August 26

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  1346: Hundred Years' War: The military supremacy of the English longbow over the French combination of crossbow and armored knights is established at the Battle of Crécy.

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  1713: Physicist, mathematician, and inventor Denis Papin dies. He invented the steam digester, the forerunner of the pressure cooker and of the steam engine.

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  1723: Biologist and microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek dies. Van Leeuwenhoek was a pioneer of microscopy who made fundamental contributions to the establishment of microbiology as a scientific discipline.

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  1728: Polymath Johann Heinrich Lambert born. He will make important contributions to mathematics, physics (particularly optics), philosophy, astronomy, and map projections.

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  1735: Leonhard Euler presents his solution to the Königsberg bridge problem – whether it was possible to find a route crossing each of the seven bridges of the city of Königsberg once and only once – in a lecture to his colleagues at the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg.

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  1743: Chemist and biologist Antoine Lavoisier born. He will have a large influence on both the history of chemistry and the history of biology.

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  1795: Occultist and explorer Alessandro Cagliostro dies. He was a glamorous figure associated with the royal courts of Europe where he pursued psychic healing, alchemy, and scrying.

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  1900: Biochemist Hedley Ralph Marston born. Marston's research into fallout from the British nuclear tests at Maralinga will prove the existence of significant radiation hazards at many of the Maralinga sites long after the tests.

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  1918: Physicist and mathematician Katherine Johnson born. Johnson will compute orbital mechanics as a NASA employee which will be critical to the success of the first and subsequent U.S. crewed spaceflights; she will also pioneer the use of computers to perform these tasks.

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  1930: Philo Farnsworth is granted a ptent (U.S. 1,773,980) for his television system . This is his first patent, with a description of his image dissector tube, and his most important contribution to the development of television.

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  1974: Pilot and explorer Charles Lindbergh dies. At age 25 in 1927 he went from obscurity as a U.S. Air Mail pilot to instantaneous world fame by making his Orteig Prize–winning nonstop flight from Long Island, New York, to Paris.

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  1995: Writer and peace activist John Brunner dies.