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In a letter to Mao, Stalin proposed that China send troops to Korea to support North Korea. Regarding the possible outbreak of a Third World War, Stalin commented that if war were inevitable, it would be better for it to break out now, with Germany

Mao Zedong proclaims the People’s Republic of China

First Soviet nuclear explosion: The RDS (Russian: “Russia does it itself”) is detonated on a 38-meter concrete tower in Technical Area Sh in Facility 905 in Kazakhstan; the explosion is 22 kilotons; it will be the first of 715 national nuclear tests; 9 days later

Witold Pilecki, a Polish soldier who had himself arrested and interned in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz during World War II for organizing an attempted armed revolt among the prisoners, was killed with a gunshot to the back of the head in a prison

Lithuania. Over 40,000 unwelcome people are deported to Siberia. The following year, another 29,000 are added. In Latvia, 43,000 are deported. Any hope of resistance to the Soviets dies in these years.

East Germany. General Gaidukov, military commander of the Zentralwelke, which was churning out thousands of V-2s for the Soviets, hosted a banquet for the scientists and technicians. Caviar was eaten and vodka flowed. That same evening, unexpectedly, 92 trains carrying 2,000 German technicians and scientists

Those condemned to death at the Nuremberg trials are hanged.

Goering committed suicide in his cell with a cyanide capsule. How he obtained it will never be known. His ashes were secretly scattered in the river; there was never to be a monument to Hermann Goering.

The Soviet Union rejects the American plan for nuclear arms control; it will be another 30 years before a serious attempt to control the arms race is put in place between the two superpowers.

Construction of the ENIAC computer at the University of Pennsylvania (JP Fckert and J. Mauchly); it is capable of 300 multiplications per second.

The most dangerous place, despite the wars of the 20th century, remains the home due to domestic accidents. In 1946, in the United States, accidents due to falls were 18 per 100,000 people per year (0.018%/year). They dropped to less than 5 from 1990 onwards

Professor Theodore von Karman and several engineers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Caltech) founded Aerojet Engineering Corp; within 3 years the company would be able to produce 6 kg/h of liquid hydrogen.

Generals Eisenhower, Montgomery, and Zhukov toast victory together. Ike Eisenhower was a heavy Coca-Cola drinker and wanted it for his soldiers too. By the end of the war, the US Army had consumed 5 billion bottles of Coca-Cola, produced at 64 production sites worldwide. Georgy

The killings of fascists after the liberation in the province of Bergamo are estimated at at least 380 documented cases

Bomporto, province of Modena. A Christian Democrat representative is assassinated as part of post-war vendettas.

Himmler and a small group of SS men crossed the Elbe with the aim of reaching Bavaria; among them were SS-Sturmbannführer Josef Kiermayer (his bodyguard), SS-Standartenführer Rudolf Brandt (his personal assistant), the two senior adjutants SS-Obersturmbannführer Werner Grothmann and SS-Sturmbannführer Heinz Macher, as well as

American GIs meet the Red Army at Torgan on the Elbe

The city of Cassino is captured. Poles of the Second Polish Army Corps, veterans of the Soviet Gulags and having passed through Iran, Palestine, and Egypt, raise the Polish flag at 10:20 a.m. on the ruins of the monastery atop Monte Cassino.

The mass production of the fearsome Grumman F6F HellCat begins in American factories; in the short three-year period of its production, 12,272 units will be produced; and it will provide a fundamental contribution to the conflict: out of 6,477 Japanese aircraft shot down in flight

The Nazis reach the outskirts of Stalingrad

The First Battle of El Alamein ends with a stalemate. It can still be considered a British victory, having halted the Axis advance toward Cairo. 13,000 British casualties and 10,000 German casualties. The number of Italian casualties is unknown, but 7,000 were taken prisoner.

The United States decided to maintain a financial relationship with its allies in World War II that was completely different from that it had with its “associates” in World War I. Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act, under which the United States almost always provided its

Italy. Jewish students and teachers are excluded from public schools.

The British crack the Japanese diplomatic code again.

Japanese Manchuria. The state of Manhukuo is born, with its capital Shinkyo (Changchu to the Chinese). In Japan’s vision, it was to become an example of a neo-Asiatic nation, independent of European colonizers. Teams of Japanese planners, engineers, architects, and bureaucrats set to work. Many

The Holodomor (Ukrainian: Голодомор, “to kill by starvation”), Great Famine. It was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. The Holodomor was part of the larger Soviet famine of 1932–1933 that affected the country’s major grain-producing areas.

Guglielmo Marconi completes and inaugurates the Vatican Radio broadcasting facilities. Marconi is the first to speak on the radio, followed by Pope Pius XI.

The Russian-German meteorologist Wladimir Koppen hypothesizes that the cause of the ice ages is to be found not in the harsh winters but in the cool summers.

The National Socialists win 18% of the Reichstag vote and become the second largest party.

Third Geneva Convention. Prohibits the violent or humiliating treatment of prisoners of war and establishes the conditions under which they must be housed, fed, and cared for.

Mickey Mouse was born by Walt Disney

Enrico Fermi brings together a group of young Italian physicists (Majorana, Amaldi, Segrè) at Via Panisperna. They work on nuclear physics.

Charles Doolittle Walcott, America’s most powerful scientific administrator and discoverer of the Burgess Shale Bestiary, dies.

London. John Logie Bard’s first public demonstration of television broadcasting takes place between two penthouses in a London building.

The French and Belgian armies occupy the Ruhr to force Germany to pay its war debts.

Fascism becomes a mass movement with more than 200,000 members; Mussolini is elected to parliament in the liberal coalition, the group has 7% of the seats and the socialists lose 10%, the communists are at 3.9%.

China. In a period of extreme uncertainty in the country, for the first time in several centuries, the Chinese Communist Party is founded in Shanghai.

Antonio Petrone marries Teresa, and the following year they leave Italy. In early 1921, Antonio Petrone is 25 years old and leaves his hometown, a town with an ancient, mysterious, rugged, and rocky name: Sasso di Castalda. Houses cling to the peaks of the Apennines,

The Arabs led by Lawrence of Arabia occupy Syria

Italian mine on Pasubio inadvertently triggers a second mine

The American scientist Robert Goddard, given the immeasurable interstellar distances and consequently the very long times for possible interstellar travel, discusses for the first time the possibility of colonizing other star systems with “protoplasms” engineered so as not to start from scratch, but so as

Italian mine in no man’s land near Buse del Oro, north of Colbricon

First failed attempt at a Bolshevik revolution in Russia

Falkenhayn presented the Kaiser with the famous memorandum in which he recommended a violent attack on Verdun or Belfort on the Swiss border; Verdun was chosen.

The Germans use nerve gas. German troops surprise Allied forces at Ypres, Belgium, attacking two French and Algerian colonial divisions with 168 tons of lethal chlorine gas. The first major German gas attack decimated the Allied lines, so France and Great Britain immediately began developing

Antwerp, Belgium. Winston Churchill leaves the city: all hope of holding it is now gone. The British were counting on the fortified city of Antwerp to stop the Germans. At this point, Churchill begins to consider opening another front, possibly on the eastern flank, to

Beginning of the Battle of the Marne. On September 5, 1914, the French attempted to repel the German advance northeast of Paris, beginning the Battle of the Marne. After hostilities began in Europe in August 1914, Germany launched an offensive on the Western Front, hoping

A continuous front was formed from Switzerland to the coast of Belgium; in the first 5 months of the war the Germans lost 750,000 men, the French 900,000 (300,000 killed).

King Leopold II of Belgium marries Caroline Lacroix, a prostitute who gives him two children. She dies five years later.

French scientist Georges Claude creates the first neon lamp

The Frenchman Eugene Antoniadi, using the Meudon telescope, discovered that Giovanni Schiaparelli’s Martian canals were actually just dark, irregular regions, essentially an optical illusion.

Following the economic crisis and poverty in Russia, a protest is organized in front of the Tsarist residence in St. Petersburg; hundreds of thousands of people join in; Tsar Nicholas II is not there, he is on a hunt; the guards shoot at the crowd,

Philosopher Sigmund Freud publishes The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, the first in a series of highly readable books.

Thomas Alva Edison founded the Edison Portland Cement Company with $11 million in capital and sought a headquarters in western New Jersey. He found one in Ogden, where he built a factory and row houses for workers. The business failed to take off and was

Basel, Switzerland. First World Zionist Congress, presided over by Theodor Herzl. Further meetings will follow, annually and then biennially.

Guglielmo Marconi visits his native Bologna for a holiday and is greeted triumphantly. Then, at the invitation of the Royal Navy, he conducts a radio transmission experiment in Rome at the Quirinale, and then in La Spezia, where he communicates between a ship and the

Marquis Guglielmo Marconi arrives in London

United States. Elmer Sperry begins experimenting with gyroscopes, possibly to replace magnetic compasses, which fail to function in the steel hulls of battleships. Sperry will file over 400 patents and found eight manufacturing companies during his career. His son, Lawrence, will continue his father’s work,

The Frenchman Gustav Zede’ invented the periscope, which was later installed on the submarine Morse

Hadamard manages to prove that no zero of the Zeta function is further to the right than 1

Western United States. In the second half of the 19th century, the American bison population collapsed due to relentless hunting, and by 1894, the enormous herds in Yellowstone Park had been reduced to just 25 animals. By the end of the 20th century, the American

Johnstown, Pennsylvania. A dam failure after days of heavy rains released 20 million tons of water, overwhelming the village of Johnstown, killing 2,209 people.

Heinrich Hertz accepted the offer of the Rheinish University of Bonn and moved there, occupying the house that once belonged to Rudolf Clausius (the inventor of the Second Law of Thermodynamics). Hertz was already famous, at just over thirty, for having opened a conference of

The King of Norway and Sweden announces a competition to award the best work on the mathematics of the Solar System. Poincaré wins the prize and later discovers an error that leads to the inauguration of Deterministic Chaos and Chaos Theory.

Dow Jones & Co. invents the Dow Jones Index: it includes 11 Wall Street stocks

Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy writes The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

Nikola Tesla arrives in New York and is accepted by the Immigration Office in Manhattan, although the government employee evidently has difficulty understanding his nervous interlocutor, who is then registered as a native Swede (he had probably said “Smiljan,” not “Sweden”). Tesla is initially astonished

The Brooklyn Bridge opens. Designed by engineer John Roebling, the Brooklyn Bridge is one of the most recognizable symbols of the United States. Made entirely of steel, it connects the island of Manhattan to the borough of Brooklyn, otherwise separated by the East River. Begun

Alexander II was assassinated by a bomb in St. Petersburg. Two of his sons would suffer violent deaths: Grand Duke Sergei was assassinated by a bomb in the Moscow Kremlin in 1905, and Grand Duke Paul was shot by the Bolsheviks in the Peter and

Astronomers find two (not one) comets in the sky in the same orbit as the Great Comet of 1843. On Earth, in recent months, there has been a debate over the hypothesis that a comet breaks apart due to its close passage across the Sun

Menlo Park, New Jersey. A decisive experiment for the light bulb filament: some Japanese bamboo samples (among the thousands tested) lasted nearly 3.5 hours at the dazzling glow of 71 candela. Another version, dimmed to the more sustainable brightness of 16 candela, lasted a remarkable

Nobel Prize-winning scientist William Crookes believed in ghosts. He attended the séances of the medium Florence Cook. The medium would usually sit behind a curtain in the living room, have the lights turned off, and enter a trance. The curtain would then be lifted and

Born in Lvov, Ukraine, Jan Lukasiewics, a logician, was the inventor of reverse Polish notation, which allows expressions to be written without the use of parentheses.

Edison Electric Light Company, predecessor of GE (General Electric), is founded.

The night sky lights up with thousands of meteors every hour. It’s Biela’s Comet, which has fractured, and we’re seeing small debris entering Earth’s atmosphere.

Johann Friedrich Miescher, a Swiss scientist at the University of Tubingen in Germany, discovered DNA (without knowing its composition, however) thanks to a series of experiments on alcohol, pig gastric juice, and human pus.

Gregor Mendel becomes abbot of the Brunn monastery; from now on he abandons scientific research

Thomas Alva Edison worked nights for Western Union (trains), while during the day he invented and built various devices: a teleprinter for stock market quotes, a fire alarm, a duplicating telegraph printer. And on October 13, 1869, he obtained his first patent: for an electrochemical

Maria Sklodowska (later Marie Curie) was born in Warsaw

Karl Marx writes Das Kapital (Capital)