This Day In History : April 26

1962 United Kingdom

Ariel 1 Launch (First UK Satellite)

Ariel 1, the first satellite built by the United Kingdom, is successfully launched into space. It is designed to study the ionosphere, contributing valuable data to scientific research. This launch marks the UK's entry into the space exploration era.

Also on This Day in History April 26

Discover what happened on April 26 with HISTORY's summaries of major events, anniversaries,
famous births and notable deaths.

Births on This Day, April 26
  • 1877 Alliott Verdon Roe

    English aviator who was the first in Britain to construct and fly his own airplane.

  • 1829 Theodor Billroth

    German surgeon, generally considered to be the founder of modern abdominal surgery.

  • 1812 Alfred Krupp

    German manufacturer of steel and armaments who was known as “The Cannon King.”

  • 1836 Erminnie Adele Smith

    American anthropologist (née Platt) was the first woman to specialize in ethnographic field work.

  • 1879 Owen Willans Richardson

    English physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1928 for “his work on the thermionic phenomenon [electron emission by hot metals] and especially for the discovery of the law named after him.”

Deaths on This Day, April 26
  • 1920 Srinivasa Ramanujan

    Indian mathematician who did notable work on hypergeometric series and continued fractions.

  • 1908 Karl August Möbius

    German zoologist whose work in marine biology included the formation of pearls and the anatomy of the whale.

  • 1940 Carl Bosch

    German industrial chemist who at BASF directed development of the industrial scale process for production of ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen.

  • 2006 Yuval Ne'eman

    Israeli theoretical physicist, who worked independently of Gell-Mann but almost simultaneously (1961) devised a method of grouping baryons in such a way that they fell into logical families.

  • 1951 Arnold Sommerfeld

    German physicist whose atomic model permitted the explanation of fine-structure spectral lines.

1993

Space shuttle Columbia mission

In 1993, space shuttle Columbia was launched on the second German sponsored D-2 Spacelab Mission lasting until 6 May.
1986

Chernobyl nuclear plant explosion

In 1986, in Pripyat, Russia, one of the four sectors at the Chernobyl nuclear plant exploded in the world's worst civil nuclear catastrophe. 
1954

Salk vaccine tested

In 1954, mass testing of the Salk polio vaccine began, involving about 1.8 million children.
1962

NASA's Ranger 4 spacecraft crashes into the Moon

NASA's Ranger 4 becomes the first U.S. spacecraft to reach the Moon. The mission was intended to transmit pictures and collect scientific data, but a malfunction prevented it from doing so. Despite the failure, the mission provided valuable engineering experience.
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