What happened on October 26 in History?

Football Association was founded: 26 October 1863: For centuries before the first meeting of the Football Association in the Freemasons' Tavern on Great Queen Street, London on 26 October 1863, there were no universally accepted rules for playing football. Ebenezer Cobb Morley, as captain of Barnes, in 1862 wrote to Bell's Life newspaper proposing a governing body for the sport "with the object of establishing a definite code of rules for the regulation of the game"; the letter led to the first meeting at The Freemasons' Tavern that created the FA in 1863.

Morley was a founding member. Six meetings near London's Covent Garden, at 81–82 Long Acre, ended in a split between the Football Association and what would become the future rugby ten years later. Both of them had their own uniforms, rituals, gestures and highly formalised rules.

In each public school the game was formalised according to local conditions; but when the schoolboys reached university, chaos ensued when the players used different rules, so members of the University of Cambridge devised and published a set of Cambridge Rules in 1848 which was widely adopted. Another set of rules, the Sheffield Rules, was used by a number of clubs in the North of England from the 1850s.