July 26 – Some important events on this day.
657 👉🏼 Battle of Siffin during the first Muslim civil war between Ali ibn Abi Talib and Muawiyah I beside Euphrates River
1267 👉🏼 Inquisition forms in Rome under Pope Clement IV
1519 👉🏼 Francisco Pizarro receives royal charter for the west coast of South America
1533 👉🏼 Francisco Pizarro orders the death of the last Sapa Inca Emperor, Atahualpa
1579 👉🏼 Admiral and navigator Francis Drake leaves San Francisco to cross Pacific Ocean
1775 👉🏼 U.S. postal system established
1803 👉🏼 The Surrey Iron Railway, arguably the world’s first public railway, opens in south London
1835 👉🏼 1st sugar cane plantation started in Hawaii
1865 👉🏼 The capital of New Zealand moves from Auckland to Wellington
1878 👉🏼 In California, poet and American West outlaw calling himself “Black Bart” makes his last clean getaway when he steals a safe box from a Wells Fargo stagecoach. The empty box found later with a taunting poem inside.
1882 👉🏼 Richard Wagner’s opera “Parsifal” premieres in Bayreuth, Germany
1896 👉🏼 Vitascope Hall, 1st permanent for-profit movie theatre, opens in New Orleans
1903 👉🏼 1st automobile trip across the United States (San Francisco to New York) completed by Horatio Nelson Jackson and Sewall K. Crocker
1908 👉🏼 United States Attorney General Charles Joseph Bonaparte issues an order to immediately staff the Office of the Chief Examiner (later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation or, more commonly, FBI)
1945 👉🏼 Declaration of Potsdam: US, Britain and China demand the unconditional surrender of Japan during WWII
1945 👉🏼 Physicist Raemer Schreiber and Lieutenant Colonel Peer de Silva depart Kirtland Army Air Field to transport the plutonium core for the Fat Man bomb (bombing of Nagasaki) to the island of Tinian where the bomb is assembled.
Nagasaki was the second Japanese city to be bombed by the US in the dying days of World War II. Unlike “Little Boy” dropped on Hiroshima on the 6th August 1945, Nagasaki’s bomb, christened “Fat Man”, was plutonium based and dropped three days later on the 9th August.
Although this second bomb was more powerful than that dropped on Hiroshima, the hilly terrain of Nagasaki protected it to some extent and there was no firestorm. The effects were still catastrophic, with the exact death toll unknown but estimated at about 75,000.
1951 👉🏼 Netherlands ends state of war with Germany
1953 👉🏼 Fidel Castro leads a failed attack on the Moncada Barracks, intended to spark a revolution in Cuba
2017 👉🏼 3 live king cobras reported found inside potato chip cans by customs officials in Los Angeles
2018 👉🏼 Observation of a black hole by The Very Large Telescope in Chile proves Albert Einstein’s prediction of “gravitational redshift”, published in “Journal Astronomy & Astrophysics”