AS

Enrico Fermi, in a letter or Scientific Research, communicates the results of his research on artificial radioactivity; Fermi used neutrons to bombard all the elements in the periodic table, starting with hydrogen. When he reached fluorine, he recorded a few ticks on his Geiger-Muller counter.

Donald Douglas makes the DC-1 operational

In Berlin, Germany, a large group of Nazi students gathered to burn 20,000 books by Jewish authors.

Adolf Hitler in power in Germany, but only 3 of the 11 ministers are Nazis

The National Socialists win 37% of the Reichstag vote and become the largest party in Germany.

A New York City driver hits Winston Churchill on Fifth Avenue, who was looking the wrong way while crossing the street; Churchill gets away with it.

Alan Turing goes to King’s College and studies mathematics.

Mike Collins, a future member of the Apollo 11 crew, was born in an apartment near Via Veneto, opposite the Borgese Gardens in Rome; his father, General James L. Collins, fought with Pershing in the Philippines and in 1916 in Mexico against Pancho Villa.

CY Chao conducts experiments on the penetration of gamma rays into heavy materials such as lead.

Leningrad, Soviet Union. A night of struggle against religion. A roundup of arrests is carried out among members of the Russian religious intelligentsia. This wave of prisoners headed for the gulags joins that of anarchists, Mensheviks, pro-Cadet groups (scientists, academics, artists, writers, engineers, etc.), and

Las Vegas turns on its first neon lights. It’s the Oasis Cafe sign. The world’s first neon sign is the Cinzano sign in Paris, from 1913.

Kellogg-Briand Pact: 61 nations join in declaring that they renounce war as a means of resolving international disputes.

Amsterdam Olympics

Scotsman Alexander Fleming discovers (unstable) penicillin (for typhoid, malaria, and tuberculosis). Penicillin is probably the single most important contribution to increasing life expectancy worldwide in the 20th century. The discovery is accidental and serendipitous: he interrupts his studies on staphylococci to go on vacation, forgetting

International Congress of Mathematicians in Bologna, in which Hilbert poses the fundamental question of whether it is possible to demonstrate all mathematical truths

American Christie patents innovative suspensions for heavy vehicles; they will be used first by the Soviets on T34 tanks in World War II and will make the difference compared to German tanks.

Turkey. In a famous speech to the nation, Ataturk sanctioned the Westernization of the alphabet, the way men and women dress (the veil was discouraged), the calendar, and education. It was a true revolution.

Several students join Fermi’s group in Rome, including Bruno Pontecorvo

Ettore Majorana, a nephew of Professor Quirino Majorana, joins Fermi’s group in Rome; he is a skilled mathematician, superior even to Fermi in this, with an excessive tendency to criticism and a profound pessimism; he works alone and lives a solitary life.

Gottingen, Germany. John von Neumann reveals the proof of his MiniMax Theorem. It will be published in 1928 under the title “On the Theory of Parlour Games,” and will definitively establish game theory as a scientific discipline, framing cooperation between people in mathematical terms. He

7:30 a.m.: Umberto Nobile arrives in Alaska on the Norge airship.

Rocco Anthony Petrone is born. Six months later, a policeman knocks on Teresa’s door to inform her that her husband, Antonio Petrone, has died in an accident on a railroad construction site. He was the family’s only income. Teresa must decide, and quickly, what to

Hugo Gernsback launches Amazing Stories, the first pulp magazine dedicated to science fiction.

Einstein and Satyendra Nath Bose theorize the Bose-Einstein condensation

In a Munich beer hall, Hitler gathers two thousand followers and begins a march following a communist uprising; the demonstration is broken up by the police, Hitler is arrested, and the Nazi Party is declared illegal.

Turkey. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk abolishes the caliphate. Religious courts are abolished, and Sharia law is replaced by a civil code based on the Swiss model. It will be reestablished in parts of Syria and Iraq the following century by Caliph Al Baghdadi in June 2014,

Russia. Kronstadt sailors attempt a riot. Once the uprising is quelled, the insurgents are lined up on the pier. “Count yourself!” The odd numbers step forward and are shot on the spot. The even numbers will receive 10 years in the Gulag in Kholmogory. After

American Clarence Birdseye introduces frozen foods

Arthur Compton measured the corpuscular properties of light quanta predicted by Einstein. In 1937, Davisson and Thomson did the same for the wave properties predicted by de Broglie.

Russia. Alexander Friedmann publishes “The World in Space and Time,” in which he hypothesizes possible universes governed by General Relativity, with a Big Bang and a Big Crunch, or expansion to infinity.

Hardy and Littlewood showed that, if the Riemann Hypothesis is true, then every large odd number can be expressed as the sum of three primes.

The philosopher Sigmund Freud publishes The Ego and the Id.

French veterinarian and biologist Gaston Ramon developed vaccines against diphtheria and tetanus. He helped save 60 million lives (estimate updated at the beginning of the 21st century).

Abel Wolman becomes Chief Engineer of the Maryland State Department of Health. Along with Linn Eslow, he invents water chlorination, helping save an estimated 177 million lives (up to the beginning of the 21st century alone).

Bukhara, Central Asia. The city’s residents see planes flying overhead for the first time. They are Red Army planes coming from nearby Kagan, already conquered by the Bolsheviks. The city of Bukhara is bombed and then conquered by the Bolshevik troops of the great General

Poland. Soviet Marshal Mikhail Nikolaevich Tukhachevsky, anticipating a certain victory against the Poles, issued an order on July 2, 1920, proclaiming, “…the moment of reckoning has come. The army of the Red Banner and the army of the predatory White Eagle stand face to face

British administration of Palestine. Previously, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, the British Army had governed Palestine until the establishment of a civil administration on 1 July 1920. Britain was granted a mandate for Palestine on 25

Russian engineer Fridrikh Tsander points out that even the course of a spaceship can be changed with a gravity assist like that of a comet.

United States, 19th Amendment to the Constitution: granting women the right to vote

Deportation/elimination of the Don Cossacks

The civil war and famine caused by collectivization in the USSR causes 5 million deaths

Champs-Elysees, Paris. American President Wilson receives applause and shakes hands amidst two lines of crowds chanting “Wilson! Wilson! Wilson! Vive l’Amerique!”

Richard Feynman was born in Far Rockaway, in the southern part of Long Island, near the sea and not far from New York.

English naval attack on Ostend

Finnish Civil War. The Whites prevail in a bloody conflict. Not without massacres on the part of the Whites as well: 8,000 Reds were shot and another 20,000 died of starvation and exhaustion. This was the first of three wars the Finns fought and won

New York: First three-light traffic light goes into operation

First Battle of the Piave: the Austrians are pushed back to the left bank of the Piave

The Allies occupy the Rhineland

The Finnish declaration of independence sparked a civil war in Finland between the Whites, supported by German troops who landed in the country, and the Reds, both Finnish and Russian, who occupied the country. The Whites won the civil war in May 1918. Not without

Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo. The Italians are overwhelmed between Bovec and Tolmin at Caporetto. At Caporetto in particular, the defeat is complete: 280,000 prisoners, 350,000 stragglers, 40,000 dead, 3,150 artillery pieces (two-thirds of the Italian army’s total) in enemy hands, 3,000 heavy machine guns

Gaza, Ottoman Empire. Pro-British Jews developed a spy organization to inform the British of Ottoman troop movements. One of the codes used window shutters. Sarah Aaronsohn, one of the commanders of this organization called NILI, had a house overlooking the Mediterranean. She would signal British

The 1st US Div. intervenes in Lorraine

Italian mine on Pasubio

Cycle of 10 Austrian mine explosions on Pasubio

Second Italian mine on the Sief

Austrian mine on the Marmolada near Forcella V

Third Italian mine on Colbricon

Austrian mine on Lagazuoi Piccolo

Luigi Romersa was born in Reggio Emilia in 1917, and pursued a career as a journalist, which would take him far and wide, both before, during, and after World War II, including to extreme locations such as three bases at the South Pole and an

After the February Revolution, the Russian Provisional Government (Временное правительство) was established in Petrograd following the fall of the Russian Empire and the abdication of the Tsar. The two rival institutions, the Duma and the Petrograd Soviet, competed for power. Tsar Nicholas II had abdicated

In Russia the Tsar and his government are overthrown: Nicholas II abdicates when popular opposition becomes uncontrollable

Frankie Galluccio and his sister enter the Harvard Inn, a dive bar in Brooklyn. The bartender tells him, “Frankie, boy, give me the girl with the whore’s face, and I’ll show her some fun.” It was the bartender’s first serious mistake. Frankie slashes him in

Magneti Marelli was the first to build “car magnets” or alternators to produce electrical energy in cars.

United States. President Wilson goes to the Senate to propose a solution for Europe with a peace without victors, guaranteed by the United States. The president is unaware that a few days earlier, the Kaiser had approved the use of German submarines against all commercial

Austrian mine on Lagazuoi Piccolo

Lawrence of Arabia (Thomas Edwards Lawrence), a British intelligence officer, organizes the revolt of the Arab tribes against the Turks of the Ottoman Empire.

American Red Cross nurses began using Cellucotton as a feminine hygiene product. It was a material patented years earlier by Ernst Mahler and James Kimberly of the small American company Kimberly Clark. The material was supplied in large quantities to the US Army for use

Austrian mine on Lagazuoi Piccolo

The Royal Air Force was the first to adopt radio on its aircraft, finding a way to avoid engine noise by placing microphones and earphones integrated into the aviators’ helmets.

Battle of Gallipoli (Dardanelles): the Allied fleet attempts to take Istanbul but the operation fails: 46,000 dead and 200,000 wounded among Australians, New Zealanders and British

Dardanelles. The gigantic British naval assault begins.

The last charge of the Panama Canal project is detonated, having been completed by the Americans in 10 years of work made possible by the determination of President Theodore Roosevelt; the state of Panama itself was created by Roosevelt to separate that territory from Colombia.

The first refrigerators became available on the market, and in the 1920s they began to replace the more traditional iceboxes en masse.

Stockholm Olympics

Chuck Jones, a Warner Bros. cartoonist, was born in Spokane, Washington; he would go on to draw 1,200 cartoons featuring characters such as Wile E. Coyote, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and more.

Occupation of Korea by Japan.

The World Zionist Organization (WZO) opens a Palestinian office. Its goals are to purchase land from Arab landowners, initiate agricultural colonization, and welcome Jewish immigrants.

Guglielmo Marconi announces to the press the successful wireless communication between the two sides of the Atlantic. The New York Times calls it “the most marvelous scientific development of our time.” Marconi is 27 years old.

Brown discovers the first fossil specimen of Tyrannosaurus rex. Twelve more will be discovered in the 20th century, all in the northern United States (Dakota, Wyoming, Montana) and southern Canada (Sasketchwan).

Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius suggests that single bacterial spores could be carried into interstellar space by the solar wind.