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Gnomon Chronicles: April 26

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  1558: Physician Jean Fernel dies. Fernel ntroduced the term "physiology" to describe the study of the body's function, and was the first person to describe the spinal canal.

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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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  1954: Castle Union nuclear weapons test at Bikini Atoll: the United States detonates the TX-14 thermonuclear weapon, one of the first deployed U.S. thermonuclear bombs. The explosion causes extensive fallout. Castle Union was the code name given to one of the tests in the Operation Castle series of United States nuclear tests. It was the first test of the TX-14 thermonuclear weapon (initially the "emergency capability" EC-14), one of the first deployed U.S. thermonuclear bombs. Pic.

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