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Mutinies in the German fleet.

Enrico Fermi left Rome for Pisa, where he was admitted to the prestigious Scuola Normale Superiore. At the time, only about ten applications were accepted each year. Fermi’s essay for the entrance exam is still legendary today: “The Distinctive Characteristics of Sounds and Their Causes.”

Great Britain. The country has accumulated a huge war debt. The reparations imposed on Germany (which will indirectly lead to World War II) will not be enough, and the country is heading for a gradual economic decline averaging 0.2% per year, and a rise in

The Battle of Verdun ends. After 10 months and massive losses, the Battle of Verdun, the longest battle of the Great War, ended. In February 1916, the Germans had attacked Verdun, a city 137 miles east of Paris. The forts of Hardaumont and Douaumont had

Americans Duncan Black and Alonzo Decker invent the electric drill

Epidemic, in Europe and America, of Encephalitis Lethargica, which causes victims to fall into a long drowsy state from which they often do not awaken

The concepts of stimulated emission (a photon with the correct energy can cause an electron to move up in orbit or down and emit a photon) and spontaneous emission (the electron spontaneously moves down in orbit and emits a photon) mature; the first phenomenon will

In the USA, Wheeler managed to elect “dry” governors, that is, prohibitionists, in most states.

The US occupies the Dominican Republic.

Guglielmo Marconi is appointed Senator of the Kingdom of Italy. The proposal is made by Senator Colombo, founder of Edison and Undersecretary of Posts and Telegraphs.

Russia declares war on Türkiye

As Europe plunges into the Great War, anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowsky works in Papua and, speaking with a local cannibal about the war in Europe, the cannibal asks him, puzzled, how Europeans could consume such enormous quantities of meat. When Malinowsky explains that Europeans do not

The French, entrenched on the Grand Couronne’, mow down waves of Germans attempting to scale it.

Germans defeat Russians at the Masurian Lakes

The Germans defeat the Russians at Tannenberg

Battle of Charleroi: Germans defeat French

German troops enter Belgium and head towards the French border

Germany declares war on France

Serbian student Gavrilo Princip commits the assassination of Prince Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo; the prince was visiting the Bosnian capital, a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, despite warnings of possible attacks; the prince escapes an initial assassination attempt with a hand grenade, then on the

James Chadwick discovered that the energy of beta radiation varied from one measurement to the next. To solve the problem, Wolfgang Pauli soon suggested that the energy was shared between two particles: one visible (the electron) and the other invisible (later discovered to be the

Marie and her daughter Irene begin working together for a radiological (X-ray) service for the French army.

Srinivasa Ramanujan, an Indian mathematician, spent three intense years collaborating with Professor Godfrey H. Hardy at Trinity College, Cambridge. Ramanujan, alone, independently rediscovered countless mathematical theorems, retracing their history, unfortunately wasting considerable time rediscovering their foundations. In a long letter to Professor Godfrey H. Hardy,

Ernst Mahler and James Kimberly of the small American company Kimberly Clark, during a trip to Europe, discovered a material five times more absorbent than cotton and even less expensive to produce. They brought it to the United States, patented it, and began large-scale production.

The Federal Reserve Bank was established by President Woodrow Wilson, approved by the United States Congress, to administer monetary policy and stem periodic panics in the financial markets.

Construction of the first Aswan Dam by the British

In the United States, the Federal Reserve was created as a supervisory body for banks and credit institutions in order to restore investor confidence, which had been shaken by decades (from 1970 to 1910) which had seen the failure of thousands of banks.

According to Niall Ferguson, we are at the height of the West’s direct domination of the world: the 11 Western empires control 50% of the earth’s land mass, 57% of the population, and a full 80% of the GDP. The British control 25% of the

After a year of revolts, Pu Yi (the last Chinese emperor) abdicates. Yuan Shikai is elected president.

Littlewood discovers that, contrary to predictions, Gauss’s hypothesis is a mirage: if you continue counting, sooner or later you reach a point where Gauss’s integral logarithm goes from overestimating to underestimating. In fact, after a century, no one has yet reached such large numbers.

Benito Mussolini heads the revolutionary branch of the socialists and takes control of the party (PSI)

Modena. The new electric tram replaces the horse-drawn one. Not without heated controversy, which was abolished in a referendum, which won the YES vote. Complaints included “What if you’re driving on the street?”, “What if you’re driving on a road with Armagnac?”, and “Overhead power

Wilbur Wright, the most inventive of the Wright brothers, dies of typhus.

Thomas Alva Edison decides that his invention, the Type A alkaline battery, is mature enough for industrial use. He invests $1.2 million in this manufacturing project. The following January, he begins supplying the Ford Motor Company with 450,000 Type A batteries each year.

Robert Goddard, the future father of astronautics, graduated in Physics from Clark University.

The workplace fatality rate in the United States is 60 per 100,000 workers per year (0.060%/year). It will progressively decline to less than 5 from 2010 onwards (0.005%/year).

Victor Hess measures radioactivity during a hot air balloon flight at 5,300 meters: the radioactivity is triple that of the ground level. He therefore concludes that at least part of the radiation is of extraterrestrial origin.

Max von Laue experiments with the diffraction of X-rays by crystals, thus proving their wave nature.

Roald Engelbregt Gravning Amundsen at the South Pole after 1400 km of walking

Italian aviator Giulio Gavotti conducts the first tactical bombing in history. He drops explosive charges by hand on Turkish lines in Libya.

First Conference of Physicists at Solvay

Lane, with interference experiments, demonstrates that X-rays are electromagnetic radiation

Scottish physicist Charles C. T. R. Wilson became the first to observe the motion of individual alpha or beta particles in a cloud chamber he had specially invented. Fifteen years earlier, Wilson had taken meteorological measurements for two weeks from the summit of Mount Nevis,

Former President Teddy Roosevelt, a big-game hunting enthusiast and zoologist, publishes the essay: “Revealing and Concealing Coloration in Birds and Mammals”

John Archibald Wheeler, one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century, was born in Jacksonville, Florida.

Hiram Bingham, in two expeditions (the second financed by National Geographic and Yale), discovered three lost Inca cities: Vizco, Vidca Bab, and Macchu Picchu (the latter never found even by the Spanish).

William D. Coolidge at General Electric Research Labs develops a thin tungsten filament still used in incandescent lamps.

The phenomenon of superconductivity is discovered for the first time in Mercury.

Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discovers superconductivity in Mercury at 4K

Frank C. Mars began making candy from his home in Tacoma, Washington; he later rented his first candy factory with 125 employees; by the end of the century, Mars’s chocolate business alone had reached $10 billion.

American Glenn Curtiss builds the first seaplane

Elmer Sperry builds a mechanism for operating a ship’s rudder, incorporating a PID controller with automatic gain adjustment

The New York Times publishes the news of Percival Lowell’s latest observation of Mars: “Martians build two immense canals in two years” on a full page; subhead: “Incredible feat by our planetary neighbors.”

Italy invades Libya and the Dodecanese in the southern Aegean; the government is that of the liberal Giovanni Giolitti.

The U.S. Antitrust Commission broke up the Rockefeller family’s Standard Oil into 34 companies, including Continental Oil (renamed Conoco), Standard of Indiana (renamed Amoco), Standard of California (renamed Chevron), Standard of New Jersey (renamed Esso, and then Exxon), and Standard of New York (renamed Mobil).

Just 10 years after entering the international machine-made textile business, Japan crushed its competition. By 1910, the Japanese were Asia’s only exporter of thread, yarn, and fabric, and their exports surpassed those of Germany, France, and Italy.

California is the state with the largest oil extraction capacity in the world.

Astapovo railway station, Ryazan district, Russian Caucasus. Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy dies.

Passage of the spectacular Halley’s Comet.

The Great Comet of January 1910 passes by. It’s extremely bright, visible even to the naked eye during the day. It will pass again in 4 million years.

Modena: almost all canals are covered (with the exception of the Naviglio, which was covered in 1979)

England. The British crown passes to the House of Windsor with the sovereigns: George V, Edward VIII, George VI, Elizabeth II

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, cousin of Theodore Roosevelt, a man of enormous charm, genuine interest in people, energy bordering on frenzy, a personal fortune and a celebrated name, runs for the New York State Senate; FDR, unlike Theodore, enters politics as a Democrat.

Indonesia. Only in 1910 did the Dutch, who had arrived centuries earlier, manage to gain control of the entire archipelago of thousands of islands.

First extraction of titanium from its ore. The ore was discovered in 1791, but it was not mined in commercial quantities until the 1950s.

American philosopher William James, author of Pragmatism, dies.

In just twenty years, Shanghai’s population jumped from one million to three million, including over one hundred thousand foreigners. Governor Zhang Zhidong expressed the city’s spirit with the words: “Learning from the West, preserving the spirit of China,” a motto that would become the motto

Young Gyorgy Hevesy arrives in England to research radioactivity, specifically Radium-D, which later turns out to be radioactive lead. He contemplates injecting it into living beings to track their metabolism. One day, to prove to the cook that the meatballs were leftover meat from days

Cretan Venizelos becomes prime minister of Greece

Carl Bosch perfected a process invented by Fritz Haber, which used methane and steam to extract nitrogen from the air and converted it into fertilizer on an industrial scale, effectively replacing huge quantities of bird droppings, which were previously used to provide nitrogen to poor

The French aviator Blériot flies his monoplane across the English Channel from Calais to Dover; Blériot uses the modified Model 11: it is the precursor of modern airplanes: it is a monoplane, with steerable wing surfaces, a propeller at the front, and directional controls at

After nine years of research and development, Thomas Alva Edison announced that the rechargeable battery was a reality. He showed off his 1.2V E-cells: thin, light, and shiny. Edison had brought about a revolution in the electrochemical sector. It was composed of 120 nickel plates,

Palestine, a dominion of the Ottoman Empire. Tel Aviv is founded (“Old New Land” from Theodor Herzl’s novel, Hebrew: תֵּל־אָבִיב).

American explorer Robert E. Peary first reaches the North Pole

First kibbutz founded in Israel: Degania

German scientist Theodor Wulf measured ionizing radiation at the base and top of the Eiffel Tower and discovered that at the top, it was only slightly less than half that on the ground. That is, much more than he would expect if it were emitted

celestial body of considerable size falls in Siberia at Tunguska and explodes before hitting the ground, causing an explosion of 120 Mton.

Ford launches the Model T (Tin Lizzie)

Clementine Ogilvy Hozier marries Winston Chrunchill. They will spend 57 years together.

Fort Meyer, near Washington, D.C. Orville Wright takes a flight in his airplane for over an hour. On a subsequent flight, with a passenger in addition to the pilot, Orville Wright, the plane crashes, killing the passenger and injuring Orville.

Czernowitz, Austria-Hungary. The recognition of Yiddish as the national language of the Jews is consecrated. Seventy delegates from many countries participate. Yiddish arose from a fusion of Germanic, Hebrew, and Slavic elements and was spoken by 13 million Jews before 1939. Yiddish culture is at