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Retired American Colonel Jacob Schick patents the electric razor

First experimental public broadcasts in the USA (in 3 homes)

Modena: construction of the Temple

Werner Heisenberg: Uncertainty Principle

At Bell Labs, Joseph Davisson and Lester Germer observe free electron diffraction, a property predicted by the young Louis De Broglie two years earlier.

Philo Taylor Farnsworth, having obtained the necessary funds from a consortium of banks, patented the electronic television, or cathode ray tube.

Hawthorne-Mayo Experiment. At a General Electric factory in Hawthorne, California, an experiment was conducted to test the effectiveness of electric light (versus the dim light of kerosene lamps) on industrial productivity. At the end of the experiment, it seemed clear that electric light did indeed

7:40 PM (Italian time): Charles Lindbergh is reported over Plymouth, UK.

2:50 PM (Italian time): Charles Lindbergh is reported on the tip of Ireland.

8:50 p.m. (East Coast Time): Charles Lindbergh reported over Newfoundland

1:52 PM (East Coast Time): Charles Lindbergh is reported off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada.

7:52 a.m. (East Coast Time): Charles Lindbergh takes off from New York

Umberto Nobile (Italy) flies over the North Pole on the airship Norge: 13,000km navigated by sight, of which 5,200km in areas never before visited by man.

Palmiro Togliatti and Rita Montagnani’s son Aldo, suffering from schizophrenia with autistic traits, is born. He was born while Palmiro was in prison. After the death of his mother, Rita (1979), Aldo was confined to a psychiatric hospital (Villa Igea) in Modena, where he lived

Werner Heisenberg introduces his formalism: the so-called “Heisenberg Picture” according to which the state of the system is considered constant over time

Stalin comes to power in the Soviet Union. The purges and deportations he carries out affect 70 million people and kill 20 to 30 million over 30 years.

The Indian Citizenship Act passed by the U.S. Congress and President Calvin Coolidge. The law automatically made Native Americans, or the tens of thousands of surviving people of the millions who populated North America when the Mayflower landed.

Australopithecus discovered in South Africa

Osborn in Mongolia discovers first Velociraptor fossils

Zurich. A young (only 19 years old) John von Neumann began his PhD at ETH Zurich. According to his friend Theodore von Kármán, von Neumann’s father wanted John to pursue industry and thus invest his time in a more financially worthwhile endeavor than mathematics. Indeed,

Coolidge is president of the United States

Louis De Broglie, that is, the younger De Broglie brother, proposes that particles of matter sometimes behave like waves, with wavelength lambda = h/p; or: not only is light corpuscular and wave-like, matter is too!

Hubble determines that “nebulae” are actually galaxies, including Andromeda

Rome. On the very day Corbino and Fermi were supposed to meet to discuss young Enrico’s future, the Fascist march on Rome takes place. Corbino is a prominent figure, Minister of Education in 1921, and in 1923 he will also be Minister of National Economy,

Enrico Fermi’s dissertation at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, on X-ray diffraction. At the time, Enrico Fermi was the leading proponent of relativity in the Italian physics community. He graduated with honors.

Insulin injection saves diabetic patient. In Toronto, Leonard Thompson becomes the first diabetic to be treated with insulin. Diabetes had been known for over 3,000 years, but its precise cause remained a mystery until the 1920s. At the beginning of the 20th century, the only

Aula Magna of the University of Padua. Albert Einstein, in Italy for a series of lectures, wanted to personally meet Gregorio Ricci Curbastro (from Lugo di Romagna), whose mathematics on differential calculus was a crucial support for the development of General Relativity.

Greek soldiers are at the gates of Ankara; they are stopped by Turkish forces commanded by General Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk); he will later succeed in pushing the Greeks back from Anatolia and will be acclaimed as a national hero; the sultanate will be abolished and

Russian physicist Alexander Friedmann solves Einstein’s equations and derives a variety of expanding and contracting cosmological models; he sends the solutions to Albert Einstein, who remains lukewarm and prefers his own static model.

American astronomer Heber Curtis, opposing Harlow Shapley during a public debate at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, argues that the spiral nebulae visible in the night sky are actually very distant galaxies like our own.

Marie Curie was invited to travel to the United States by an American journalist, Mary “Missy” Meloney; upon her arrival in the United States she was welcomed triumphantly, and raised funds of 150,000 dollars to purchase more radium for her research.

Tulsa, Oklahoma. A 19-year-old black man, Dick Rowland, is accused of making sexual advances toward a white woman in an elevator. He is arrested, and a thousand white citizens surround the police station to lynch him. Several armed African-Americans rush to the scene. A counteroffensive

Nobel Prize in Physics to Albert Einstein for the photoelectric effect, and not for light quanta or relativity, at the investiture ceremony, in the official speech Einstein obviously speaks about Relativity, a theory considered very controversial

Mitsubishi Electric is founded in Japan

Nikola Tesla filed a patent for an airplane that took off vertically, adjusted its propellers, and flew horizontally. The patent was approved in 1927. This was the VTOL technology that would not be realized until several decades later.

New York. A truck bomb filled with metal fragments explodes outside the JP Morgan headquarters on Wall Street, Manhattan. Thirty-two passersby are killed and hundreds more injured. Authorities attribute the attack to anarchists, but for financiers, it merely fuels further panic.

The Thule Society becomes the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NationalSozialistische Deutsche ArbaiterPartei, NSDAP) with three thousand members.

Douglas and Boeing build their first airplanes

Max Born correctly proposes that the square of the Schrödinger wave function, which is always a positive real number, gives the probability of finding the particle at that point at that time; Max Born works with Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg, whose Uncertainty Principle strongly

Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, P.A.M. Dirac, Felix Bloch, Max Plank, Albert Einstein, Louis De Broglie, Born Jordan Pauli: Quantum Mechanics is born, undoubtedly one of the greatest achievements of 20th-century physics; it explains many mysterious 19th-century phenomena such as spectral lines, the stability

Poland. In mid-August 1920—between the 14th and 16th, but what happened on the 15th, the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, was decisive—Marshal Iozef Pilsudski launched a counteroffensive that, led by General Iozef Haller, stopped the Red Army before Warsaw, while on

Nobel Prize in Physics to Niels Bohr

American expedition to the Gobi Desert in Mongolia finds 25 dinosaur eggs and fossils dating back 85 to 25 million years.

Northern Russia: Kholmogory (or Kholmogory), the first Gulag of the Soviet era, is established. It will be inaugurated in 1924. Sailors from Kronstadt will be imprisoned there after an attempted riot. Once the uprising is quelled, the insurgents are lined up on the pier. “Count

American logician Emil Post invents the formal system that will become known as “Post’s System.”

Ramanujan died in Madras, India, where he had moved for a period of convalescence on the advice of Hardy.

First double non-stop Atlantic crossing: British airship R34

Bela Kun’s revolutionary communist regime in Hungary

Hungary. When Bela Kun takes power, young John von Neumann is transferred to Vienna and then to the Adriatic. He will develop a lifelong aversion to communism.

Versailles. Germany is condemned to pay, within thirty years, in goods or money, the sum of 132 billion gold marks. According to Keynes, a sum exceeding 2 billion would be unreasonable and inconvenient for the international community.

John Maynard Keynes raises the alarm, arguing that the reparations imposed on Germany will cause problems for the world economy.

Poland. The Polish Constituent Assembly appointed Iozef Pilsudski, a former Austro-Hungarian officer who fought on the Russian front, as head of the Republic. A month later, Pilsudski launched an army toward Kiev, Ukraine, composed of Poles and Ukrainian rebels commanded by Simon Vasilyovich Petliura, leader

The Bavarian group Germanenorden becomes the Thule Society, the first National Socialist group in Germany.

Wheeler passes a constitutional amendment ushering in Prohibition

Third Anglo-Afghan War: Afghanistan becomes an independent state

In the suppression of a socialist uprising in Berlin, 2,000 people were killed; the repression of the Munich Soviet Republic was also bloodily crushed.

Joseph Larmor proposes the idea of a planetary dynamo to explain the solar and terrestrial magnetic fields.

The American Hermes is the first aircraft carrier under construction (US Navy)

Theodore Roosevelt, candidate in the 1920 election, dies suddenly

During World War I, the Hashemite clan in the Arabian Peninsula collaborated with the British, who promised to place them in power after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. But this promise was also made to the Saud clan, stationed in Kuwait. Immediately after the

Proclamation of the Hungarian Republic. Communist Béla Kun returned from the nascent Soviet Union with considerable funding, and in November 1918, Kun returned to Hungary with Soviet support and founded the Hungarian Communist Party. Adopting Lenin’s tactics, he immediately opposed Mihály Károlyi’s government and achieved

Enrico Fermi entered the competition in Rome for admission to the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa; Fermi was admitted and spent the next four years in Pisa. At the time, only about ten applications were accepted each year. The essay Fermi wrote for the entrance

Proclamation of the Czechoslovak Republic

Proclamation of the Austrian Republic

Fritz Haber wins the Nobel Prize. During World War I, Germany is under an embargo and cannot obtain saltpeter, essential for making gunpowder. Saltpeter can be replaced with ammonia, which Haber, with his invention, manages to extract from the air. Haber also pioneered the use

The Great War or First World War. A catastrophe from which Europe would never recover. Nevertheless, it was enthusiastically accepted and approved by all democratically elected parliaments.

The Turks are defeated in Palestine

German offensive, close to success, by General Erich Ludendorff

Soviet Union. Lenin, having outlined the Gulag system the previous October, now ordered an increase in the number of prisons and intensified the repression of crimes. The following May, he decreed that extortion would be punishable by at least 10 years in prison and an

Italian mine on Pasubio

Hermann Weyl generalizes Einstein’s theory of General Relativity (from 1915) by transforming the very notion of length into something dependent on the path followed

Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania become independent from Russia, taking advantage of the chaos of the October Revolution.

China, Sun Yatsen establishes a government of southern China in Canton

Lenin’s Return. Vladimir Lenin returns to Russia to lead the Russian Revolution. Although exiled in Siberia and Europe for his revolutionary activities, Lenin had managed to grow the Bolshevik Party thanks to his skills as an orator and writer. When Russia fell into chaos following

The United States purchases the Danish West Indies and incorporates Puerto Rico.

First Battle of Gaza: First British attempt to break through the fortified defenses of the Ottoman Empire.

British occupation of Baghdad

Sheffield, England. The British army has a problem: the heat generated by cannons deforms steel barrels, causing problems. English engineer Harry Brearly is tasked with developing a solution. He experiments with different types and alloys of steel. By chance, he notices parts among the scraps

Cologne, Germany. The meat shortage caused by the British embargo spurs the city’s mayor (and later chancellor), Konrad Adenauer, to invent vegetarian (soy) sausages.

Clinton, Indiana, USA. Birth of Lawrence Joseph Giacoletto, who half a century later would develop an effective high-frequency small-signal transistor model, also known as the Giacoletto-Johnson model.