February 26 in History

February 26 is the 57th day of the year. There are 309 days remaining until the end of the year.

• 1815 – Napoleon Bonaparte escaped from Elba.
• 1863 – US President Abraham Lincoln signed the National Currency Act into law.
• 1870 – In New York City, the first demonstration of a pneumatic subway opened to the public.
• 1909 - Kinemacolor, the first successful color motion picture process, was first shown to the general public at the Palace Theatre in London.
• 1917 – The Original Dixieland Jass Band recorded the first jazz record for the Victor Talking Machine Company in New Jersey.
• 1919 – President Woodrow Wilson signed an act of the US Congress establishing most of the Grand Canyon as a US National Park. 
• 1920 – The first German Expressionist film and early horror movie, “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” premièred in Berlin.
• 1929 – President Calvin Coolidge signed an Executive Order establishing the 96,000 acre Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.
• 1971 – UN Secretary General U Thant signed a UN proclamation of the vernal equinox as Earth Day.
• 1980 – Egypt and Israel establish full diplomatic relations.
• 1993 – 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 United Kingdom’s oldest investment banking institute, Barings Bank, collapsed after a securities broker, Nick Leeson, lost $1.4 billion by speculating on the Singapore International Monetary Exchange using futures contracts.

February 23 in History

February 23 is the 54th day of the year There are 312 days remaining until the end of the year.

• 632 – The Last Sermon (Khutbah, Khutbatul Wada’) of the prophet Muhammad.
• 1455 – The Gutenberg Bible, the first Western book printed with movable type, was published.
• 1836 – The Battle of the Alamo began in San Antonio, Texas.
• 1861 – President-elect Abraham Lincoln secretly arrived in Washington, DC, after thwarting an assassination plot in Baltimore, Maryland.
• 1883 – Alabama became the first US state to enact an antitrust law.
• 1886 – Charles Martin Hall produced the first samples of man-made aluminum, after several years of intensive work. He was assisted in this project by his older sister Julia Brainerd Hall.
• 1898 – Emile Zola was imprisoned in France after publishing J’accuse, a letter accusing the French government of anti-Semitism and wrongfully imprisoning Captain Alfred Dreyfus. 
• 1903 – Cuba leased Guantanamo Bay to the United States "in perpetuity.”
• 1905 – Chicago attorney Paul Harris and three other businessmen met for lunch to form the Rotary Club, the world's first service club.
• 1927 – The Federal Radio Commission (later renamed the Federal Communications Commission) began to regulate the use of radio frequencies in the US.
• 1941 – Plutonium was first produced and isolated by Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg. 
• 1942 – Japanese submarines fired artillery shells at the California coastline near Santa Barbara.
• 1947 – The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) was founded.
• 1954 – The first mass inoculation of children against polio with the Salk vaccine began in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
• 1983 – The US Environmental Protection Agency announced its intent to buy out and evacuate the dioxin-contaminated community of Times Beach, Missouri.