The first decade of the 20th century
A Chronology of Events
Editor: Piero Scaruffi
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- 868: First printed document, the "Diamond Sutra"
- 1000: about 300 million people live in the world (the same number as in the first year of the millennium)
- Kaifeng (CHina) is the largest city in the world with about one million inhabitants
- 1024: First paper money in China
- 1350 1.5 people die in England of the plague (out of 4 million)
- 1431: Joan of Arc burned
- 1492: Columbus discovers America
- 1661: Johan Palmstruch invents the first European paper money (Sweden)
- 1681 Pierre Paul Riquet's Canal du Midi links the Atlantic and the Mediterranean
- 1765: James Watt steam engine
- 1776: American revolution
- 1783: First balloon flight (Paris) by the Montgolfier brothers
- 1796: Edward Jenner invents the vaccine against smallpox
- 1800: Alessandro Volta invents the electrical battery
- 1800: about one billion people live in the world
- 1801: Britain's population is 10.7 million
- 1803: John Dalton proposes that matter is composed of atoms
- 1830: The world's population tops 1,000,000,000
- 1838: Samuel Morse invents the code for telegraphy
- 1839: First commercial telegraph
- 1839: Louis Daguerre invents the "daguerrotype", a precursor of the photographic camera
- 1842: Richard Owen discovers the first fossils of dinosaurs.
- 1844: In the US there are over 5,000 kms of railway (3,000 in Britain, 2,000 in Germany, 500 in France)
- 1848: All adult men can vote in French national election
- 1851: The population of the USA is 20,067,720 free persons and 2,077,034 slaves (source: Scientific American)
- 1858: Telegraph wire laid at the bottom of the ocean between Ireland and Canada
- 1859: First oil well drilled in America
- 1860: eleven southern states secede from the Union
- 1861: U.S. civil war
- 1861: Italy unified by Garibaldi
- 1861: The czar abolishes serfdom in Russia
- 1864: James Clerk Maxwell unifies electricity and magnetism in his equations of the electromagnetic field
- 1865: End of U.S. civil war
- 1869: The Union and Central Pacific railroads meet in Ogden, Utah
- 1870: All adult men can vote in US national election
- 1871: Germany unified
- 1873: First San Francisco cable car
- 1876: General Custer and his troops are massacred by Indians at Little Big Horn
- 1876: Alexander Bell demonstrates the telephone
- 1879: Thomas Edison invents the light bulb
- 1881: Sitting Bull surrenders
- 1883: Time zones first used by the railroads to standardize their schedules
- 1885: The Santa Fe Railroad reaches Los Angeles
- 1885: First skyscraper, in Chicago
- 1886: First consumer camera (by Kodak)
- 1889: Germany enacts the first pension plan in the world
- 1890: Hermann Hollerith's tabulator chosen for the national census: it uses punched cards
- 1890: The work hour in the US is 60 hours
- 1891: In Java archeologists unearth Pithecanthropus Erectus
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1892: - Edward Doheny strikes oil in Los Angeles
1895:
- the Lumiere brothers invent cinema
1896: - Marconi files a patent for wireless cable
1897: - The atom is not indivisible, constituents are first observed
1897:
- Aspirin invented by Felix Hoffmann
1897:
- First car in Los Angeles
- 1900: Sigmund Freud publishes the Interpretation of Dreams
- 1900: First mass-market camera, the "Brownie" (by Kodak)
- 1900: Max Planck invents Quantum Theory
- 1900: 5% of American households own a telephone
- 1900: Life expectancy in the US is 47.3
- 1900: Los Angeles population is 100,000
1901:
- Guglielmo Marconi conducts the first transatlantic radio transmission
- Britain's population is 37.1 million
1902:
- a criminal case is solved thanks to fingerprints (Paris)
1903:
- Wilbur and Orville Wright fly first airplane
- Marie Curie discovers radioactivity
- The US produces 11,200 cars (1,700 from Ford)
- the first Tour de France
1905:
- Einstein publishes the Special Theory of Relativity
1906:
- Frederick Hopkins discovers vitamins
- San Francisco earthquake and fire
1907:
- Leo Baekeland invents the first plastic ("bakelite")
- Alzheimer describes a form of "pre-senile dementia"
1908:
- The first "zeppelin", created by Ferdinand von Zeppelin, lands in a Germany city
- Ford introduces the Model T, the first mass vehicle
- First oil well drilled in the Middle East
- William D'Arcy discovers oil in Iran
1909:
- Invention of plastic
- The average salary in the US is $0.19
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