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Americans Alvarez and Compton demonstrate that cosmic rays are predominantly positive: due to interaction with the Earth’s magnetic field, more of them arrive from the West than from the East.

Wall Street loses 17% in six consecutive weekly sessions (the stock market is also open on Saturdays in 1933)

New York Times: Article headlined “Radio Waves Are Coming from the Center of the Galaxy.” NBC radio broadcasts the whistle coming from the stars and an interview with Jansky, who explains that the signal is coming from the center of the Milky Way, thirty thousand

Soviet Union. The People’s Commissar reports to Stalin that the White Sea-Baltic Canal (Belomorkanal or Stalin Canal) is completed. In July of the same year, Stalin takes a pleasant steamboat cruise on the canal with Kirov. Photos of the event exist, showing the two laughing

In Germany, the Nazi Party proclaims the National Anti-Jewish Boycott Day, during which Jews or people who do business with them are beaten or killed.

Reichstag elections: Nazi violence during the campaign, 43.9% for the Nazis

F.D. Roosevelt is president of the United States: on March 4, 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is inaugurated as the 32nd president of the United States. In his inaugural address, Roosevelt outlines the “New Deal,” the expansion of the

H1N1 virus epidemic, of Russian origin

Tsunami in Kaalualu, Hawaii, with a 300m high wave

Earthquake in Japan: 8.9 on the Richter scale, 2,990 dead

7:00 PM: Miami, Florida: Giuseppe Zangara launches an assassination attempt on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, managing to fire five times, hitting five people and killing the mayor of Chicago; FDR escapes unharmed.

Alexander Dahl, with his hydrogen balloon, was the first to rise high enough above the ground (11,300 m) to photograph the curvature of the Earth. In 1935, it was surpassed by the American manned probe Explorer 2 (22 km) and then by the V2 rockets

Fritz Haber (the Nobel Prize-winning Haber process for ammonia synthesis, and also the Fritz Haber of World War I gases) receives orders from the Nazi government to fire all his Jewish collaborators as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry. Haber, in an act

After 16 years of war and guerrilla warfare, the Red Army finally manages to establish control over its Soviet Central Asia. The death toll is 50,000. The Basmachi are defeated.

Kazakhstan, Soviet Union. In just four years, the population, due to forced collectivization and the resulting famine, dropped from 8 million to 3 million. More than half the population disappeared.

Collectivization of land in the USSR causes 7 million deaths

Soviet Union. Baron Roberto Oros di Bartini, half-Italian but naturalized Russian, and a direct rival of Umberto Nobile, but for “heavier than air,” breaks the speed record, hurtling in his Stal-6 aircraft with retractable landing gear (the first of its kind) at 450 km/h. He

Einstein and his wife left for the United States and Germany, never to return; after a brief return to Europe in Belgium, they returned to the United States to settle in Princeton in the wooden house at 112 Mercer Street.

The modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) was founded in 1932 by Abdul Aziz bin Al Saud. The first Saudi kingdom, dating back to 1744, took its name from the founding dynasty, the Saud family, and experienced turbulent times, being ruled by the Ottoman Empire

The U.S. federal budget is only $4 billion. In 20 years, in 1952, it will reach $85.5 billion.

Los Angeles Olympics

Werner von Braun joins the Verein fur Raumschiffahrt (VfR) (Society for Space Travel) founded only a few years earlier

Dirac makes a first canonical attempt at quantizing General Relativity

Russian cosmologist George Gamow attempts to escape the USSR through what he considers the least guarded border: the southern tip of the Crimean Peninsula, attempting to land in Turkey. He and his wife Rho buy a kayak and one night they start rowing. The wind

Richard Tolman of CalTech in Pasadena, California, hypothesizes an oscillating universe, applying the powerful and robust Second Law of Thermodynamics to General Relativity for the first time. This suggests that with each successive cycle, the universe has a fraction more energy in the form of

Astronomer Jan H. Oort suggests that the motion of stars around the Sun implies that the total mass is approximately twice the luminous mass (the stars themselves). This is the first indication of the presence of dark matter.

The first air conditioner for home use is produced

Aldous Huxley publishes the novel Brave New World, in which, at the height of the Great Depression, the supreme value is happiness, which is induced through chemicals (“soma”). Revolutions, wars, suicides, and depressions disappear. This vision is generally much more horrendous than that of Orwell’s

Patrick Blackett and Giuseppe Occhialini invented the automated cloud chamber with coincidence counters. Following Blackett’s success in imaging the nuclear transmutation of nitrogen into oxygen, he and Occhialini improved the cloud chamber to acquire images only when significant events were detected using the coincidence technique

Thomas Alva Edison dies. His deafness, which he had suffered for several years, had worsened, and he also suffered from diabetes and stomach disorders, which he “treated” with a milk-only diet. On the evening of the funeral, the nation, at President Hoover’s request, dims all

Paul Dirac hypothesized that in the early moments of the universe, when electromagnetism arose, so-called Magnetic Monopoles were created in abundant quantities. These are a heavier version of the electron (10^20 times heavier…) but with a magnetic rather than electric charge. This hypothesis is not

The Russian mathematician Schnirelmann proves that any number, even or odd, can be represented as the sum of no more than 300,000 primes.

Berlin. Oberth and von Braun’s Verein fur Raumschiffahrt (Space Travel Society) tests a rocket, which unfortunately crashes into the roof of the building next to the police headquarters, destroying it in flames. Private rocket launches are banned in the city of Berlin.

In the United States, the first horizontal axis wind turbines (or wind farms) were used to power isolated users, especially in the great American West.

English economist John Keynes publishes “A Treatise on Money”

Edwin Eugene “Buzz” Aldrin, a future member of the Apollo 11 crew and the second man on the Moon, was born in New Jersey; his father, Gene Aldrin, had been a student at MIT under Robert Goddard and would receive the title of Commendatore from

Beginning of the Great Depression in the United States

The Golden Jubilee of the electric light bulb is held to celebrate Thomas Alva Edison’s invention. The most famous industrial families are present, including the Rockefellers, Morgenthauses, Rosenwalds, Kahns, Orville Wrights, George Eastmans, and Henry Ford. Then comes President Hoover. Then comes Guglielmo Marconi’s telegram

Al Capone orders the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. The American justice system will only be able to prove his tax evasion.

Mexico City. Trotskyist Julio Antonio Mella is shot dead. He was arm in arm with Tina Modotti, who was spared by the killer. Modotti would be involved in the organization’s first (failed) and second (successful) attempts to kill Trotsky himself in Mexico City in 1940.

Argentine ant species, Linepithema humile, are unwittingly imported into California via cargo ships. Argentine ant colonies will spread rapidly, fighting merciless battles against native ants. After eighty years, the Linepithema humile nation in California will number a trillion individuals, and the war will result in

Rudolph Peierls explains the motion of holes and electrons in a semiconductor

The Lateran Pacts are signed between the Catholic Church and the Italian State: the former recognizes the Papal State; the latter establishes compensation for the Church; the third recognizes the Catholic religion as the official religion and grants freedom of action to Catholic Action.

Henrich Himmler becomes head of the SS

Richard E. Byrd (USA) flies over the South Pole on a Fokker C2

In the Soviet Union, as part of the CPSU plan to study the creation of an army of ape-men, the first monkey farm was set up in Sukhumi, Georgia; here, monkeys were inseminated with human sperm, while attempts were made to inseminate African women with

Konstantin Tsiolkowski publishes the book “Trains de fusees cosmiques” (Cosmic Rocket Trains) in which he examines the possibility of multi-stage rockets.

The famous German airship Graf Zeppelin makes its first non-stop flight from Germany to New York

The Verein fur Raumschiffahrt (VfR) (Society for Space Travel) is formed; Hermann Oberth becomes its president.

In the United States, Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed. Ferdinando Nicola Sacco (Torremaggiore, April 22, 1891 – Charlestown, August 23, 1927) and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (Villafalletto, June 11, 1888 – Charlestown, August 23, 1927) were two Italian anarchists. They were charged with

Robert J. Oppenheimer worked at Harvard, Caltech, Berkeley, Leiden in the Netherlands, and Zurich, meeting people of the caliber of Pauli and Rabi.

In Belgium, the priest Georges Lemaitre, a deeply religious Quaker, conducted the most comprehensive study of the time on the simplest universes predicted by General Relativity. He went beyond Einstein, de Sitter, and Friedmann, also introducing the possibility that the model of the universe contained

Alphonse Al Capone, at the height of his career, earned $100 million a year, when $100 a month was already a good salary.

Englishman John Logie Baird demonstrates the first example of a mechanical television; his prototypes will later be used by the BBC and he will also demonstrate color (mechanical) and stereo TV.

The first national radio station: NBC (National Broadcasting Communication) in the USA; Michelin and Palmolive advertise on it.

Marriage of Frederic Joliot, former collaborator of Marie Curie, and Irene Curie, daughter of Marie and Pierre Curie

Umberto Nobile takes off with his airship from Ciampino, bound for the North Pole, with him on the Norge are 16 people: Nobile, Amundsen, Ellsworth, Larsen, Horgen, Hottwald, Wisting, Malmgren, Cecioni, Arduino, Caratti, Pomella, Omdal, Alessandrini, Johensen, Ramm

The Italian delegation to negotiate war reparations with the British departs for London. It is led by Finance Minister Giuseppe Volpi. The debt amounts to 377 million pounds. On the British side, negotiating, Winston Churchill is present. Before the signing, Churchill says: “The agreement we

Schrodinger introduces his formalism: the so-called “Schrodinger Evolution”

During a two-week vacation on Heligoland (or Helgoland—an island in northern Germany shaped like a magician’s hat), 23-year-old Werner Heisenberg found space to think, along with a respite from the extreme hay fever he suffered from. In that remote outpost, Heisenberg developed an idea that

An F5 tornado causes 630 deaths in the central US states; 75% of tornadoes occur in the US

Benito Mussolini announces that Italy is willing to negotiate its war debt with Britain and the United States. It does so before France, Belgium, Greece, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Russia (which will not repay).

Mecca falls to Ibn Saud’s forces; the Hashemites hold out in Medina and Jeddah.

Louis De Broglie extends the dual nature to every wave/particle.

Earthquake in Japan (Tokyo): 8.2 on the Richter scale, 99,330 deaths

First electric windshield wipers

Bertrand Russel writes: “…all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and the whole temple of Man’s achievements must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins… (…) only within the

Philo Taylor Farnsworth, a 15-year-old student at Mormon High School in Rigby, Idaho, invents an electronic television system and proposes it to his chemistry teacher.

Archaeologists enter Tutankhamen’s tomb. British archaeologists Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon are the first men to enter the tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen in over 3,000 years. Carter had discovered the entrance to the adolescent pharaoh’s tomb three weeks earlier, hidden among the debris

The U.S. traffic death rate is 24 deaths per 100 million miles traveled. This is a very high rate, which rapidly declines to 10 in 1940 and then gradually to 1 in 2015.

Following the example set by American democracy, the number of democracies increased, primarily in Western Europe, reaching 29. It then dropped to 12 in 1942, before increasing again to 36 in 1962, worldwide.

Lenin coldly addressed the delegation of the Communist Party of Italy (PCd’I) visiting Moscow: “In Italy, comrades, there was only one man capable of making a revolution: Benito Mussolini. But you have lost him and have not been able to recover him.”

The American company Kimberly Clark, after inventing Cellucotton as a sanitary napkin and subsequently using it as a feminine hygiene product, invented Kleenex. Initially, Cellucotton met with resistance due to customers’ modesty in requesting it, and Kimberly Clark sought other products and ways to market

Soviet Union. Arrests of anarchists intensify. After the Mensheviks, other streams of people will follow, heading to the gulags: the pro-Cadet (scientists, academics, artists, writers, engineers, etc.), the Muzhik kulaks. The overall plan “is not to wage war on individuals, but to exterminate the bourgeoisie

Emiliano Zapata is killed

Milan: The Fasci Italiani Combattenti con Mussolini are born

Proclamation of the Kingdom of King Peter I uniting Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.

6:29 a.m.: Austria is now defeated; the Viribus Unitus, the Austrian flagship, has just been given to the newly formed Kingdom of Yugoslavia; but two Italian sappers are ordered to mine it off the coast of Pola, in Istria; immediately after the operation they are

Violent popular demonstrations in Germany, workers’ and soldiers’ councils are formed on the model of the Soviet soviets

Austria offers unconditional surrender