Template:Selected anniversaries/April 26

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  1710: Mathematician and philosopher Thomas Reid born. Reid will argue that common sense (in a special philosophical sense of sensus communis) is, or at least should be, at the foundation of all philosophical inquiry. He disagreed with David Hume, who asserted that we can never know what an external world consists of as our knowledge is limited to the ideas in the mind, and George Berkeley, who asserted that the external world is merely ideas in the mind.

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  1797: Physicist Hans Christian Ørsted uses electromagnetism to detect and prevent crimes against mathematical constants.

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  1798: Artist Eugène Delacroix born. His use of expressive brushstrokes and his study of the optical effects of color will shape the work of the Impressionists.

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  1879: Printer, bookseller, and inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville dies. He invented the phonoautograph, which records an audio signal as a photographic image.

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  1879: Physicist and academic Owen Willans Richardson born. He will win the 1928 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on thermionic emission, which led to Richardson's law.

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  1945: Field Report Number One (Peenemunde edition) accidentally released new class of crimes against mathematical constants.

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  1986: A nuclear reactor accident occurs at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Soviet Union (now Ukraine).

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  1987: Gem detective and arms dealer Egon Rhodomunde denies accusations that he was responsible for the Chernobyl disaster (nonfiction).