History for April 26

History for April 26 - On-This-Day.com:
John James Audubon 1785 - Ornithologist, naturalist, painter, Rudolf Hess 1895 - Adolf Hitler's Deputy in the Nazi Party, Charles Richter 1900 - Seismologist, creator of the Richter magnitude scale used to quantify earthquakes 


Carol Burnett 1933 - Actress, comedian, Bobby Rydell 1942 - Singer, Joan Chen 1961 - Actress 


1514 - Copernicus made his first observations of Saturn. 


1607 - The British established an American colony at Cape Henry, Virginia. It was the first permanent English establishment in the Western Hemisphere. 


1865 - John Wilkes Booth was killed by the U.S. Federal Cavalry. 


1937 - German planes attacked Guernica, Spain, during the Spanish Civil War for the Spanish nationalist government. This raid is considered one of the first to be attacks on a civilian population by a modern air force. 


1945 - Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, the head of France's Vichy government during World War II, was arrested. 


1954 - Grace Kelly was on the cover of "LIFE" magazine. 


1982 - The British announced that Argentina had surrendered on South Georgia. 


1986 - The world’s worst nuclear disaster to date occurred at Chernobyl, in Kiev. Thirty-one people died in the incident and thousands more were exposed to radioactive material.