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In France, Frederic Joliot, husband of Irene Curie, discovers the conditions for the uranium chain reaction

Marguerite Perey wins the Nobel Prize for the discovery of francium. She is the third woman to win it after Marie and Irene Curie.

In Washington, Bohr and Fermi discuss the explosion or fission of uranium.

Adolf Hitler on an official visit to Italy is greeted coldly by the population and the Pope

Philosopher Jean Paul Sartre publishes his novel Nausea.

Saudi Arabia. From the East Coast, on the Persian Gulf, American engineers from Standard Oil send a telegram to their parent company, Standard Oil of California, in San Francisco (SoCal, later renamed Chevron): after five years of exploration, significant quantities of oil have been found.

Mauthausen, Austria. After the Anschluss (annexation of Austria to the Reich), the main camp was built on a hill overlooking the town of Mauthausen (near Linz), near a granite quarry ceded by the City of Vienna to DEST, a company owned by the SS. German,

Isador Isaac Rabi invents the magnetic resonance method for determining the atomic spectrum

Pablo Picasso presents Guernica at the Paris International Exhibition

Antonio Gramsci dies after 10 years of imprisonment

Englishmen Josh Cooper and Dilly Knox manage to crack a version of the Nazi Enigma code. They take advantage of an Enigma machine (Model K) captured from the Spanish during the Civil War, which they received from the Italians, who in turn received it from

Italian East Africa. In Addis Ababa, Viceroy Graziani is seriously injured in an attack by African patriots. Fascist Party Secretary Cortese orders a reprisal, literally unleashing the civilian population, whom he considers soldier-colonialists. For three days and three nights, they transform the city into a

Professor Corbino dies: Lo Surdo becomes director of the Rome Institute of Physics, where Fermi works.

San Francisco. Levi Strauss has his jeans, patented in 1872, given the distinctive red label.

Amaldi and Fermi publish “On the Absorption and Scattering of Slow Neutrons” in Ricerca Scientifica.

Hitler occupies the Rhineland

American logician Alonzo Church proves the Tarski-Church-Turing theorem: There is no foolproof method for discriminating true statements of arithmetic from false statements.

Gerhard Domagk’s (Pasteur’s intellectual heir) daughter, Hildegard, stabbed a needle in her hand when she fell down the stairs. The wound became infected, and she risked amputation of her arm. Her father, Gerhard, had already tested Prontosil, a reddish compound with sulfur, on mice. After

EPR Paper: Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen hypothesize entanglement: particles that have interacted in a certain way (entanglement) in the past will have strong correlations in the results of measurements made in the future on the two particles, even if separated by large distances

Robert Oppenheimer invites the Serbers, old friends, to his ranch in New Mexico. When they arrive, after driving for hours on unpaved roads with enormous potholes, they find that there are already other occupants in the Oppenheimers’ guest room. Robert nonchalantly suggests that the former

Soviet Union. Luigi Calligaris, a leading figure in the Italian socialist revolutionary movement, is arrested. He had already expressed disillusionment with the Soviet Union after witnessing the famines caused by forced collectivization. The NKVD’s torture of Calligaris quickly took effect: he accused his two comrades,

The Badische Amilin und Soda Fabrik (BASF) mine in the Kohnstein massif was recycled as a research and production site for rockets (later called V-1 and V-2); two long tunnels connected by 50 galleries were dug; Mittlewerk Gmbh was the cover name in an almost

At Doventry, Sir Robert Alexander Watson Watt experiments with radar (the Americans already had a similar version but did not exchange their secrets with the English).

Dakar. French physician Jean Laigret prepares and successfully tests a yellow fever vaccine, easily administered without the need for sterilized syringes or needles. It will be further improved with the Peltier-Duriex vaccine, which also protects against smallpox.

Moscow. On the same day as Sergei Kirov’s assassination, Stalin dictated and signed the decree marking the beginning of the purges: “All courts are ordered to expedite trials against enemies of the Soviet state, and the accused are to be deprived of all rights: defense,

Moscow. Assassination of Sergei Kirov. It marks the beginning of Stalin’s terrible purges. According to a legend spread throughout the USSR, Lenin, before dying, had imposed a solemn oath on the party’s top leaders: “Don’t kill each other, because if heads start rolling, it will

Electrical Experimenter editor Hugo Gernsback pressured Westinghouse, warning them that Nikola Tesla’s complete lack of money could be embarrassing for the company. Westinghouse reluctantly agreed to put Tesla on the payroll as a “consulting engineer” at $125 a month.

Englishman Tommy Flowers used between 3,000 and 4,000 valves in an experimental automatic installation to control 1,000 telephone lines. The system was released for limited use in 1939. But Tommy Flowers would become famous for the Colossus, built in 1943.

American Gibson of Fawcett produces polyethylene

Kurt Godel commutes between Vienna and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton

In the USSR, the Dmitlag camp held 1.2 million inmates.

Enrico Fermi publishes the article “Tentative Theory of Beta Rays,” published in Italian in Zeitschrift fur Physik. The article contains all the basic elements of weak interactions. Following Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, the Via Panisperna Boys had decided to boycott German scientific journals,

The first concentration camps are established in Germany

The USSR is recognized by the USA and enters the League of Nations.

Annus Mirabilis by Enrico Fermi

The German parliament approves by more than two-thirds majority the change to the constitution, to give Adolf Hitler the power to rule by decree for the next four years.

Germany. Konrad Adenauer, future German Chancellor, is removed by the Nazis from his position as First Mayor of Cologne.

Emu War. War on the emus in Australia. The Australian government declares war on the emus, due to popular discontent over the destruction the animals are causing in cultivated fields. A military operation, complete with machine guns, attempts to exterminate the emus. The operation results

Due to the Great Depression, the number of banks in the United States dropped from 25,000 to 14,000, resulting in a collapse in investor confidence.

Gyula Gombos, a far-right radical, is the Hungarian prime minister.

Lausanne. At Italy’s urging, an international conference is held to discuss the possible cancellation of war debts and the removal of barriers to trade between nations. Belgium, France, Germany, Japan, Great Britain, and Italy participate. The plan fails because the U.S. Congress rejects the agreement.

Universal Studios’ Scarface hits theaters; it covers Al Capone-inspired mafia themes.

Judge James Wilkerson convicted Al Capone of tax evasion. He received the maximum sentence: 10 years in federal prison plus one year in a low-security prison. Indeed, one receipt was found, just one, in his name, even though he was officially penniless.

Ernest Walton places a lithium target in front of a 250 kV proton accelerator. He observes a shower of alpha particles: helium nuclei resulting from the split lithium nucleus. This is the first nuclear disintegration. The discovery will be made public at the Royal Society

Grand Council of Fascism. Mussolini approves a motion stating: “To overcome a crisis (…) that now has more political and moral aspects than purely economic ones, it is necessary to: 1) Resolve the problem of reparations and interstate war debts by canceling the former and

The last emperor of China was a Japanese puppet. Henry Pu Yi, the last emperor of China from 1908 to 1912, became regent of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. Enthroned when Emperor Hsüan-T’ung was three years old, he was forced to abdicate four years

San Lazzaro Asylum in Reggio Emilia: construction of the Buccola Pavilion for female workers.

RA Fischer, pioneer of neo-Darwinism, hypothesizes for the first time the genetic point of view of evolution

James Chadwick discovers the neutron, at the Cavendish Laboratory

Carl David Anderson experimentally discovers antimatter (anti-electron or positron), predicted by Dirac only the year before

Karl Jansky discovers radio noise from the center of the Milky Way

Between 1900 and 1932 the US Patent Office issued more than 350 patents on the water closet.

Danish carpenter invents Lego (made of wood); the commercial version will have great worldwide success in the 1950s.

The circular reducer is used by the Japanese company Sumitomo as a reducer for electric motors

The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton is founded, which will take over the baton of the mathematical mecca, abandoned by Göttingen in 1943.

Tuskgee Study. At the Macon County Health Center in Alabama, the progression of untreated syphilis was analyzed in 600 Black farmers, 399 of whom were infected. The patients were injected with a serum, actually a placebo. Years passed, and only in 1972 did a former

The National Socialist Party, the People’s Party and the Labour Party were founded in Hungary.

Gambling is legalized in Nevada

World War I is over, and only a few years have passed since the American president attempted to usher in a new era of trust in international affairs, and his Secretary of State even went so far as to dismantle the Black Chambers office (composed

Dirac comes to the theoretical conclusion that positrons must exist: all the negative energy states are already occupied but occasionally some holes form which appear to us as positive energy particles (positive mass) identical to the electron, if the electron occupies the hole it is

First International Conference on Nuclear Physics: held in Rome at the Physics Institute on Via Panisperna. Participants included Orso Mario Corbino, Enrico Fermi, Niels Bohr, Marie Curie, Werner Heisenberg, and Guglielmo Marconi.

Numerous internationally renowned physicists visit Fermi’s group in Rome, including Hans Bethe, Felix Bloch, Edward Teller

The aircraft use “Rotary Pistons” engines (example: DC3)

Little Caesar hits theaters; it covers mafia themes inspired by Al Capone

Du Pont’s Rowland and Rohm produce Plexiglas

Dirac publishes “The Principles of Quantum Mechanics”

Robert J. Van de Graaf builds a generator capable of creating a powerful stream of subatomic particles: the Van de Graaf generator

Gandhi leads civil disobedience. In his boldest act of civil disobedience against British rule, Mahatma Gandhi led a long march to the sea to protest the salt tax. Accompanied by thousands of demonstrators, Gandhi and his followers managed to reach the Arabian Sea, where they

Soviet Union. The Solovki Islands GULag, the first one, built in 1923 with three thousand prisoners, already had 50,000 inmates by 1930. But by 1928, the Solovki cancer had metastasized and spread throughout the Soviet Union, first to Karelia, and then especially to Siberia. There

Carothers invents polymers

The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act imposed tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods. Some economists, though controversially, believe it significantly contributed to the onset of the Great Depression. A few days earlier, over a thousand economists signed a letter to President Hoover urging him to veto it.

Thomas Midgley and his team were searching for a non-toxic, non-flammable compound with a low boiling point that would make it suitable for refrigeration. After countless attempts, they tried chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which proved highly promising and highly stable, interacting with almost nothing. Dramatically, to demonstrate

England. Sir Frank Whittle files the first patent for the jet engine for aircraft. He is only 22 years old. He dies in the United States in 1996.

Russia. Writer Varlam Shalamov is arrested. He will spend much of his life in Siberian gulags. He will die in 1982 in a mental institution, where he will be admitted by the KGB. His books will begin selling several years after the fall of the

Russell proves that the universe contains mostly hydrogen

Subrahmanian Chandrasekhar establishes the maximum limit for a white dwarf before becoming a neutron star (1.4 Solar Masses), the calculations are confirmed in 1930 by the Russian Lev Landau; the limit for a neutron star (Landau-Oppenheimer-Volkov limit) is instead 2.5 Solar Masses

Edwin Hubble from Mount Wilson, California, announces his discovery that the Universe is expanding.

Vladimir Kosma Zworykin, inventor of the iconoscope and the kinescope, began working for RCA, thus applying his inventions to cinema.

The scientific community believes it is impossible to obtain the energies necessary for the disintegration or decomposition of the atomic nucleus.

Louis De Broglie receives the Nobel Prize for theoretically predicting the existence of diffraction and interference properties in free electrons.