Today’s Motto: ‘The eyes are useless when the mind is blind’

This is Your Day-TODAY: Take a Determined Step Forward and Make History! 

On this day, Mar.26……..

1668 – England took control of Bombay.

1845 – A patent was awarded for an adhesive medicated plaster, predating the ‘Band-Aid.’ Drs. Horace Harrell and William H. Shecut developed a process in which rubber is dissolved in a solvent was then spread on fabric. They later sold the idea to Dr. Thomas Allcock who marketed it as Allcock’s Porous Plaster.

1885 – Commercial production began of George Eastman’s flexible, paper-backed photographic film, the first continuous-strip negative able to be compactly spooled (pic credit- George Eastmen Museum).

1885 – The first cremation in England took place at Woking, where a crematorium was built. The deceased was a Mrs Jeannette C. Pickersgill, a well-known figure in literary and scientific circles.

1895 – The Phantoscope, an early motion picture projector that enlarged film images for viewing  by large groups, was patented by Charles Francis Jenkins. The Phantascope became the basis of Edison’s Vitascope projector. (These developments owed much to George Eastman’s invention of roll film,

followed by transparency film, that enabled the same camera to make multiple photographs in a series).

1916 – Robert Stroud stabbed and killed a prison guard in Leavenworth Kansas. For this crime, he was imprisoned for life. While there, Stroud conducted and published important research on bird diseases, and became the “Birdman of Alcatraz,” named for the prison where he spent his sentence (pic credit-Wikipedia).

1923 – BBC began its daily radio weather forecast.

1931 – New Delhi replaces Calcutta as capital of British-Indies.

1934 – Driving tests introduced in Britain.

1953 – Dr. Jonas Salk announced a new vaccine to immunise people against polio (pic credit-Academy of Achievements).

1971 – East Pakistan  (now Bangladesh) declares its independence from Pakistan under Sheikh Mujibur Rehman leadership (pic credit-Shutterstock). 

1974 – Gaura Devi, a peasant woman, gathered other women around her in a village in the Garhwal Himalayas and—by hugging trees and through other forms of defiance—together prevented loggers from felling trees. This act by illiterate tribal and village women to reclaim their traditional forest rights was a dramatic moment in the ‘Chipko Andolan’, a non-violent struggle. Hugging of trees—“chipko”—was one such novel means of protest.

1992 – Accord with Bangladesh on Tin Bigha. (The Tin, or Teen Bigha Corridor is a strip of land belonging to India on

the West Bengal–Bangladesh border, which in September 2011, was leased to Bangladesh so that it can access its Dahagram–Angarpota enclaves).

1996 – The 3-day old Hazratbal shrine crisis ends, as the militants holed up in the shrine come out of it.

1997 – Russia agrees to help India in developing a state-of-the-art integrated air defence system, even as the two agree to carry military cooperation into the 21st century during the visit of Prime Minister Deve Gowda.

2015 – Shiite militia forces in Iraq boycott the fight against ISIS in Tikrit to protest U.S. airstrikes; the U.S. was responding to a request from the Iraqi government, but militias are concerned that the U.S. will receive credit for their work to date.

Born….

1973 – Lawrence Edward Page, an American computer engineer who was a graduate student when he co-founded Google, Inc. with Sergey Brin, while working in the same Ph.D. programme (pic credit-Forbes).

RIP….

1814 – Joseph Ignace Guillotin, French physician who promoted a law requiring the use of a “machine that beheads painlessly” as a humane mode for all executions as punishment. The beheading device ‘Guillotine’ was named after him (pic credit-Wikipedia).

Titbits….
1780 – 1st British Sunday newspaper appears (British GazetteandSundayMonitor)

.You may have known….
Till about 17th Century, India was the richest country of the world.

                                                                                                {Compiled by Lt. Gen. (R) Raj Kadyan}