1194 Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, was born in Iesi, near Ancona, Italy on December 26, 1194 to the emperor Henry VI and forty-year-old Constance of Sicily. King of Sicily from 1198, King of Germany from 1212, King of Italy and Holy Roman Emperor from 1220, he spoke six languages (Latin, Sicilian, Middle High German, Langues d'oïl, Greek and Arabic. Frederick was an avid patron of science and the arts and is often considered the most cultured man of his age.
1605 King Lear was written in 1605, the year William Shakespeare's source, The True Chronicle History of King Lear, was first published. Its first known performance was on St. Stephen's Day in 1606. King Lear was banned in Britain from 1788-1820 as the government considered the play inappropriate in the light of King George III’s insanity.
1770 HMS Endeavour, under the command of Lieutenant James Cook (later Captain Cook) ran into the Great Barrier Reef, during its trip to the South Pacific and Australia. Substantial repairs were needed and she limped into port in Batavia in the Dutch East Indies where it spent 11 weeks. The Endeavour left on December 26, 1770, and reached the English port of Dover the following July, having been at sea for nearly three years.
1776 In the early predawn hours of Boxing Day 1776, George Washington and his army crossed the Delaware River to launch a surprise attack against the Hessian forces at the Battle of Trenton.
Future US president James Monroe took part in the Battle of Trenton. He was carried from the field bleeding badly after being struck in the left shoulder by a musket ball, which severed an artery.
1783 The modern parachute was invented in the late 18th century by Louis-Sébastien Lenormand. His intended use for the parachute was to help entrapped occupants of a burning building to escape unharmed. Lenormand used his 14-foot contraption with a rigid wooden frame to make the first recorded public parachute jump, when he leaped from the tower of the Montpellier observatory, in France, on December 26, 1783.
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| The birth of Frederick II |
1605 King Lear was written in 1605, the year William Shakespeare's source, The True Chronicle History of King Lear, was first published. Its first known performance was on St. Stephen's Day in 1606. King Lear was banned in Britain from 1788-1820 as the government considered the play inappropriate in the light of King George III’s insanity.
1770 HMS Endeavour, under the command of Lieutenant James Cook (later Captain Cook) ran into the Great Barrier Reef, during its trip to the South Pacific and Australia. Substantial repairs were needed and she limped into port in Batavia in the Dutch East Indies where it spent 11 weeks. The Endeavour left on December 26, 1770, and reached the English port of Dover the following July, having been at sea for nearly three years.
1776 In the early predawn hours of Boxing Day 1776, George Washington and his army crossed the Delaware River to launch a surprise attack against the Hessian forces at the Battle of Trenton.
Future US president James Monroe took part in the Battle of Trenton. He was carried from the field bleeding badly after being struck in the left shoulder by a musket ball, which severed an artery.
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| Battle of Trenton by Charles McBarron. |
1783 The modern parachute was invented in the late 18th century by Louis-Sébastien Lenormand. His intended use for the parachute was to help entrapped occupants of a burning building to escape unharmed. Lenormand used his 14-foot contraption with a rigid wooden frame to make the first recorded public parachute jump, when he leaped from the tower of the Montpellier observatory, in France, on December 26, 1783.
1791 Charles Babbage was born at 44 Crosby Row, Walworth Road, London on December 26, 1791. A mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer, Babbage proposed the first mechanical computer, the Difference Engine. An automatic mechanical calculator designed to tabulate polynomial functions, it was never constructed in his lifetime, but the idea formed the basis of modern computing.
1831 British chemist and physicist Michael Faraday discovered the fundamentals of electromagnetic induction. He found that moving a magnet through a coil of copper wire caused an electric current to flow through the wire. After ten years of experiments on electromagnetism, on December 26, 1831 Faraday produced the homopolar generator, the first electric producing generator.
1860 The first ever inter-club football match took place between Hallam F.C. and Sheffield F.C. at the Sandygate Road ground in Sheffield, England on December 26, 1860. The match report for the game in the Sheffield Daily Telegraph states that the game was played between 16 of Sheffield and 16 of Hallam and Stumperlowe (Stumperlowe being a hamlet half a mile from Sandygate).
1862 Red Rover was the U.S. Navy's first hospital ship, serving the Mississippi Squadron until the end of the American Civil War. Her medical complement included four female nurses from the Catholic order Sisters of the Holy Cross. They became, the first volunteer females to serve on board a U.S. Navy hospital ship on December 26 1862, when they began work as volunteer nurses on board USS Red Rover.
1862 On December 26, 1862, in Mankato, Minnesota, 38 Dakota men were hanged in a mass execution. This event occurred in the aftermath of the Dakota War of 1862, a conflict between the Dakota Sioux and white settlers in Minnesota. This was the largest mass execution in US history.
1865 James Mason of Franklin, Massachusetts registered the first U.S. patent for a coffee percolator on December 26, 1865, His device still used a downflow method without rising steam and water. Before the invention of the coffee percolator, European and Americans generally roasted their coffee at home using in particular popcorn poppers and stove-top frying pans.
1871 W.S.Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan first met in 1870, brought together by producer Richard D'Oyly Carte. Their first opera, Thespis (see picture below), premiered the following year in London at the Gaiety Theatre on December 26. A Christmas entertainment, Thespis did modestly well, but the two would not collaborate again for four years.
1871 Boxing Day is a British tradition, going back many centuries but only made an official holiday in 1871. Also known as St. Stephen's Day, it was customarily a time for giving to the poor. The name comes partly from the boxes kept in British churches to collect money for the needy. On the day after Christmas Day it became a custom of Victorians for tradesmen to collect their "Christmas boxes" or gifts in return for good and reliable service throughout the year on the day after Christmas.
1888 The shortest run for a West End play in London was a production of Lord Lytton's 1838 melodrama The Lady of Lyons, which opened on December 26, 1888. The audience was asked to leave after waiting for an hour because nobody could raise the safety curtain. The play was cancelled after that fiasco.
1893 Mao Zedong was born on December 26, 1893 in the village of Shaoshan village, Hunan province. in South China. The eldest son of four children, his father, Mao Yichang, was a a grasping money lender and middle class peasant farmer who through hard work and peasant shrewdness had grown comparatively prosperous. The chairman of the Communist Party of China from its establishment in 1949, Mao Zedong's rule is estimated to have caused the deaths of approximately 70 million people.
1871 W.S.Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan first met in 1870, brought together by producer Richard D'Oyly Carte. Their first opera, Thespis (see picture below), premiered the following year in London at the Gaiety Theatre on December 26. A Christmas entertainment, Thespis did modestly well, but the two would not collaborate again for four years.
1871 Boxing Day is a British tradition, going back many centuries but only made an official holiday in 1871. Also known as St. Stephen's Day, it was customarily a time for giving to the poor. The name comes partly from the boxes kept in British churches to collect money for the needy. On the day after Christmas Day it became a custom of Victorians for tradesmen to collect their "Christmas boxes" or gifts in return for good and reliable service throughout the year on the day after Christmas.
1888 The shortest run for a West End play in London was a production of Lord Lytton's 1838 melodrama The Lady of Lyons, which opened on December 26, 1888. The audience was asked to leave after waiting for an hour because nobody could raise the safety curtain. The play was cancelled after that fiasco.
1893 Mao Zedong was born on December 26, 1893 in the village of Shaoshan village, Hunan province. in South China. The eldest son of four children, his father, Mao Yichang, was a a grasping money lender and middle class peasant farmer who through hard work and peasant shrewdness had grown comparatively prosperous. The chairman of the Communist Party of China from its establishment in 1949, Mao Zedong's rule is estimated to have caused the deaths of approximately 70 million people.
1898 Radium was discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie in the form of radium chloride in 1898. They extracted the radium compound from uraninite and announced the discovery of the new element at the French Academy of Sciences on December 26, 1898. "My beautiful radium", Marie Curie called the element. She was in thrall to it: it stirred her, she wrote, with "ever-new emotion and enchantment."
1908 Galveston “Jack” Johnson became the first black world heavyweight boxing champion on December 26, 1908 when he beat Tommy Burns over 14 rounds in Sydney, Australia. Two years later, Jack Johnson knocked out white boxer Jim Jeffries in a heavyweight boxing match, sparking race riots across the United States.
1919 On December 26, 1919 Boston Red Sox owner Harry Frazee sold their star player Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees for $125,000 and a $350,000 loan. Ruth was made a full-time outfielder by the Yankees. His signing was the prelude to an extraordinary Major League season during which the Bambino would hit 54 home runs. Ruth's legendary power and charismatic personality made him a larger-than-life figure during the Roaring Twenties.
1933 American electrical engineer and inventor, Edwin Armstrong was granted five U.S. patents covering the basic features of frequency modulation (FM) on December 26, 1933. FM radio was demonstrated to the Federal Communications Commission for the first time in 1940. Today, many radio stations send out both kinds of signals. Amplitude Modulation (AM) may be used for talk shows, and FM for music.
1943 The Battle of the North Cape took place in the Arctic Ocean on December 26, 1943. It was the last to take place between big-gun capital ships in the war between Britain and Germany. The Royal Navy’s HMS Duke of York and her escorts sank Germany’s battleship Scharnhorst. Only 36 men were pulled from the icy seas, out of a crew of 1,968. The British victory confirmed the massive strategic advantage held by the British, at least in surface units.
1946 American gangster Bugsy Siegel opened The Flamingo Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas on December 26, 1946. It is the oldest casino still in operation on the Las Vegas Strip. This iconic landmark predates much of the glitz and glamour we associate with the Strip today, having witnessed the transformation of Las Vegas from a desert outpost to a global entertainment capital.
1948 The Reith Lectures were established by John Reith, the BBC's first Director-General, with the aim of presenting "the fruits of new and serious thinking on the part of men and women from every walk of life." On December 26, 1948 the renowned philosopher Bertrand Russell made the first of the BBC’s annual Reith lectures speaking on the authority of the individual.
1963 The Beatles' "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "I Saw Her Standing There" were released in the United States on December 26, 1963, marking the beginning of Beatlemania on an international level.
"I Want to Hold Your Hand." became their first US number one hit on February 1, 1964.
1972 Harry S. Truman, the 33rd President of the United States, died on December 26, 1972 in Kansas City, Missouri of multiple organ failure caused by pneumonia at the age of 88. Truman was so poor after his presidency that Congress had to enact the Former Presidents Act to give him a pension. Herbert Hoover, the only other living ex-president, took the pension as well, despite his wealth, to avoid embarrassing Truman.
1972 As part of Operation Linebacker II during the Vietnam War, 120 American B-52 Stratofortress bombers attacked Hanoi, including 78 launched from Andersen Air Force Base in Guam on December 26, 1972, the largest single combat launch in Strategic Air Command history.
1982 Time magazine chose the personal computer as its Person Of The Year on December 26, 1982, the first non-human ever. Ironically, the writer of the story wrote it on a typewriter, since Time's newsroom would not get computers for another year.
2001 Harry Potter author JK Rowling married Dr. Neil Murray on December 26, 2001 in a private ceremony at her home, Killiechassie House, near Aberfeldy. It was her second marriage. Already with one daughter from her first marriage, Rowling had a second child, David, in 2003, and a third, Mackenzie, in January 2005 with Dr Murray.
"I Want to Hold Your Hand." became their first US number one hit on February 1, 1964.
1972 Harry S. Truman, the 33rd President of the United States, died on December 26, 1972 in Kansas City, Missouri of multiple organ failure caused by pneumonia at the age of 88. Truman was so poor after his presidency that Congress had to enact the Former Presidents Act to give him a pension. Herbert Hoover, the only other living ex-president, took the pension as well, despite his wealth, to avoid embarrassing Truman.
1972 As part of Operation Linebacker II during the Vietnam War, 120 American B-52 Stratofortress bombers attacked Hanoi, including 78 launched from Andersen Air Force Base in Guam on December 26, 1972, the largest single combat launch in Strategic Air Command history.
1982 Time magazine chose the personal computer as its Person Of The Year on December 26, 1982, the first non-human ever. Ironically, the writer of the story wrote it on a typewriter, since Time's newsroom would not get computers for another year.
2001 Harry Potter author JK Rowling married Dr. Neil Murray on December 26, 2001 in a private ceremony at her home, Killiechassie House, near Aberfeldy. It was her second marriage. Already with one daughter from her first marriage, Rowling had a second child, David, in 2003, and a third, Mackenzie, in January 2005 with Dr Murray.
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| JK Rowling and Dr Murray |
2004 An earthquake in the Indian ocean off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia on December 26, 2004. One of the largest observed tsunamis followed, with waves over 100 feet high. It affected the coastal areas of South East Asia and Indonesia killing approximately 250,000 people.
2006 Gerald Ford lived 93 years and 165 days, longer than any other U.S. president, (a record since broken by Jimmy Carter). He died on December 26, 2006, at his home in Rancho Mirage, California, of arteriosclerotic cerebrovascular disease and diffuse arteriosclerosis. Ford's 895-day presidency remains the shortest of all presidents who did not die in office.
2006 Gerald Ford lived 93 years and 165 days, longer than any other U.S. president, (a record since broken by Jimmy Carter). He died on December 26, 2006, at his home in Rancho Mirage, California, of arteriosclerotic cerebrovascular disease and diffuse arteriosclerosis. Ford's 895-day presidency remains the shortest of all presidents who did not die in office.
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