kekulé in Bonn he started a systematic analysis of the terpenes present in essential oils. Up to this time only a few had been isolated in pure form, and structural information was sparse. Melting point comparison and the measurement of mixtures was one of the methods to confirm identical substances. For this method the mostly liquid terpenes had to be transformed into crystalline compounds. With stepwise derivatisation, especially additions to the double bond present in some of the terpenes, he achieved the goal of obtaining crystalline compounds. The investigation of the rearrangement reactions of cyclic unsaturated terpenes made it possible to obtain the structure of an unknown terpene by following the rearangments to a known structure of a terpene. With these principal methods he opened the path to systematic research on terpenes. He was responsible for naming terpene and pinene, and for undertaking the first systematic study of pinene. He wrote a book about the chemistry of terpenes, “Terpene und Campher” (1909).

Otto Wallach is known for Wallach’s rule, Wallach degradation, the Leuckart-Wallach reaction (which he developed along with Rudolf Leuckart) and the Wallach rearrangement.

In 1934, President FDR ordered the creation of a Communications Commission, which brought about the FCC.

In 1935,  Adolf Hitler orders the Luftwaffe to be re-formed, violating the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles.

In 1935,  Robert Watson-Watt carries out a demonstration near Daventry which leads directly to the development of radar in the United Kingdom.

In 1936,  In the February 26 Incident, young Japanese military officers attempt to stage a coup against the government.

In 1937, Adolf Hitler officially opens the world’s first Ferdinand Porsche’s “Volkswagen” factory. To many people, the new cars resemble bugs.

In 1946,  Finnish observers report the first of many thousands of sightings of ghost rockets.

In 1952,  Vincent Massey is sworn in as the first Canadian-born Governor-General of Canada.

In 1960,  A New York-bound Alitalia airliner crashes into a cemetery in Shannon, Ireland, shortly after takeoff, killing 34 of the 52 persons on board.

In 1966,  Apollo Program: Launch of AS-201, the first flight of the Saturn IB rocket

In 1966,  Vietnam War: The ROK Capital Division of the South Korean Army massacres 380 unarmed civilians in South Vietnam.

In 1971,  U.N. Secretary General U Thant signs United Nations proclamation of the vernal equinox as Earth Day.

In 1972,  The Buffalo Creek Flood caused by a burst dam kills 125 in West Virginia.

In 1980,  Egypt and Israel establish full diplomatic relations.

In 1980, Actor-turned-politician Ronald Reagan scores a landslide victory in New Hampshire’s Republican presidential primary, trouncing second-place finisher George Bush.

In 1984, The last American Marines the multinational peacekeeping force Lebanon left Beirut.

In 1987,  Iran-Contra affair: The Tower Commission rebukes President Ronald Reagan for not controlling his national security staff.

In 1991,  Gulf War: United States Army forces capture the town of Al Busayyah.

In 1992,  Nagorno-Karabakh War: Khojaly Massacre: Armenian armed forces open fire on Azeri civilians at a military post outside the town of Khojaly leaving hundreds dead.

In 1992, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that sexually harassed students may sue to collect monetary damages from their schools and school officials.

In 1993,  World Trade Center bombing: In New York City, a truck bomb parked below the North Tower of the World Trade Center explodes, killing six and injuring over a thousand.

In 1995,  The United Kingdom‘s oldest investment banking institute, Barings Bank, collapses after securities broker Nick Leeson, loses $1.4 billion by speculating on the Singapore International Monetary Exchange using futures contracts.

In 1995,  Selena gives her last televised concert in front of over 66,746 people, for a record breaking 3rd time at the Houston Astrodome, nearly a month before she is shot to death by Yolanda Saldívar, the former president of her fan club.

In 1996, President Clinton moved to step up economic sanctions on Cuba in response to Cuba’s downing of two unarmed airplanes belonging to the Cuban-American exile group Brothers to the Rescue.

In 1997, President Clinton defended White House fund-raising tactics as “entirely appropriate,” a day after the disclosure of documents putting Clinton at the center of all-out fund-raising efforts.

In 1998, a jury in Amarillo, Texas, rejected an $11 million lawsuit brought by Texas cattlemen who blamed Oprah Winfrey’s talk show for a price fall after a segment on food safety that included a discussion about mad-cow disease.

In 1998, White House damage-control expert Sidney Blumenthal accused independent counsel Kenneth Starr of trying to intimidate him to keep him from talking with journalists about prosecutors on Starr’s team. “I never imagined that in America I would be hauled before a federal grand jury to answer questions about my conversations with members of the media,” Blumenthal said after a morning of grand jury testimony.

In 1999, President Clinton, outlining foreign policy goals for the final two years of his administration, urged continued American engagement in the quest for peace and freedom abroad during a news conference in San Francisco.

In 2012,  A train derails in Burlington, Ontario, Canada killing at least three people and injuring 45.

In 2013,  A hot air balloon crashes near Luxor, Egypt, killing 19 people.

In 2015, Apple was told to pay Texas tech company $533 million for violating patents. Apple was ordered to pay Texas-based technology company Smartflash $533 million after a federal jury on Wednesday found that the iPhone and iPad maker’s iTunes software infringed on three Smartflash patents. Smartflash had asked for $852 million. Apple tried to have the court throw out the case, arguing that it had never used Smartflash’s technology and that the company’s patents were invalid because they involved innovations already patented by other companies. Apple says it will fight to overturn the decision. [PC World]

In 2019,  Indian Air Force fighter-jets targeted Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist training camps in Balakot.