News & Politics - On This Day (April 15) 
MSFixR says: 1452 - Leonardo da Vinci , Italian Renaissance polymath born. (d. 1519) (Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian polymath; a scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, botanist, musician and writer. Born as the illegitimate son of a notary, Piero da Vinci, and a peasant girl, Caterina, at Vinci in the region of Florence, Leonardo was educated in the studio of the renowned Florentine painter, Verrocchio. Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the "Renaissance man", a man whose seemingly infinite curiosity was equalled only by his powers of invention. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived.)
Self-portrait in red chalk, circa 1512 to 1515. 1632 - Battle of Rain; Swedes under Gustavus Adolphus defeat the Holy Roman Empire during the Thirty Years' War. 1738 Baroque composer George Frideric Handel's Serse, an opera loosely based on Xerxes I of Persia, premiered in London. 1755 A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson was first published. 1865 - Abraham Lincoln dies after being shot the previous evening by John Wilkes Booth and Andrew Johnson becomes the 17th President of the United States. 1912 The passenger liner RMS Titanic sank about two hours and forty minutes after colliding with an iceberg (pictured), killing over 1,500 people.
Willy St๖wer: Untergang der Titanic (Sinking of the Titanic) 1923 - Insulin first became generally available for use by diabetics.
The structure of insulin. The left side is a space-filling model of the insulin monomer, believed to be biologically active. Carbon is green, hydrogen white, oxygen red, and nitrogen blue. On the right side is a cartoon of the insulin hexamer, believed to be the stored form. A monomer unit is highlighted with the A chain in blue and the B chain in cyan. Yellow denotes disulfide bonds, and magenta spheres are zinc ions. 1947 Jackie Robinson, the first African American to break the baseball color line, played his first game in Major League Baseball. 1955 - Ray Kroc opens his first franchise of McDonald's restaurant in Des Plaines, Illinois. 1986 U.S. armed forces launched Operation El Dorado Canyon against Libya. 1989 The death of former Chinese General Secretary Hu Yaobang triggered a series of events that led to the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing. Original post: On This Day (April 15) |
