August 27, 1956

1956Glen Matlock, English singer-songwriter and bass player^[†]

Glen Matlock is an English musician, best known for being the bass guitarist in the original line-up of the punk rock band the Sex Pistols. He is credited as a songwriter on 10 of the 12 songs on the Sex Pistols' only officially released studio album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, although he had left the band early in the recording process, credited as bassist and backing vocalist on only one song on the album, "Anarchy in the U.K." However, on the bootleg album Spunk, Matlock played bass on all the songs, which included earlier studio recordings of 10 of the 12 songs that later appeared on the Bollocks album.

1956Pelageya Shajn, Russian astronomer and academic (born 1894)^[†]

Pelageya Fedorovna Shajn, née Sannikova, was a Russian astronomer in the Soviet Union, and the first woman credited with the discovery of a minor planet, at the Simeiz Observatory in 1928. Pelageya also discovered numerous variable stars and co-discovered the periodic, Jupiter-family comet 61P/Shajn–Schaldach. She was married to prominent Soviet astronomer Grigory Shajn.

1956The nuclear power station at Calder Hall in the United Kingdom was connected to the national power grid becoming the world's first commercial nuclear power station to generate electricity on an industrial scale.^[†]

Calder Hall Nuclear Power Station is a former Magnox nuclear power station at Sellafield in Cumbria in North West England. Calder Hall was the first full-scale nuclear power station to enter operation in the West, and was the sister plant to the Chapelcross plant in Scotland. Both were commissioned and originally operated by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority. The primary purpose of both plants was to produce weapons-grade plutonium for the UK's nuclear weapons programme, but they also generated electrical power for the National Grid.