FQ

Meanwhile, in America, the problem shifts to the actual construction of the bomb. Purification is carried out using the diffusion method. The physicist Compton is working on the chain reaction with the aim of producing plutonium.

Bohr met Heisenberg in Denmark. The latter, as an occupier and a physicist serving the Reich, was confident of German victory. Heisenberg discussed the military applications of atomic energy, believing that such weapons would have decided the war. During the conversation, he produced a drawing

First gas tests at Auschwitz

USSR. Smolensk falls to the Wehrmacht.

Operation Barbarossa begins: the Wehrmacht sweeps into Russia. In the first month, the Soviets lose 11,700 tanks (78% of their total), 10,000 warplanes (67%), and 19,000 artillery pieces (51%): one of the greatest military catastrophes in history. By July 16, the Germans are already in

Bletchley Park. The Enigma key lists recovered from the German ships Munchen and Lauenburg allow the British to make further progress. Turing’s technique, called Bamburismus, which uses Bayesian statistical calculations, is also implemented.

Richard Feynman is hired at Bell Labs in New York.

Libya. Erwin Rommel’s entire Afrika Korps contingent finishes taking up positions in the field, to assist their Italian ally.

German invasion forces in Crete manage to capture an outpost at Hania; the Allies, in a risky operation, manage to evacuate 18,000 of the 32,000 soldiers on the island; the Germans will remain until the end of the war.

This was the scheduled start date for Operation Barbarossa, which was then postponed by four weeks due to Germany’s commitment to supporting the Italians in Greece and Yugoslavia. The delay may have saved Moscow and the oil fields of the Caucasus…

Japanese Ambassador Nomura confirms to Tokyo: “I have discovered that the United States is reading some of our codes.” But in the weeks that follow, Magic’s incredulous and delighted interceptors are astonished to discover that the old code still works; the Japanese simply cannot believe

The Me-163 Komet (also manufactured by Junkers, despite its name), a liquid-fueled rocket-powered fighter with a top speed of 960 km/h, was shelved after a first (successful) test in May 1941, after defense officials declared that traditional aviation would be more than sufficient to defend

Yugoslavia. The regular army dissolves, and two resistance groups form to fight against the invaders, primarily German and Italian. These are the Chetniks, led by Draza Mihailović (a former colonel who has decided to continue fighting), and the Communist Partisans, led by Josip Broz, Tito’s

Yugoslavia is invaded simultaneously from five directions: by the Italians from Albania, by the Hungarians and Germans from Austria, Romania and Bulgaria; the Yugoslav army dissolves within a short time.

The Nazi German Reichspost realizes that the only official direct link between the UK and the US is the radio circuit protected by AT&T’s A3 Scrambler system. This will lead to efforts to decrypt it.

Just 20 days after Yamamoto’s Pearl Harbor plan was conceived, Ambassador Grew wrote to the State Department: “…that he had heard from many sources…that the Japanese high command…in the event of trouble with the United States, would launch a massive surprise attack against Pearl Harbor

Libya, Sidi Barani. The British launch a counterattack against the Italians. The Indian Division, the British 7th Division, and the Australian Division are deployed. It will be a resounding, unexpected success.

secret delegation of six men, including John Cockroft, arrived in Washington, DC, carrying a copper device sent by John Randall and Harry Boot of the University of Birmingham: a cavity magnetron, a device capable of producing extremely short-duration, extremely high-frequency electromagnetic pulses, which allowed radar

First RAF bombing raid on Berlin

After two refusals, at the third request from Himmler, Wernher von Braun agrees to become a member of the Schutzstaffel (SS)

London. Halifax and Chamberlain seriously consider and promote the idea of keeping Mussolini and Italy out of the war by offering the Italian dictator French and British possessions in Africa and the Mediterranean.

Finland. The Red Army conquers the Finnish city of Viipuri.

Bletchley Park. The first “Bombe,” the machine designed by Alan Turing to automatically decrypt Enigma, enters service. It lacks the Diagonal Board designed by Gordon Welchman, so it stops too frequently for a potential candidate, generating too many false alarms. It will be used only

Edwin McMillan, Seaborg’s colleague and friend, creates the first transuranic element, neptunium. Seaborg and his colleagues soon arrive at the next one: plutonium.

New rotors for the Enigma machine are recovered by the British from the U-boat U-33.

Germany. Walter Boethe conducts a nuclear fission experiment with impure graphite rods. The impurities distort the experiment, and Boethe concludes (erroneously) that graphite is not a suitable moderator, and the Germans focus on heavy water. The “Americans” stick with graphite…

It’s estimated that it would take 12 million years to extract one pound of fissile uranium-235. In Tennessee, the Americans will do it in two years.

Mass production of Nazi U-Boats begins: over 1,100 will be produced in 5 years.

Lev Trotsky (Лев Троцкий), pseudonym of Lev Davidovich Bronstein (Лев Давидович Бронштейн), died in Mexico, where he had taken refuge after being expelled from the USSR.

Finland, Battle of Suomissalmi: after a fierce battle the Soviets manage to take over the city, but then units of skilled skiers from the Finnish army carry out rapid encircling maneuvers and, often resorting to cold steel, liberate the city and push the Soviets back.

The American VS300 is the first helicopter to lift off the ground. It was designed in the United States by Russian Igor Sikorsky.

Palo Alto, California: Bill Hewlett and David Packard found HP

The Electric Rapid Train (ETR) “212” (Viper’s Head) is the protagonist of a historic feat, setting a record from Florence to Milan in 1 hour and 55 minutes, reaching a speed of 203.4 km/h. July 20, 1939, was thus the date that effectively marked the

Bell Labs in New York. George Stibitz builds a complex number calculator. It has 400 relays, operating at a maximum switching speed of 20 Hz.

The Japanese changed the code for encrypting navy messages. They adopted one with a much larger codebook, and one that was much more difficult to crack, than the previous one. The Americans called it JN-25.

End of the Spanish Civil War. With the surrender of the Madrid Republicans, after three years of bloody fighting, the Spanish Civil War ended. It all began in 1936, when General Francisco Franco launched a reactionary military uprising in Morocco, splitting Spain in two, with

Kolkata, India. Scientist Bibha Chowdhuri, along with director Debendra Mohan Bose of the Bose Institute, experimentally observed and published reports on showers of mesotrons, later called mesons. She studied batches of Ilford halftone plates exposed to cosmic rays at two different altitudes, one in Darjeeling

The Fermi family arrives in New York

Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann published an article in Naturwissenschaften declaring the experiments conducted in Germany, which proved beyond doubt that uranium fission under neutron bombardment produced radioactive barium. In reality, the experiments had been conducted and designed by Lise Meitner, who agreed not to

Warner Bros. creates Daffy Duck

Munich Agreement: British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlaine and the French reach a peace agreement with Hitler, but allow Hitler to annex the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia.

Italian East Africa (AOI). A municipal census is conducted in Addis Ababa. The population is 26,669, of whom 25,147 are Italian and 1,522 are foreigners (mostly Greek and Armenian traders). Another 10,000 Italians will arrive in 1939, and by the start of World War II,

Alan Turing returns to England after his PhD at Princeton University.

New Guinea. An Archbold Expedition plane accidentally discovers an inland valley, the Grand Valley of the Baliem River, where it finds a previously unknown population, the Dani, who had never come into contact with Europeans before. That is, for 46,000 years, since the Dani arrived

Italy, world champion. The last chance for brotherhood before the Second World War. The 1938 FIFA World Cup, or Jules Rimet World Cup, was the third FIFA World Cup for senior men’s national teams, organized by FIFA every four years. It was held from June

Nazi Germany annexes Austria without firing a single shot.

Information about the Soviet Gulags begins to filter through to the United States and Europe. George Placzek and Viktor Weisskopf, after spending several months in the USSR, upon returning to America explain to an initially skeptical Oppenheimer that Russia isn’t what he thinks it is

Stalin imprisoned Sergei Pavlovich Korolev (father of the Soyuz and the entire Soviet space program) and Andrei Tupolev and forced them to work in the Urals.

The Japanese changed the code to encrypt their diplomatic codes. The British would break it again in the summer of 1938.

In the basement of an apartment in an unremarkable Iowa town, John Vincent Atanasoff built a binary computer with memory, using vacuum tubes, but not programmable. After considering base 100, then base e (Napier’s number), he settled on base 2. He demonstrated it publicly in

When Claude Shannon returns to MIT after his summer visit to Bell Labs in New York, he presents his ideas to his advisor Vannevar Bush, who is enthusiastic and has him include them in his thesis: it is possible to perform complex mathematical operations through

Nikola Tesla, at the age of 81, leaves the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan, on his daily walk to feed the pigeons in Central Park. He is hit by a taxi and thrown onto the pavement. He refuses medical attention and asks to be taken

Separation of Burma from India

Alan Turing publishes “Computable Numbers”

Danish geologist Inge Lehmann, while examining the readings of a seismometer after an earthquake in New Zealand, discovers that the Earth’s core is divided into a solid, inner part and a liquid, outer part, and the origin of the Earth’s magnetic field.

Tsunami in Lituya Bay, Alaska, with a 150m high wave

Alan Turing conceived what we now call the Universal Turing Machine, an infinite-memory Turing machine with data and instruction memory. Turing also realized the machine’s ability to modify its own program and the modern concept of computer learning and artificial intelligence.

JRR Tolkien publishes “The Hobbit”

Benito Mussolini proclaims the Empire in Piazza Venezia; Mussolini and Fascism reach their peak: some, 60 years later, have commented that if an assassin had assassinated him on May 9, 1936, we would have a statue of him in at least one square in every

Fischer and Tropsch of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry marketed, on behalf of Brabag Germany, synthetic gasoline produced from carbon monoxide and hydrogen. During the Nazi war effort, this type of gasoline accounted for 9% of the military’s gasoline and 25% of the gasoline

German company BASF develops the first magnetic recording tape for AEG

Xinjiang, Western China. The young bandit Ma Chung Yin, leader of the Chinese Muslim revolt, is negotiating with his Soviet neighbors. One day he encounters them, climbs into a truck, and is never heard from again.

A Croatian terrorist assassinates King Alexander of Yugoslavia, an ethnic Serb, in Marseille.

Enrico Fermi wrote the article “Attempt at a Theory of Beta Rays,” in which he intuited the role of the neutrino. He sent it to the British journal Nature, which rejected it, saying it “contains speculations too far removed from reality to be of interest

Comic books are gaining ground on the market, including those printed on low-quality paper made from wood pulp, known as “pulp fiction”.

Nazino, Siberia. Barges unload the 6,114 deportees on Nazino Island: a total of 322 women, 4,556 men, and 27 corpses. On May 27, another 1,200 deportees joined the first group. The “Nazino Affair” refers to a social survival experiment conducted by Soviet authorities in 1933

In the USSR, GULag deportees built the Belomorkanal (or Stalin Canal) that connects the White Sea to the Baltic Sea; it is 244 km long and only 2 years of forced labor were used to build it in unimaginable working conditions; the Panama Canal was

Dornberg, of the Verein fur Raumschiffahrt (Space Travel Society), while disassembling a rocket engine, accidentally ignites the fuel with a spark. The device explodes in his face, and his co-workers spend hours removing the shrapnel embedded in his skin.

Werner von Braun is appointed head of a secret “Rocketry R&D” project located in Kummersdorf

Ibn Saud proclaims the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

During the Great Depression, unemployment in the United States reached 30% of the workforce.

When it seemed that the British were about to accept the demands of Ambedkar, the main representative of the cause of the untouchables in India, Mahatma Gandhi began a fast in protest “until death”; the untouchables or achuta are the fifth category (varna), the lowest,

Asteroid 1221 Amor, approximately 1 km in size, is discovered in the asteroid belt. It is a NEO (Near Earth Object) that will give its name to an entire class of NEOs: the Amor asteroids, which graze Earth’s orbit from outside the Solar System.

Nobel Prize for Physics to Wernher Heisenberg

Berkeley: Professor Robert Oppenheimer and his doctoral student Melba Phillips briefly date. One evening, he takes her to Grizzly Park, overlooking the San Francisco Bay. At one point, the eccentric professor gets out of his car and tells the girl he’s going for a walk

Bell Labs, NY: The American mathematician of Swedish origin H. Nyquist publishes in the “Bell System Technical Journal” the article “The Regenerative System” in which he studies the stability of feedback systems.

The Empire State Building is the tallest building in the world (381 m), remaining so until 1976, when it was surpassed by the World Trade Center. The Empire State Building was built in response to the 1929 Crash, at a feverish rate of four floors

First nonstop flight from Tokyo to Washington: C. Payborn, H. Herndorn (USA)

The covered market opens in Modena

The Christ of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil is completed