NOW & THEN
26 MAY
1424: Gold and silver mines in Scotland became Crown property.
1733: John Kay, Richard Arkwright’s assistant and a former clockmaker, patented the flying shuttle to operate on Arkwright’s spinning frame.
1805: France’s Napoleon Bonaparte was crowned King of Italy.
1834: Sikhs captured Peshawar from British in India.
1887: British East Africa Company was chartered.
1913: Emily Duncan became Britain’s first woman magistrate.
1917: German aircraft killed 76 civilians in bombing raids along the south-east coast of England.
1938: The first Volkswagen car was completed in Wolfsburg, Germany.
1950: Petrol rationing ended in Britain after ten years.
1954: Funeral ship of Pharaoh Cheops was discovered in Egypt.
1966: British Guiana became independent Latin American nation of Guyana.
1969: Apollo 10 splashed down in the Pacific after travelling 600,000 miles, and arrived 25 seconds late.
1969: Thor Heyerdahl, Norwegian, set out in papyrus craft Ra to prove ancient Egyptians could have sailed the Atlantic.
1973: An Icelandic gunboat shelled and holed a British trawler.
1989: The BBC broadcast the 10,000th episode of the daily radio serial The Archers, with Terry Wogan and Dame Judi Dench as guests.
1991: Lauda Air Boeing 767 disintegrated 31,000ft above Thailand, killing all 223 on board. Company said later that crash was caused by engine mistakenly being thrown into reverse.
1995: Scotland opened their World Rugby Cup programme with a 89-0 victory over Ivory Coast. Skipper Gavin Hastings scored a world record 44 points.
1998: The Supreme Court of the United States ruled that Ellis Island, the historic gateway for millions of immigrants, was mainly in the state of New Jersey, not New York.
2004: The New York Times published an admission of journalistic failings, claiming that its flawed reporting and lack of scepticism towards sources during the build-up to the 2003 war in Iraq helped promote the belief that Iraq possessed large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.
The United States Army veteran Terry Nichols was found guilty of 161 state murder charges for helping carry out the Oklahoma City bombing.
2006: An earthquake in Java killed more than 5,700 people and left 200,000 homeless.
2009: North Korea tested two short-range missiles, further heightening tensions in the region.
2010: The Alcohol Commission called for a ban on Buckfast tonic wine in a bid to combat Scotland’s booze problem.
2011: Fugitive Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect Ratko Mladic was arrested in Serbia after 16 years on the run.
2014: More than 40 people were killed when the Gorakhpur Express, a high-speed passenger train, derailed and crashed into a freight train in Utter Pradesh state, northern India.