April 15 is Rubber Eraser Day
Titanic Remembrance Day
Tax Day (United States)
Father Damien Day (Hawaii)
Jackie Robinson Day (Major League Baseball)
April 15, 1452 was the birthday of Leonardo da Vinci, (Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci), Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, mathematician, engineer, inventor, etc. See a sample of famous artwork.
First American School for the Deaf opened in Hartford, Connecticut on April 15, 1817.
In 1861 President Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 Volunteers to quell the insurrection that soon became the American Civil War.
1865 – Death of President Abraham Lincoln , sixteenth President of the United States. Lincoln was 56 years old. The Civil War had ended only 6 days prior to Lincoln’s assassination.
On April 15, 1889, Father Damien (Jozef De Veuster) died of Hansen’s disease (leprosy) on the island of Molokai, Hawaii.
April 15, 1892, the General Electric Company was formed.
1912 – The British passenger liner RMS Titanic sank in the North Atlantic at 2:20 a.m., two hours and forty minutes after hitting an iceberg. Only 710 of 2,227 passengers and crew on board survived.
Insulin became generally available for use by people with diabetes in 1923.
In 1924 Rand McNally published its first Road Atlas.
1947 – Jackie Robinson debuted for the Brooklyn Dodgers, breaking baseball’s color line.
McDonald’s restaurant dates its founding to the opening of a franchised restaurant by Ray Kroc, in Des Plaines, Illinois on this date in 1955.