Significant Events on September 26

September 26 — a day of discovery, destruction, and global shocks. In 1580,

explorer Francis Drake returned to England after sailing around the entire globe — only the

second circumnavigation in history. In 1687, a Venetian cannonball hit the Parthenon

in Athens, igniting stored gunpowder and devastating one of the world’s greatest ancient

monuments. In 1905, Albert Einstein published his paper on Special Relativity,

reshaping science with the famous equation E = mc². In 1917, World War I’s Battle

of Polygon Wood began, followed a year later, in 1918,

by the Meuse-Argonne Offensive — the largest American-led assault of the war. In 1933,