Today in history—April 26

1607: English colonists make landfall at Cape Henry, Virginia, on their way to found the first permanent English settlement in North America, Jamestown.

1711: Philosopher David Hume, who will briefly consider studying for the bar before deciding it’s not for him, is born at Edinburgh, Scotland.

1812: Alfried Felix Alwyn Krupp, the “Cannon King,” is born at Essen, Germany.  He will take over management of a failing family steel operation at age 14 and build it into one of the world’s great armaments manufacturers.

1882: American John Sutliff receives a patent for the first perpetual motion machine.

1889: Philosopher and reluctant academic Ludwig Joseph Johann Wittgenstein is born to a wealthy family in Vienna, Austria.

1917: Architect Ieoh Ming “I.M.” Pei, who will do as much as anyone to inflict large, square, dull, faceless, uncomfortable buildings on the modern world, is born at Suzhou, China.

1921: Station WEW in St. Louis broadcasts the first radio weather report.  Odds are it was wrong then, too.

1932: Comedian Ed Wynn appears in front of a live audience to record the first broadcast of Texaco Star Theater, which will soon make him the medium’s biggest star.

1955: The Salk polio vaccine is tested by innoculating 1.8 million children.  This was obviously before strict tort liability became the rule.

1961: Robert Noyce of Intel Corp. patents the integrated circuit.

1983: Just two months after it crossed the 1100 mark, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closes above 1200 for the first time ever.

1986: A nuclear reactor accident at Chernobyl in the Ukraine kills 31 people and irradiates thousands more.