March 26 : Often suffering is the strongest teacher.

On this day, 26 Mar...

1668 - England took control of Bombay.

1845 - Joseph Francis of New York City patented a corrugated sheet-iron lifeboat.

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 were then spread on fabric. They later sold the idea to Dr. Thomas Allcock who marketed it as Allcock's Porous Plaster.

1872 - Thomas J. Martin was awarded a patent for the fire extinguisher.

1885 - Commercial production began of George Eastman's flexible, paper-backed photographic film, the first continuous-strip negative able to be compactly spooled.

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 take 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 after the prison where he spent his sentence.

1923 - BBC began its daily radio weather forecast.

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

1934 - Driving tests introduced in Britain.

1953 - Dr. Jonas Salk announced a new vaccine to immunize people against polio.

1971 - Bangladesh (East Pakistan) declares its independence.

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 defense system, even as the two agree to carry military cooperation into the 21st century during the visit of Prime Minister Deve Gowda.

2014 - Beijing issues air pollution warnings, advising limited outdoor activity as particulate concentration measures over 12 times the World Health Organization standard.

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.

RIP

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

1990 - Maniben Patel, daughter of Sardar Vallabhai Patel.

Titbits

1780 - 1st British Sunday newspaper appears (British Gazette and Sunday Monitor).

You may have known...

When you lie, your nose gets warm.