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 than 4 prime numbers, simply by first representing n-3 and then adding 3 (which is prime).

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 continue to be used throughout the world throughout the 1930s and 1940s, and in the United States again in the 1950s.

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 rovers and the Venera missions to Venus. It also designed the Fregat and Ikar upper stages and the Oko military satellites. In recent years, it has also developed and tested inflatable space structures for atmospheric reentry (IRDT – tested in 2000, 2002, and 2005, but all with lost cargo) and solar sails (2001 and 2005, both failures).

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 go duck hunting there.

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 from several debilitating diseases. Meanwhile, his main competitor, Valentin Glushko, takes advantage of the situation to denounce him. At the end of the war, Tupolev works with Stalin to convince him of the valuable contribution Korolyov could make to rocketry for the USSR, and he is released in 1945.

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 of over $100 billion (as of 2007). His net worth was estimated at $392 billion (as of 2007) at his death.

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 a range to bomb the American East Coast.

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 synonymous with “junk mail” during the Fourth Industrial Revolution. A famous Monty Python sketch featured a restaurant with the following menu: “Spam, sausage, spam, spam, bacon, spam, tomato, and spam.”

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, Seaborg discovers cobalt-60, another source of radiation later widely used in medicine to treat tumors.

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, is appointed director of the institute in Corbino’s place. To make matters worse, a few months later, Guglielmo Marconi, Fermi’s great supporter and director of the CNR, dies.

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 Berkeley National Laboratory, consisted of a piece of molybdenum electrostatic deflector that had been bombarded with deuterium nuclei in the cyclotron at the University of California, Berkeley, transforming it into 97Tc. Technetium was the first element ever produced artificially, although its existence in nature was later demonstrated both within and outside the solar system. It is the first and only element discovered in Italy. For many years, a gap remained in the periodic table for element number 43. Dmitry Mendeleev predicted that the missing element would be chemically similar to manganese and therefore named it ekamanganese. In 1925, Walter Noddack and Ida Tacke, the discoverers of rhenium, announced the discovery of element 43, naming it masurium (after Masuria, a region of East Prussia, now Poland). Their announcement was never confirmed and is now commonly considered erroneous, although some researchers have disputed this conclusion. In 1952, American astronomer Paul Merrill identified technetium in the emission spectra of some red giant stars, strengthening the theory that such stars produce heavy elements. Modest quantities have also been found in uranium mines, especially those where natural nuclear fission has occurred, such as the Oklo nuclear reactor.

Golden Age of Particle Physics: The so-called Particle Zoo (the mu lepton, mesons, and particles with strange quarks) is discovered in cosmic rays.

Soviet military support to the Chinese; the Soviet contribution, which remained largely secret until the fall of the USSR in 1991, is estimated at 50,000 men and hundreds of aircraft and artillery; Soviet aid ends when American military aid to the Chinese begins

General Francisco Franco’s uprising begins the Spanish Civil War

Gerhard Domagk’s Prontosil saved Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s life in 1936. Prontosil would then be featured in the New York Times, and sales skyrocketed. The human body splits Prontosil in two to produce sulfonamide, which interferes with the synthesis of folic acid, essential for cell replication, especially in bacteria. Sulfonamides were born. For this, Domagk would receive the Nobel Prize in 1939. Domagk was employed by the German company IGF (which would later produce the Zyklon-B used to exterminate inmates in extermination camps).

Soviet Union. After a promising start in the 1920s with the Gas Dynamics Lab in St. Petersburg, and even a science fiction film with Tsiolkovsky’s consultancy, Soviet research was abruptly halted by a wave of Stalinist purges. In 1936, the leaders of the missile program were arrested and shot within hours, Korolev was sent to a gulag, and Glushko was imprisoned for six years. With the discovery of the V-2 rocket in Germany, the program regained momentum, and in 1953 a plan for an ICBM was approved. Korolev (OKB-1) would build the R-7, with engines supplied by Glushko (OKB-456). Kapustin Yar was too close to American listening stations in Turkey, so Tyuratam, renamed Baikonur, was chosen to purposely confuse it with the Baikonur railway station 280 km to the north. Keldysh, now head of the prestigious Institute of Applied Mathematics, introduces computers to Soviet industry.

The Hindenburg airship makes 10 flights in New Jersey and 7 in Rio de Janeiro.

Hermann Goring takes control of the German military machine

American actors Robert Kike and Louise Garrett built a couple of bungalows in the uninhabited area called Kuta in Bali; they also began teaching surfing to the locals; by word of mouth, Kuta soon became a tourist destination and after the war mass tourism exploded.

Leo Szilard tries in vain to convince Niels Bohr and Enrico Fermi that nuclear fission is possible and dangerous and therefore research in this direction must be placed under government control.

Nobel Prize in Physics to Carl David Anderson for the discovery of the positron

Fermi publishes “On the Motion of Neutrons in Hydrogenous Substances” on Ricerca Scientifica

Amaldi and Fermi publish “On the Absorption and the Diffusion of Slow Neutrons” in Physical Review

Soviet Union. The official Communist Party newspaper, Pravda (Truth), features a front-page photo of a smiling Joseph Stalin holding seven-year-old Gelya Marzikova in his arms. In the following months, Gelya’s father is arrested on false charges and executed in 1938. Gelya and her mother are exiled to Kazakhstan, where she dies shortly thereafter under mysterious circumstances. From that moment on, Gelya Marzikova’s name disappears, and the happy Soviet child in the photo is identified as Mamlakat Nakhangova, a 13-year-old Tajik girl who earned membership in the Order of Lenin by diligently collecting large quantities of cotton balls in the fields.

The Italian war of conquest in Ethiopia ends

Italian East Africa (AOI). There were 300,000 soldiers present, about a third of whom were Askaris. This number dropped to just 55,000 in 1939. There were also 100,000 militarized workers and 50,000 Blackshirts of the Voluntary Militia for National Security. Public employees were thought to number approximately 6,500. In total, 201,440 Italians traveled to AOI from 1935 to 1939.

Robert J. Oppenheimer works in Berkeley and knows Jean Tatlock and Haakan Chevalier of the Communist Party

Albert Einstein chooses a new assistant: the mathematician Leopold Infeld, who will assist him from 1936 to 1938, along with Nathan Rosen. Nathan Rosen will take over in 1944.

Berlin Olympics

Autarchy begins in Italy

Mr. Godman, after noticing that many customers in his supermarket in Oklahoma stopped shopping simply because their shopping bags were full, invented the shopping cart.

Philosopher Jean Paul Sartre publishes “The Transcendence of the Ego” and “Imagination”.

Konrad Zuse, a German, creates a programmable digital vacuum tube machine

United States. The top tax is above 77%, and is even above 90% for half of this period, mostly during the 1950s, under solid Republican leadership (!). It will then be brought down to 70% by the Democrats (!) in 1965, and then will continue its decline to 30% under Reagan in the 1980s.

Kodak markets the color camera

Alan Turing publishes his most important paper: “On computable numbers with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” introducing what will be remembered as the Turing Machine and the Universal Turing Machine, which are the basis of every digital computer.

Alan Turing began his PhD at Princeton University. He returned to England in 1938.

Nobel Prize in Physics to Sir James Chadwick for the discovery of the neutron

Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to Frederic Joliot and Irene Curie for the discovery of artificial radioactivity.

Hideki Yukawa predicts the existence of pions (up and anti-down or down and anti-up quarks)

Schrodinger’s Cat Thought Experiment

Schrodinger speaks explicitly of entanglement between particles

At Corbino’s suggestion, Fermi’s group presents Italian Patent No. 324 458 on the use of slow neutrons to have them absorbed by other atomic nuclei.

Ethiopia stands alone. The League of Nations votes to impose deliberately ineffective economic sanctions against Fascist Italy for invading Ethiopia. Measures that would have prevented the invasion, such as an oil embargo against Italy and the closure of the Suez Canal, were not adopted for fear of sparking hostility in Europe. Ethiopia thus lost its independence for the first time in its long history, and tens of thousands of Ethiopians were killed as a result of Italian occupation actions, which included the use of nerve gas and other modern atrocities. By the end of 1936, the Italian conquest of Ethiopia was complete. Ethiopian leader Emperor Haile Selassie went into exile but returned in 1941 when British and Ethiopian troops liberated the country. Ignoring the British occupation authorities, Selassie quickly organized his own government.

The Italian army invades Ethiopia, and also uses toxic gas (mustard gas)

Irene Curie, Marie Curie’s daughter and her first pupil, wins the Nobel Prize. She is the second woman to win it, after her mother, also sharing the prize with her husband. In 1939, Marguerite Perey also won the prize for the discovery of francium.

Aleksei Grigor’evic Stakhanov collected 102 tons of coal in just 5 hours and 45 minutes; his example gave rise to a movement called the “Stakhanovites.”

The British put into operation the J Machine, a machine to decrypt the Japanese diplomatic code.

Albert Einstein chooses a new assistant: the mathematician Nathan Rosen, who will assist him from 1935 to 1945.

Rome. Countess Carina Negrone achieved a new record by reaching an altitude of 12,043 meters with the same aircraft previously used by Donati, setting a new world record, surpassing Hilsz’s previous record by a full 754 meters. The record, for propeller-driven aircraft, remains unbeaten in aviation history.

Alan Turing became a Fellow of King’s College at just 22.

American scientist Irving Langmuir, in collaboration with scientist Katherine Blodgett and based on the studies of another scientist, Agnes Pockels, created the Langmuir tank in which, by releasing a known quantity of oily material into water, it expands into a patch until it reaches the thickness of a single molecule, held together only by van der Waals forces; knowing the initial volume and the final surface area, the molecular size can then be calculated.

Soviet Union. Trofym Lysenko advocates non-genetic inheritance and denounces genetics as a capitalist pseudoscience. Lysenkoism will cause famines and disasters, first in the USSR and then in Mao’s China, resulting in millions of deaths through misguided and harmful policies. And 3,000 renowned biologists and geneticists will be executed.

The average American’s spending on necessities is 60% of their income. This will gradually decline to 35% of their income in 2015.

Charles Richter (of the Californian Institute of Technology – CalTech), published the famous article “An Instrumental Earthquake Magnitude Scale” in the Bulletin of the Sesmological Society of America, in which he established the Richter scale for measuring the energy of an earthquake.