October 26 – Some important events on this day.
740 👉🏼 An earthquake strikes Constantinople, causing damage to city walls and buildings
1366 👉🏼 Comet 55P/1366 U1 (Tempel-Tuttle) approaches 0.0229 AUs of Earth
1850 👉🏼 Robert McClure sights the fabled Northwest Passage for the first time (from Banks Island towards Melville Island)
1861 👉🏼 Pony Express (Missouri to California) ends after 19 months
1863 👉🏼 International conference begins in Geneva aimed at improving medical conditions on battlefields – beginning of the Red Cross.
1881 👉🏼 Gunfight at the OK Corral: The most famous shootout in the Wild West occurs, between lawmen (including Wyatt Earp) and the Cowboys, with Tom and Frank McLaury and Billy Clanton killed.
After silver was discovered nearby in 1877, Tombstone quickly grew into one of the richest mining towns in the Southwest. Wyatt Earp, a former Kansas police officer working as a bank security guard, and his brothers, Morgan and Virgil, the town marshal, represented “law and order” in Tombstone, though they also had reputations as being power-hungry and ruthless. The Clantons and McLaurys were cowboys who lived on a ranch outside of town and sidelined as cattle rustlers, thieves and murderers. In October 1881, the struggle between these two groups for control of Tombstone and Cochise County ended in a blaze of gunfire at the OK Corral.
1901 👉🏼 First recorded use of “getaway car” occurs after holding up a shop in Paris
1918 👉🏼 Germany’s supreme commander General Eric Ludendorff resigns, protesting the terms to which the German Government has agreed in negotiating an armistice.
At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 1918, the First World War came to an end. The armistice, the fourth of three armistices which had already taken Germany’s three main allies out of the war, meant total victory for the Allies and the collapse of Germany.
The armistice was not a formal surrender (this would come later with the Treaty of Versailles) but it ended all the active fighting. Celebrations occurred across the world after its announcement as the “war to end all wars” had finally come to an end.
Of course this peace would only last twenty-some years. The rise of the Nazi Party gave rise to the stab in the back myth that the German Army was betrayed by the “November Criminals” who signed the armistice.
1950 👉🏼 Mother Teresa founds Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta, India
1972 👉🏼 Guided tours of the former prison at Alcatraz by the National Park Service begin
1977 👉🏼 Last natural case of smallpox discovered in Merca district, Somalia. Considered the anniversary of the eradication of smallpox, the most spectacular success of vaccination
2019 👉🏼 Raid by US Special Forces kills ISIS founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Syria