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Warner Bros. creates Bugs Bunny

In Hungary, the Arrow Cross (fascist movement) is the most popular force (250,000 members out of 7 million inhabitants) but fails to take power, which is maintained by a right-wing government.

The Romanian Iron Guard (Legion of the Archangel Michael) is the third largest fascist movement in Europe; but political power is maintained by a semi-authoritarian right-wing government.

Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli) is Pope

Acupuncture with stainless steel needles (which do not cause diseases due to rust) has been documented since 1939. Among the policies Mao would push in China was acupuncture, pushed by the regime to please poor Chinese communities who could not afford expensive medicines. The wealthy,

Linus Pauling publishes “The Nature of Chemical Bond and Structure of Protein”

The Germans adopt new rotors for their Enigma machines. The British will be able to decrypt them in January 1940.

During December 1938, sensational events in German physics demonstrated that Fermi had completely misinterpreted his neutron experiments, the very ones for which he had just won the Nobel Prize. He would never recover from the embarrassment. Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner in Berlin (Lise was

The Fermi family, after spending a few days on holiday in Copenhagen, also visiting the Bohr family, embarked on the Franconia in Southampton, bound for the United States of America.

Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Fermi. From Stockholm, Fermi, for racial reasons, moved directly to the USA. The Via Panisperna group ended. Fermi received the prestigious prize alone: he did not have to share it with anyone. The only other recipient of the award

The Fermi family: Enrico, Laura, Nella, Giulio board the train at Rome station that will take them to Sweden to collect the Nobel Prize: they will not return to Italy until after the end of the war.

Wernher von Braun, now too important a figure in Germany, becomes a member of the National Socialist Party

Milton Sirotta, the 9-year-old nephew of Edward Kasner, a professor at Barnard College of Columbia University in New York, invented the name Googol (10^100) and then the name Googolplex (10^Googol). A Googolplex is such a large number that if you tried to write it out

Wallace Hume Carothers of Du Pont commercializes nylon. Its first use is in toothbrush bristles. Then, in 1939, it becomes women’s stockings. It’s “artificial silk.” Nylon stockings are a huge commercial success. By 1940, 64 million pairs of nylon stockings have been produced and sold.

Nazi scientist Hans Spemann proposed replacing the nucleus of an egg cell: his ideas led to the first cloning experiments

A specimen of coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae, a crossopterygian fish thought to have become extinct 100 million years ago) was caught off the coast of South Africa.

SS chief Henrich Himmler sent an expedition to Tibet to search for traces of a race of superhumans who lived underground and possessed an occult power called “vril.” Vril was actually the invention of an English science fiction writer who had published a novel in

Hans Bethe is the first to describe a separate nuclear fusion cycle for carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, cycles that provide energy to massive stars during their short lives.

In the USA, W. Pollard and H. Roselund design a programmable painting mechanism for the DeVilbiso company

Swiss-born German Walter Schottky, at Siemens, theoretically explains the metal-semiconductor junction

California. Riding the wave of investment in military technology, Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett tinkered in their Palo Alto garage until they produced their first device: an audio frequency generator. HP would become a 20th-century icon.

Konrad Zuse, a German engineer, built the Z1 computer in his parents’ living room. It read instructions from a punched card and was mechanical (not electrical or electronic). Helmut Schreyer advised him to use vacuum tubes, but they were too expensive, so they built the

Modena publisher Fortunato Formiggini, known as Furmajun from Modena, threw himself from the Ghirlandina Tower to protest racial measures. On the morning of November 29, 1938, he threw himself from the Ghirlandina, the cathedral’s tower, falling onto a narrow patch of pavement that he himself,

The racial laws in Germany and then throughout Europe led to a steady flow of Jewish emigrants to the United States, England, and Sweden. Approximately 23,500 of these would ultimately remain in their adoptive country. About one hundred of these were highly regarded physicists. Among

Kristallnacht in Germany: Windows of hundreds of Jewish shops are smashed.

Halloween: Orson Welles broadcasts his version of H.G. Wells’s “War of the Worlds” on CBS radio. The music is interrupted to announce that Princeton astronomers have seen a flash on Mars. Then, a few minutes later, news breaks of a meteorite in New Jersey. Reports

Mario Pezzi entered aeronautical history. Assigned to the 1st Experimental Center, on May 7, 1937, he set the altitude record by reaching 15,655 meters aboard a Ca.161. For this occasion, Pezzi wore a special pressurized and electrically heated spacesuit and a watertight helmet, similar to

Italy passes the Manifesto of Race: essentially anti-Semitic laws.

The members of the SS are 238,159 and continue to grow, during the war years they reach one million

Vorkuta, Soviet Union (Siberia, just west of the gigantic mouth of the Ob River). Trotskyists held in the gulag are gathered for a march through the snow. Suddenly, from an invisible point in the blinding white blanket, heavy machine gun fire opens on the advancing

A hurricane in the North Atlantic triggers a tidal wave that kills 600 people on the New England coast.

Lev Landau, the USSR’s greatest theoretical physicist, was arrested and imprisoned for anti-Soviet activities during the Great Purge. He was released only thanks to the intervention of international figures such as Pyotr Kapitsa and Niels Bohr.

The beautiful physics student Gilda Senatore goes to the University of Naples like every day to attend class, and after class, she stays in the classroom, as she often does, to study. Suddenly, Professor Ettore Majorana calls her: “Miss, Miss Senator!” She turns and sees

Oskar Klein discovered what would become known as Yang-Mills fields (rediscovered in 1954 and used from 1973 onwards to construct the Standard Model). Klein presented his work in Warsaw, titled “New Physical Theories.” Then, with the chaos of World War II and the rise of

Seaborg discovered cobalt-60, a radiation source later widely used in medicine to treat tumors. A year earlier, brothers John (a doctor of medicine) and Ernest (a physicist) Lawrence had decided to treat their mother, who was suffering from uterine cancer, with X-rays in Ernest Lawrence’s

While Alan Turing was finishing his doctoral thesis in England, John von Neumann from the United States offered him the position of assistant. Turing was tempted by the offer, but with war likely looming, he preferred to offer his services to Great Britain. He would

Vienna. Abraham Wald is a young Austrian statistician. He comes from an Orthodox Jewish family. With the Anschluss (annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany), his world collapses. That same day, March 11th, his academic tutor and benefactor, Karl Schlesinger, commits suicide. Abraham Wald will clandestinely

Joachim Von Ribbentrop becomes German Foreign Minister

Hitler personally leads the Wehrmacht

Du Pont produces Teflon

Hungarian Laszlo Biró, after studying medicine, practicing hypnosis, racing, and journalism, along with his brother György, invented the ballpoint pen as we know it today. The invention actually dates back to 1888, when John L. Loud invented it, but he never commercialized it (it also

The comic book character “Superman” is created

The Basque city of Guernica is bombed by German aircraft.

Ray Ban glasses are created for US pilots

Palestine: first proposal for territorial partition between the Palestinian and Israeli peoples. Palestine is still under British protectorate. This is the first mention of the so-called “two-state solution.” It was adopted by United Nations Resolution 181 in 1947 and has since been consistently accepted by

Dobzhansky publishes “Genetics and the Origin of Species,” the first truly scientific discussion of Darwinian natural selection in rigorous terms of the behavior of genes in natural populations. Essentially, it is the modern synthesis of genetics and evolutionism.

Through the observation of cosmic rays, muons, the first particles of the second generation, were discovered, opening up new and unexpected horizons in the standard model, so much so that Isaac Rabi exclaimed: “Who ordered that?”

Nobel Prize for Physics to Clinton Davisson and George Thomson.

The Japanese arrive in Nanking and massacre more than 100,000 civilians in the next 12 months.

Spain. In the Battle of Brunete, the famous photographer Gerda Taro (real name Gerda Phorylle), companion of Robert Capa (real name André Friedmann), dies behind the Republican lines. According to several accounts, a Republican tank, while reversing, unknowingly collides violently with the car carrying Gerda.

Guglielmo Marconi dies. His wife Cristina reports that, shortly before his death, he wrote to Mussolini, concerned about his overly intimate relationship with Hitler. He courageously warned Mussolini never to join Hitler in a war against England. Mussolini replied: “You speak like that because your

Moscow. Paolo Robotti, whose wife was Palmiro Togliatti’s sister, is arrested by the KGB. He tells his wife, “Don’t tell Ercoli anything.” (Ercole Ercoli was Palmiro Togliatti’s conventional name in the Soviet Union; Ercoli was the deputy secretary of the Comintern, the Third Communist International.)

Claude Shannon takes a break from MIT and heads to Manhattan’s Bell Labs (near Greenwich Village). Bell Labs is a paradise for inventors: theory and practice intersect in chance encounters in the long corridors and cafeterias. The cross-fertilization of different disciplines and skills will indeed

USSR. Stalin’s purges hit the Red Army’s top ranks: three of the five high marshals, 98 of the 100 members of the Supreme Military Council, 48,000 middle- and high-ranking officers, 13 of the 15 corps commanders, and eight of the nine admirals were executed. Never

The influx of prisoners into the GULag system increased from 800,000 to over 2,000,000 people per year. This period would be remembered as “The Great Stalinist Terror.” GULag stands for Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerej, or Central Camp Administration.

During the Stalinist Terror, Mikhail Gorbachev’s grandfather was arrested. His future wife Raisa’s grandfather was also arrested and executed during the same months. Mikhail’s grandfather was more “lucky”: the same NKVD cell that arrested him was purged, and the commander arrested, resulting in his release.

Paul Dirac argues that when one encounters large, dimensionless numbers of very high value in physics, such as 10^40 or 10^80, it is very unlikely that they are not connected to each other. He maintains that it is likely that there is a mathematical law

Radio astronomy: Grote Reber builds the first radio telescope in Illinois and records a strong radio signature from the constellations Cygnus and Cassiopeia. This is the dawn of radio astronomy. In 1933, Karl Jansky of Bell Labs recorded a mysterious background noise from deep space,

The Russian Vinogradov shows that any sufficiently large odd number can be represented as the sum of no more than 3 prime numbers (for example 1937 = 641 + 643 + 653); therefore any even number can be represented as the sum of no more

Papal Encyclical Denouncing Racism and Persecution in Germany

San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge amazes the world with its 1200m-long suspension bridge between its two pylons.

Wallace Hume Carothers (inventor of polymers and nylon) takes his own life with the cyanide capsule he always kept in his pocket

Italian physician Luigi Bogliolo conducted clinical trials demonstrating the carcinogenicity and potentially lethal effect of Thorotrast (ThO2), used as a contrast agent for x-rays and angiograms (which study blood vessels). Today, Thorotrast is known to be one of the most potent carcinogens known. It would

Founding of the Lavochkin Design Bureau (OKB-301). Derived from the Lavochkin Design Bureau, which designed airplanes during World War II and was then headed by Georgi Babakin (self-taught, suspicious of public education), it has had some spectacular successes such as the famous Lunokhod automatic lunar

The Peenemunde base is built, where the V-1 and V-2 will be studied.

The island of Usedom, on the German Baltic coast, was chosen as the location for the Peenemunde base for Werner von Braun’s group; the site was suggested to Wernher by his mother, who knew the place was peaceful because his father (Wernher’s grandfather) used to

Stalin’s NKVD purges all senior officers, including Sergei Pavlovich Korolyov. He is beaten until he confesses and sentenced to 10 years of hard labor in a Siberian gold mine. There, he is beaten several times, has a broken jaw, loses all his teeth, and suffers

John D. Rockefeller dies. During his lifetime, he founded Standard Oil, which was later split by antitrust laws into 34 companies, including Chevron, Exxon, Mobil, and other current oil giants. In the final years of his life, he lavished philanthropic donations, reaching the astronomical figure

The Hindenburg airship explodes in New Jersey due to the static charge accumulated on the plastic by rain; it burns because it contains hydrogen: it could not have used helium because the Americans would not sell it to the Germans to avoid giving the airships

Wernher von Braun becomes a National Socialist. He joins the SS on May 1, 1940.

Annus Mirabilis for Computer Science. Four properties that would define the Computer Age began to mature and sparked the revolution: digital computing, binary algebra, electronics, and general-purpose programming.

The rate of pedestrian deaths in road accidents in the United States peaked at 12 deaths per 100,000 residents per year (0.012% per year). It then gradually declined to 4 in 1965 and 2 in 2005 (0.002% per year).

English philosopher Ferdinand C.S. Schiller, founder of Humanism, a version of Peirce’s Pragmatism, dies.

The Hormel company develops Spiced Ham, or Spam, in cans, which, during World War II, will be distributed in massive quantities (5 billion cans) to soldiers and to alleviate hunger among civilians in Europe. It will become so common that, decades later, it will become

Stalin’s Great Purge: 690,000 deaths

Modena: the train station overpass is being built

Brothers John (a doctor of medicine) and Ernest (a physicist) Lawrence decide to treat their mother, who is suffering from uterine cancer, with X-rays in Ernest Lawrence’s laboratory. The tumor disappears. Their mother, then 67, lives to 83. Radiation therapy is born. A year later,

Professor Corbino dies: Lo Surdo becomes director of the Rome Institute of Physics, where Fermi works. This is a devastating blow for Enrico, who loses his mentor, protector, and almost father figure. To make matters worse, Lo Surdo, a bitter rival of Corbino and Fermi,

Franklin Delano Roosevelt confirmed for the second term in the White House

Sicily. Researchers Carlo Perrier and Emilio Segrè discovered technetium (from the Greek technetos, meaning artificial) in the laboratories of the University of Palermo’s Institute of Physics. They identified it in a sample of molybdenum sent to them by Ernest Lawrence. The sample, from the Lawrence