Cs

The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator Analyzer and Computer) is fully operational. It calculates a hundred times faster than any previous machine: 200 us for an addition or subtraction.

South Korea. American General Hodge welcomes Syngman Rhee (a Christian) back home (educated at Harvard and Princeton). He will become head of state of South Korea.

Schio. The context is heated by previous fascist persecutions of the Black Brigades, in which, for example, Giacomo Bogotto was tortured, his eyes gouged out, and perhaps buried alive. And the subsequent Pedescala massacre: 82 innocent civilians killed by the retreating Germans. At the end

The Red Army enters the Reichstag in Berlin

The Americans requisition the San Giorgio bakery in Via Taglio, Modena, to feed the troops

Patton and Montgomery talk about continuing to Moscow if necessary with the help of the remnants of the Wehrmacht: Patton: “We must finish this now while we are here and ready, otherwise we will have to do it later under less favorable circumstances” (prophetic words)

Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. British Movietone News, an English newsreel producer, arrives at the camp and shoots footage that will be released in British cinemas within a few days.

Yamato’s final mission: Operation Ten-Go, organized following the invasion of Okinawa (April 1, 1945). Under the command of Vice Admiral Yokuyama and escorted by a light cruiser and eight destroyers, she was sent to attack the American fleet supporting the landing on the western part

Yamato sets sail from Tokuyama Port on her final mission

The USAF conducts 155 test drops of enormous bombs to prepare for the dropping of the atomic bombs. The flights are conducted using B-29 bombers modified in Dayton, Ohio, to accommodate and deliver such a bulky load.

Nazi massacre: Sant’Anna di Stazzema. Around 7:00 a.m., four SS squads, approximately 200 men, surrounded the village of Sant’Anna di Stazzema, in the province of Lucca, in a pincer movement. At the first signs of the Germans’ arrival, the men of military age fled into

Montefiorino, in the Modena Apennines. The town is reached by General Messerle’s German units. Many villagers have already left Montefiorino, while hundreds more are captured.

Poland. Groups of Polish men, women, and children ambush the occupying German army. For two months, they will keep 17,000 soldiers occupied. Then, tired of Polish disobedience and aware of the imminent arrival of the Russians, Hitler decides to raze Warsaw to the ground.

El Alamein, Egypt. After an unprecedented bombardment of Axis positions, the Australians attack by moonlight. By dawn, the Italian and German positions are heavily damaged. But the minefields also hamper the British, who are unable to deploy their tanks quickly enough, and the Allied offensive

The A3 Scrambler, manufactured by the American Telegraph & Telephone Company (AT&T), was the only viable system for securing information transmitted across the Atlantic. The system was soon cracked by the Nazis.

Emmy Noether dies at age 57

Soviet Union. Emilio Guarnaschelli, a young 23-year-old communist from Turin, is arrested and sentenced without trial to three years of exile in Pinega, a remote village in Karelia, beyond the Arctic Circle. Emilio Guarnaschelli used to use irony at meetings with comrades in Moscow, which

Robert Alexander Watson-Watt (descendant of James Watt) invents a radio device to detect the approach of an airplane (meter-wavelength radar)

Japan goes bankrupt and is forced to abandon its gold standard, which in turn depreciates its currency so much that it virtually loses purchasing power on international markets. Japan was hit terribly hard by the Great Depression. This will lead to strong internal conflicts between

Monday, 3:24 a.m. Thomas Alva Edison dies. His wife Mina and all his children are at his bedside.

The Chrysler Building in Manhattan is completed: it is still the tallest brick building: 318m

The German Zeppelin circles the world in 20 days.

Hermann Oberth founded the Verein fur Raumschiffahrt (Society for Space Travel), which the young Wernher von Braun soon joined.

Robert J. Oppenheimer studied in Göttingen. His mentor was Max Born.

Hohmann invents minimum-energy transfer orbits

Soviet Union. Following the divide-and-conquer policy, Soviet Central Asia, or Turkestan, was divided into five republics belonging to the USSR: Kazakhstan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, the borders completely unnatural and arbitrary. Islam was banned, Arabic schools were closed, and local languages were henceforth

ACMA (Anonima Costruzione Macchine Automatiche) was founded in Bologna for the production of packaging machines.

Mars launches the Milky Way chocolate bar and its turnover increases from 100,000 to 700,000 USD; the previous year it had launched the Mar-O-Bar in Minneapolis without much market success.

Japan’s Hosho is the first aircraft carrier to enter service

Starting in Switzerland, many countries are beginning to add iodine to table salt to prevent birth defects and mental retardation caused by iodine deficiency.

Russia. 8,000 priests, monks, and nuns are shot.

Ireland (with the exception of Ulster) gains independence from the United Kingdom (UK)

Russian Far East. The Japanese are forced to abandon the continent after the Bolsheviks capture Vladivostok. Previously, the Japanese, supporting Kolchak’s White Army, had reached Lake Baikal, thus becoming protectors of the White Admiral Kolchak’s Independent Siberian Republic.

USSR, mountains of Tajikistan. Enver Pasha, Muslim leader of the Basmachi (a sort of clandestine mujahideen organization), is hunted down and killed by the men Lenin had sent after him. With him, the Pan-Turkic vision of a nation encompassing the peoples of Turkic origin from

Poland. Lenin urged German communist militant Clara Zetkin to “[…] not […] return to what happened in Poland. We counted on the Revolution in Poland, and it did not occur (it did not occur in Hungary, Italy, etc. Internationalism would later be greatly scaled down

After World War I, the Versailles Peace Conference, whose decisions were reserved to the Big Four (France, Great Britain, USA, Italy)

Russian Civil War. Alexander Kolchak’s White Army is in trouble. When the Red Army manages to reorganize and counterattack in 1919, the Bolsheviks focus their attack on the center of the White line, aiming for Ufa. The fighting is fierce and bloody: Ufa is captured

London. American President Wilson meets King George V and Queen Mary at Buckingham Palace. King George will later confess: “I can’t stand him: an academic and completely cold professor, a hateful man!” Wilson also meets Prime Minister David Lloyd George.

Tsarist Russia. In the thirty-year period from 1876 to 1905, 486 people were sentenced to death, or 17 people per year, throughout Russia, including those convicted of common crimes. From 1906 to 1908, during the years of the first revolution, death sentences soared to 2,200

Baku, Azerbaijan. Twenty-six Soviet Political Commissars are killed by “White” Russians and buried in a mass grave in the Turkmen desert.

The H1N1 flu, the American flu, also known as the Spanish flu, spreads across the world. Thanks to war, cold, famine, and poor sanitation, it causes tens of millions of deaths.

Italian mine on Pasubio

Albert Einstein presents his equations of General Relativity at the Berlin Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften: gravity is not a force but a curvature of space-time, a Minkowski space.

Perversely, the first German chemical weapons test was carried out on British troops, who had never used gas before. However, the wind didn’t cooperate (or cooperated with the British), and dispersed the gases in the wrong direction, and the British soldiers, immobile in their trenches,

Clashes between interventionists and neutralists in various Italian cities

Winston Churchill asks his War Group to reconsider the Dardanelles Plan. The idea is to force the straits, possibly take control of Constantinople, and eventually assist Russia on the Eastern Front.

The French enter Lorraine

The Austrians lost the first battle with the Serbs, then managed to occupy Belgrade but were forced to leave it after the defeat at Kolubara

United States. The last passenger pigeon dies in captivity at the Cincinnati Zoo, Ohio. Her name is Martha and she is female. The last one in the wild was sighted in 1900, also in Ohio. In 1813, naturalist John James Audubon described a gigantic flock

Modena. The Citadel’s perimeter walls are demolished. The building materials are used to develop Via Montecuccoli.

Guglielmo Marconi and Carl F. Braun win the Nobel Prize for the separate and parallel development of the wireless telegraph.

Irish scientist Edmund Fournier d’Albe publishes a fascinating little book entitled “Two New Worlds” in which he suggests that it is natural to think of the universe, from atoms to the Solar System to galaxies and beyond, as having an unlimited, fractal-like hierarchical structure.

Russia. Peter Akimovich Palchinskii, an innovative mining engineer, deported to Siberia by the Tsarist secret police, manages to escape to Ukraine and then to the West, where he becomes a renowned consultant. His greatest contribution lies in seeing the industrial enterprise as a whole, as

Fessenden, from his transmitting station at Brant Rock, Massachusetts, makes a broadcast of voice and music, using a high-frequency alternator according to instructions drawn up by Nikola Tesla.

Wilbur Wright achieved a flight distance of 38 km with his aircraft; Wright’s exploits reached Europe shrouded in myth and no one believed the tale of his prodigious deeds; Wright was then tempted by the desire for solemn consecration in the skies of France, a

Battle of Tsushima: The Japanese sink seven Russian battleships and capture four, including the one with Admiral Rojetvensky.

Lynde Bradley and Dr. Stanton Allen found the Compression Rheostat Company (renamed Allen Bradley in 1909)

Guglielmo Marconi donates to the Royal Italian Government the use of his patents with all his telegraph stations established or to be established throughout the world.

Harper’s Weekly writes: “In the public eye, Mr. Marconi and wireless telegraphy are one and the same. He is radiotelegraphy. Marconi was the first in this field, the first to send wireless messages over distances of several miles, the first to reach a hundred miles,

Andrew Carnegie sells Pittsburgh-based Carnegie Steel to JP Morgan for $480 million (equivalent to approximately $13.5 billion in 2013 dollars).

Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The Wright brothers test a glider, only to discover that its lift is much lower than expected. Modifications to the wing profile and subsequent testing in a wind tunnel, including precise pressure measurements at various points, eventually led to the first

China. U.S. President McKinley sends 5,000 troops, without consulting Congress, to protect American civilians in China from the Boxer Rebellion. China, in response, declares war on the United States. Among those opposing the president’s decision in Congress are members of the Anti-Imperialist League, such as

Monza. After the assassination of King Umberto I by the anarchist Gaetano Bresci with three shots from a Remington revolver, Leo Longanesi composed the following lines: “…In Monza there’s a tram that hums / They killed the King / With three bullets…”

After John Graves’ discovery of “octonions” (octuples of real numbers), Arthur Cayley redefines them as pairs of quaternions.

C.G. Witt of the Urania Observatory in Berlin discovers an asteroid with a peculiar orbit, not part of the Main Asteroid Belt, as it remains within the orbit of Mars. It is 433 Eros. A century later, it will be the target of the American

United States. After two months of military campaigns, Spain offers to sign a peace treaty with the United States. US President McKinley has done little during this time to explain the reasons for the war to the Americans. And now, a few months before the

Pierre and Marie Curie give birth to Irene Curie in Paris.

Theodor Herzl’s “The Jewish State” (Der Judenstaat), published in 1896 in Vienna, is the programmatic manifesto of the Zionist movement. Written as a response to the growing anti-Semitism of the second half of the 19th century, it represented the “sacred text” to which Jews throughout

French physician and physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey, using a series of snapshots of a cat falling upside down and righting itself on the fly, discovered the exact mechanism. The cat does not behave like a rigid body, but alternately rotates its front and back halves, extending

Cantor: set theory

In Brazil, the Stars and Stripes flag was replaced with the definitive flag we know today: 27 stars around the Southern Cross constellation, and the words “Ordem e Progresso” on a yellow and green background.

The European powers agree to cede control of 2.3 million square kilometers of Africa to King Leopold II of Belgium: the Congo Free State is born. The true goal is obviously profit. The rubber industry flourishes, and rubber plantations multiply in Central Africa. Six million

Carl Auer’s Annus mirabilis. He separates the supposed chemical element didymium into two real chemical elements: praseodymium and neodymium.

Georg Cantor discovers that there are infinities of different sizes

Charles Darwin publishes The formation of vegetable mold through the action of worms

First mass-produced DC commutator motors

Leo XIII (Gioacchino Pecci) is Pope

Scientific American magazine goes to press with the scoop on Thomas Alva Edison’s talking phonograph. The article is a whopping 15,000 words, and even the imagination is captivated by the possible applications of this invention.

Historian Allen Koeninsberg, in agreement with the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, attributes the word “hello” to Thomas Alva Edison, who coined it to answer the telephone in place of the older “hallooo” or the “ahoy” preferred by Alexander Graham Bell.

The champenoise method was perfected and the Brut denomination was born for a type of wine to be exported to England.