This Day in History

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February 26

The 59th running of The Daytona 500 will held today. The Daytona 500 has been NASCAR's season-opening race since 1982.


Events

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

1815 – Napoleon Bonaparte escapes from Elba.

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

1914 – HMHS (His Majesty's Hospital Ship) Britannic, sister to the RMS Titanic, is launched at Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast.

1919 – President Woodrow Wilson signs an act of Congress establishing the Grand Canyon National Park.

1929 – President Calvin Coolidge signs an executive order establishing the 96,000 acre Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.

1966 – Apollo program: Launch of AS-201, the first flight of the Saturn IB rocket.

1979 – The Superliner railcar enters revenue service with Amtrak.

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

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.

1995 – The UK's oldest investment banking institute, Barings Bank, collapses after a rogue securities broker Nick Leeson loses $1.4 billion by speculating on the Singapore International Monetary Exchange using futures contracts.

2008 – The New York Philharmonic performs in Pyongyang, North Korea in the first event of its kind to take place in North Korea.

2013 – A hot air balloon crashed near Luxor, Egypt, killing 19 people in history's deadliest ballooning disaster.

Births

1564 – Christopher Marlowe, 1802 – Victor Hugo, 1829 – Levi Strauss, 1846 – Buffalo Bill Cody, 1852 – John Harvey Kellogg, 1866 – Herbert Henry Dow, 1882 – Husband E. Kimmel, 1887 – William Frawley, 1908 – Tex Avery, 1914 – Robert Alda, 1916 – Jackie Gleason, 1920 – Tony Randall, 1928 – Fats Domino, 1928 – Ariel Sharon, 1931 – Robert Novak, 1932 – Johnny Cash, 1945 – Mitch Ryder, 1950 – Jonathan Cain, 1953 – Michael Bolton, 1954 – Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, 1958 – Tim Kaine, 1971 – Erykah Badu, 1979 – Corinne Bailey Rae

Deaths

1903 – Richard Jordan Gatling, 1997 – David Doyle