January 26: Facts & Historical Events On This Day

A helicopter carrying nine people, including Kobe Bryant and his daughter, crashed in California with no survivors.

England’s first female bishop of the Church of England, Libby Lane, was ordained.

A 60-ton decomposing whale exploded onto the busy streets of Taipei, Taiwan.

The dead 56-foot-long sperm whale was sitting on the back of a lorry on its way to be researched. She exploded because of the gasses building up inside her during decay. The flying debris literally washed the surrounding street, and nearby cars as witnesses watched in horror.

Frank Sinatra performed to 175,000 people who paid to see him in Rio de Janeiro.

Flight attendant Vesna Vulović survived the world’s highest fall without a parachute after falling 33,330 feet.

Amazingly she went on to fully recover. She even wanted to return to work on planes, but her manager moved her to the airline offices.

The Beaumont children, Jane, Arnna, and Grant, vanished from a beach in Adelaide, Australia, and were never found.

The children were last seen playing at the beach with an unknown man. The kids or the mysterious man were never seen again.

The Ranger 3 robotic spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The Ranger 3 could have made history as the first US spacecraft to land on the Moon, but a number of malfunctions caused the spacecraft to miss the Moon by 22,000 miles (35,000 km). While part of the mission's goal was to crash onto the Moon, it was also meant to transmit photographs of the Moon's surface back to Earth in its final 10 minutes before impact.

Elvis Presley reached number one in the UK charts with “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”

Stalin and officials walked out of Lady Macbeth opera, calling it a “muddle,” not music.

Scottish inventor John Logie Baird changed the world of communication and entertainment forever when he demonstrated television for the first time.

Baird showed his audience a puppet show that was performing out of view of them to demonstrate his invention.

The first Winter Olympics medal was awarded to American Skater Charles Jewtraw after skating 5,000 meters in just 44 seconds.

After being unearthed in South Africa, a 3,106-carat diamond became the world’s largest.

Michigan became the 26th state to join the United States of America.

Thirty thousand lives were lost after a major earthquake shook Lisbon.

Friars later spread rumors that the earthquake was a punishment from God because of the Jewish community. A poet named Gil Vicente diffused the situation and possibly prevented a grand massacre of Jewish people.