April 26 in History

In April 1956, the trucking entrepreneur Malcolm McLean sent a converted tanker, the Ideal X, from Newark, New Jersey, to Houston, Texas, carrying 58 metal truck bodies that were lifted aboard by crane. The voyage is widely treated as the start of modern container shipping. Over the following decades, the idea of moving freight in standardized, stackable boxes slashed the cost and time of handling cargo and helped make today's tightly connected global economy possible.

On 26 April 1986, Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Soviet Ukrainian SSR exploded during a safety test, releasing large quantities of radioactive material into the atmosphere. It remains the worst accident in the history of civilian nuclear power. The disaster forced the permanent relocation of hundreds of thousands of people, contaminated large areas of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, and became a turning point in how the world viewed nuclear energy and Soviet secrecy.