Events that had a significant bearing on World History in the 20th Century

Assassination of Archduke F. Ferdinand and Outbreak of World War I

June 28, 1914,

In 1914, Europe was a tinder box of tension and military rivalry. The spark for war could have been many incidents; but, as it happened the assassination of an Austrian archduke - Franz Ferdinand by a Serb provoked widespread declarations of war and the fulfillment of treaties which led to the horrendous conflict of the First World War.
The war was to last four years and cost the lives of millions of men from all corners of the world.

Russian Revolution 1917

25 October 1917 - Start of October Uprising by Bolsheviks

Since the publication of Marx's Communist Manifesto, there had been sporadic Communist revolutions in European countries, but nothing had really succeeded. But in October 1917, the Bolshevik revolution, led by Lenin, brought about a radical new form of government with world wide implications. Lenin was a fervent Marxist and wasted little time in implementing his version of a 'dictatorship of the Proletariat'. Communist Russia divided the world. It was seen by some as an alternative to the inequities of Capitalism and by others as an embodiment of totalitarianism and lack of freedom.

Invasion of Poland

1st September 1939

On 1st September, 1939, Hitler's Nazi Germany invaded Poland, ostensibly for 'lebensraum' and to redress the imbalances of the Treaty of Versailles, but the invasion of a sovereign nation finally convinced the allies - Great Britain and France of Hitler's wider intentions for the occupation of Europe. After appeasing Hitler over Austria and Czechoslovakia, Poland proved the final straw and on September 3rd, 1939, Great Britain declared war on Nazi Germany. The Second World War was to last until May 1945, costing the lives of approximately 50 million people. Less well known is that, under a secret Nazi-Soviet pact the Soviet Union also occupied parts of Poland at the same time as Germany's invasion.

 

Pearl Harbour 1941

December 7, 1941

"A day that will live in infamy" - President Franklin D. Roosevelt
In 1941, the axis powers held a supremacy over Europe and parts of Asia. Great Britain stood undefeated, but, without the strength to win against an overpowering enemy. The bombing of Pearl Harbour, led to the escalation of the world war into the Pacific arena and also brought American into war with both Japan and Germany. Three years later, it was American troops who provided the majority of the manpower in the liberation of occupied Europe.

Atomic Bomb Hiroshima

August 6, 1945

The US atomic bombs of 1945, devastated the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The devastation finally brought the Japanese to surrender, bringing to an end a fierce and costly Pacific war. The surrender of Japan had at one time seen unthinkable. But, the atomic bomb hastened the Japanese surrender. The atomic bomb had implications beyond just the end of the Second World War. It showed the world the potential devastation a third world war could cause. Even now the legacy of Hiroshima and the threat of nuclear war hangs over the world.

Indian Independence 1947

15 August 1947

India had stood as the crowing jewel in the crown of the British Empire. It was the second most populous nation in the world. After many years denying Indian calls for independence, Britain finally agreed to full Indian independence in 1947. Indian independence was accompanied by a painful separation and the birth of a new nation - Pakistan. The separation led to painful incidences of sectarian violence and killing; it led to the migration of many millions of people who found themselves on the wrong side of the border. The independence of India also created a new independent nation which claimed allegiance to neither US or the Soviet Union - but a third way as Nehru called it. With economic development, India has the potential to become a new superpower in the coming century.

The Establishment of Maoist China

October 1, 1949

In the aftermath of the second world war, China was involved in a bitter civil war between the Communists led by Mao Tse Tung and the Nationalists by Chiang Kai-shek,. On October 1st, 1949, the triumphant Communist Party established the People's Republic of China. This created another powerful Communist State in the most populated country in the world. The Communist hold on power, profoundly influenced the lives of the Chinese who suffered under the great famine of the 1960s and Cultural Revolution of the 60s and 70s. Even now, the Chinese Communist party retains strong political power - even if it has adapted its economic policies.

Assassination of John F Kennedy

November 22, 1963

One of the most shocking and unexpected moments of world history. John F Kennedy had been President since his election in 1960. He was young, liberal and Catholic and had inspired many with his positive vision of the world.

"My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what can you do for your country."

(JFK from Inauguration speech Jan 1961)
After his assassination, Lyndon Johnson became President and American involvement in Vietnam grew, leading to a bitter conflict that came to divide America. Although Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for the assassination, evidence points to a wider conspiracy and the involvement of more than one lone gunmen.

Fall of the Berlin Wall

November 9, 1989

For decades, the Berlin wall had stood as a symbol of the 'Iron Curtain' splitting West and Eastern Europe. On the one side Communist authoritarian states, on the other side liberal democracies. The wall had been built to prevent East Germans escaping into West Germany, indeed many had been shot trying to escape. But, more than anything else its presence was symbolic. The fall of the Berlin wall was an iconic moment when the Soviet Union gave up its grip on Eastern Europe. In the 50s and 60s the Soviet Union had sent tanks to quell independence movements in Hungary and then Czechoslovakia. But, this time, Mikhail Gorbachev, the proponent of Perestroika and Glasnost approved the request for freedom.

9/11 Terrorist Attacks.

11th September 2001

The US had experienced sporadic terrorist attacks before. But, the sheer audacity and scale of these terrorist attacks shocked the US and the world. The loss of life was estimated at just under 3,000. The event changed American foreign policy. It was a motivating factor behind the controversial invasion of Iraq and led to a 'war on terror' symbolised by Guantanamo Bay and a debate over the justification of torture

Nobel Prizes and the Immune System

	Passive Aggressive Treatment Emil von Behring (1901) Von Behring identified factors in blood that neutralize the toxic products from tetanus and diphtheria bacteria, and he showed how these agents could be used to prevent illness and death caused by diphtheria microbes.
	Multiple Lines of Defence Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov and Paul Ehrlich (1908) The immune system works through more than one mechanism: Mechnikov identified phagocyte cells that engulf and devour intruders, Ehrlich's side-chain theory proposed how antibodies released in blood tackle invaders.
	A Shock Response Charles Richet (1913) Richet discovered anaphylaxis, a life-threatening allergic reaction to toxins, which showed how the immune system can damage its host as well as provide protection against disease.
	Complementary Forces Jules Bordet (1919) Factors in blood serum work with antibodies to destroy bacteria, and Bordet's discovery of these complement proteins allowed the creation of tests that could diagnose many dangerous infectious diseases.
	Blood Relations Karl Landsteiner (1930) Landsteiner's discovery of human blood groups, and his system for typing blood, allowed blood transfusions to be carried out without the risk of adverse reactions.
	Raising Self-Awareness Sir Frank MacFarlane Burnet and Peter Medawar (1960) The concept of immunological tolerance showed how the body learns to recognize its own cells and tissues, which prevents the immune system from mounting a response against itself.
	Anatomy of a Killer Gerald Edelman and Rodney Porter (1972) The two scientists independently deciphered the structure of antibodies, which revealed how seemingly identical-looking molecules can target specifically any one of a countless number of invaders for destruction.
	Seeking Signs of Compatibility Baruj Benacerraf, Jean Dausset and George Snell (1980) Breakthroughs from the three researchers helped to build a picture for how a specific set of proteins found on the surface of cells can regulate the immune response.
	Creating Supply on Demand Nils Jerne, Georges Kohler and César Milstein (1984) Jerne's theories provided a clearer image of how the immune system engages antibodies to fight invaders, Köhler and Milstein's techniques for producing specific antibodies on demand helped to create better diagnostic tests and new treatments against diseases.
	Assembly Instructions for Antibodies Susumu Tonegawa (1987) By uncovering the genetic mechanism for the construction of antibodies, Tonegawa revealed how the body can generate millions and millions of antibody proteins from a much smaller number of genes.
	Double-Checking Cells Peter Doherty and Rolf Zinkernagel (1996) Doherty and Zinkernagel's discovery of how the immune system recognizes virus-infected cells uncovered the general mechanisms used by the cellular component of the immune system to distinguish foreign agents from its own cells and tissues.

Interesting science facts

Interesting science facts

In October 1999 an Iceberg the size of London broke free from the Antarctic ice shelf .

The Earth spins at 1,000 mph but it travels through space at an incredible 67,000 mph.

October 12th, 1999 was declared “The Day of Six Billion” based on United Nations projections.

It takes 8 minutes 17 seconds for light to travel from the Sun’s surface to the Earth.

10 percent of all human beings ever born are alive at this very moment.

The speed of light is generally rounded down to 186,000 miles per second. In exact terms it is 299,792,458 m/s (metres per second - that is equal to 186,287.49 miles per second).

One million, million, million, million, millionth of a second after the Big Bang the Universe was the size of a …pea.

DNA was first discovered in 1869 by Swiss Friedrich Mieschler.

The molecular structure of DNA was first determined by Watson and Crick in 1953.

The first synthetic human chromosome was constructed by US scientists in 1997.

The thermometer was invented in 1607 by Galileo.

Englishman Roger Bacon invented the magnifying glass in 1250.

Alfred Nobel invented dynamite in 1866.

Wilhelm Rontgen won the first Nobel Prize for physics for discovering X-rays in 1895.

Utopia is a large, smooth lying area of Mars.

On the day that Alexander Graham Bell was buried the entire US telephone system was shut down for 1 minute in tribute.

The low frequency call of the humpback whale is the loudest noise made by a living creature.

The call of the humpback whale is louder than Concorde and can be heard from 500 miles away.

Each person sheds 40lbs of skin in his or her lifetime.

At 15 inches the eyes of giant squids are the largest on the planet.

The largest galexies contain a million, million stars.

The Universe contains over 100 billion galaxies.

Wounds infested with maggots heal quickly and without spread of gangrene or other infection.

More germs are transferred shaking hands than kissing.

The longest glacier in Antarctica, the Almbert glacier, is 250 miles long and 40 miles wide.

The fastest speed a falling raindrop can hit you is 18mph.

A healthy person has 6,000 million, million, million haemoglobin molecules.

A salmon-rich, low cholesterol diet means that Inuits rarely suffer from heart disease.

The world’s smallest winged insect, the Tanzanian parasitic wasp, is smaller than the eye of a housefly.
If the Sun were the size of a beach ball then Jupiter would be the size of a golf ball and the Earth would be as small as a pea.

The tallest tree ever was an Australian eucalyptus - In 1872 it was measured at 435 feet tall.

Christian Barnard performed the first heart transplant in 1967 - the patient lived for 18 days.

The wingspan of a Boeing 747 is longer than the Wright brother’s first flight.

Humans have 46 chromosomes, peas have 14 and crayfish have 200.

There are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body.
An individual blood cell takes about 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body.
It would take over an hour for a heavy object to sink 6.7 miles down to the deepest part of the ocean.
There are more living organisms on the skin of each human than there are humans on the surface of the earth.
The grey whale migrates 12,500 miles from the Artic to Mexico and back every year.

Each rubber molecule is made of 65,000 individual atoms.

Around a million, billion neutrinos from the Sun will pass through your body while you read this sentence.

…and now they are already past the Moon.

Quasars emit more energy than 100 giant galaxies.

Quasars are the most distant objects in the Universe.

The saturn V rocket which carried man to the Moon develops power equivalent to fifty 747 jumbo jets.

Koalas sleep an average of 22 hours a day, two hours more than the sloth.

In 5 billion years the Sun will run out of fuel and turn into a Red Giant.

Giraffes often sleep for only 20 minutes in any 24 hours. They may sleep up to 2 hours (in spurts - not all at once), but this is rare. They never lie down.

Every second around 100 lightning bolts strike the Earth.

A typical hurricane produces the energy equivalent to 8,000 one megaton bombs.
90% of those who die from hurricanes die from drowning.

To escape the Earth’s gravity a rocket need to travel at 7 miles a second.

Microbial life can survive on the cooling rods of a nuclear reactor.

Males produce one thousand sperm cells each second - 86 million each day.

Neutron stars are so dense that a teaspoonful would weigh more than all the people on Earth.

Every hour the Universe expands by a billion miles in all directions.

An electric eel can produce a shock of up to 650 volts.

‘Wireless’ communications took a giant leap forward in 1962 with the launch of Telstar, the first satellite capable of relaying telephone and satellite TV signals.

The earliest wine makers lived in Egypt around 2300 BC.

Every year lightning kills 1000 people.

The Earth is 4.56 billion years old…the same age as the Moon and the Sun.

The largest desert in the world, the Sahara, is 3,500,000 square miles.

The largest dinosaur ever discovered was Seismosaurus who was over 100 feet long and weighed up to 80 tonnes.

The largest ever hailstone weighed over 1kg and fell in Bangladesh in 1986.

The dinosaurs became extinct before the Rockies or the Alps were formed.

Female black widow spiders eat their males after mating.

Every year over one million earthquakes shake the Earth.

The risk of being struck by a falling meteorite for a human is one occurence every 9,300 years.

The driest inhabited place in the world is Aswan, Egypt where the annual average rainfall is .02 inches.

The deepest part of any ocean in the world is the Mariana trench in the Pacific with a depth of 35,797 feet.

When a flea jumps, the rate of acceleration is 20 times that of the space shuttle during launch.

Microbial life can survive on the cooling rods of a nuclear reactor.

The African Elephant gestates for 22 months.

If our Sun were just inch in diameter, the nearest star would be 445 miles away.

The Australian billygoat plum contains 100 times more vitamin C than an orange.

Astronauts cannot belch - there is no gravity to separate liquid from gas in their stomachs.

When Krakatoa erupted in 1883, its force was so great it could be heard 4,800 kilometres away in Australia.

The air at the summit of Mount Everest, 29,029 feet is only a third as thick as the air at sea level.

Even travelling at the speed of light it would take 2 million years to reach the nearest large galaxy, Andromeda.

The temperature in Antarctica plummets as low as -35 degrees celsius.
At over 2000 kilometres long The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on Earth.
A thimbleful of a neutron star would weigh over 100 million tons.

In the 14th century the Black Death killed 75,000,000 people. It was carried by fleas on the black rat.

A dog’s sense of smell is 1,000 times more sensitive than a humans.

Micro-organisms have been brought back to life after being frozen in perma-frost for three million years.

Our oldest radio broadcasts of the 1930s have already travelled past 100,000 stars.

Facts, Known and Unknown about INDIA

"India is an abstraction.... India is no more a political personality than Europe. India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the Equator." —Winston Churchill

The name "India" comes from the River Indus, whose valleys were home to an early civilisation. These people referred to the river as the Sindhu, which Persians converted to "Hindu".

Plastic surgery first took place in India around 600 B.C. It was first used to reconstruct the noses of criminals, which had been amputated as punishment, using skin from the forehead. 

The oldest known repair surgery dates back to 49 B.C., when the Hindu surgeon Susruta carried out an operation to treat intestinal perforations and obstructions by joining together the damaged parts of the intestine after cutting into the abdomen. He sutured the segments by placing the freshly-cut heads of giant black ants on the edges of the opposing sections, demonstrating knowledge of the antiseptic properties of the formic acid that is secreted by the ant heads. 

Arabic numerals are not Arabic. While Europe obtained this system from the Arabs, the Arabs in turn obtained this system from the Hindus around the middle of the eighth century. The Hindu writer Aryabhata first described the new system in the year 499. The invention of the sign for zero made arithmetic computation much easier. In contrast, calculation was more awkward in the Roman numeral system. 

Marco Polo reported a strict sense of justice in India. If a man would not pay his debt, the creditor would draw a circle around the debtor. If the debtor should try to step out of the circle, he would be liable to punishment by death.

Babur, the first Moghul emperor of India, marched through the Khyber Pass onto the North Indian plain in 1526. The then North Indian ruler, an Afghan king, Sultan Ibrahim, leading an army of 100,000 men, attacked the invaders and lost, despite the nearly ten-to-one odds in manpower in his favour. The reason for Babur's triumph was an ancient Chinese invention that the Sultan had never heard of - gunpowder.

The political unification of North India began with Akbar, the Moghul emperor (1556-1605). Prior to Akbar, the Muslim rulers of India regarded non-Muslims as second-class citizens who had to pay a poll tax (ziziya) to live in a Muslim land. Akbar, on the other hand, married women of royal Hindu families, gave Hindus access to the inner circles of his court, and abolished the ziziya and the Hindu pilgrimage tax.

Akbar, third Moghul Emperor of India (1556-1605), was not only a brilliant general and ferocious fighter, but also imported rare plants and grasses, grafted trees, crossbred doves, maintained zoological notebooks, commissioned translations of Aristotle and other Greek philosophers, wrote letters to the Pope and to two Spanish kings, and initiated the first Anglo-Indian diplomatic relationship when he corresponded with Queen Elizabeth I. 

Persian poet Abul Feizi Hindi, personal tutor to the three sons of the Moghul Emperor Akbar, was paid annually for 15 years the equivalent sum of gold of the combined weight of his three students.

The fourth Moghul Emperor, Jahangir, who ruled from 1605 to 1627, had a harem of 300 royal wives, 5,000 more women, and 1,000 young men for alternate pleasures. His stables contained 12,000 elephants, 10,000 oxen, 2,000 camels, 3,000 deer, 4,000 dogs, 100 tame lions, 500 buffalo, and 10,000 carrier pigeons.

The Taj Mahal in Agra, one of the world's most beautiful buildings, was built by the Moghul emperor Shah Jahan (1627-1659) as a mausoleum for one of his wives, Mumtaz Mahal, who, on her deathbed in 1631, extracted a promise from her husband to take care of her children and to build a suitable monument for her. Masons from northern India, calligraphers from Baghdad and Shiraz, and various specialists from all around the Muslim world designed and supervised building activities as well as planning the garden. The work was coordinated by Ustad Isa from Lahore. 

The first six Moghul Emperors of India ruled in an unbroken succession from father to son for nearly 200 years, from 1526 to 1707, a remarkable feat as there was no tradition of primogeniture and the contest for the throne was often bloody.

The Taj Mahal was scheduled to be torn down in the 1830s so that its marble facing could be auctioned off in London to the landed English gentry. Wrecking machinery was moved into the garden grounds and work was about to begin when word came from London to cancel the demolition. The first auction of marble facades of Indian buildings had been a failure, so tearing down the 200-year-old mausoleum would not be worth it. 

Over a period of 500 years, a secret religious sect in India called the Thugs ritually murdered about 12 million people. The term "thug" originally was Hindi for "swindler". Starting in the thirteenth century, the Thugs travelled about India in bands, preying on travellers, whom they would strangle and rob. The Thugs were fanatically devoted to Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction. They lasted until around the 1830's, when the occupying British destroyed the destructive sect.

The first successful corneal transplant was performed as early as 1835 by a British army surgeon in India whose pet antelope, who had only one eye, had a badly scarred cornea. He removed a cornea from a recently killed antelope and transplanted it into his pet's eye. The operation was a success, and the pet was able to see. 

India has a bill of rights for cows. 

36% of NASA employees, 34% of Microsoft employees, 28% of IBM employees, 17% of Intel employees, and 13% of Xerox employees are Indians.

In the late nineteenth century, the Duke of Beaufort learned a game called "poona" in India. Attempting to introduce the game into England, he found Englishmen reluctant to play a game called "poona". He renamed the game "badminton", after his estate in Somerset, and it caught on.

Four major religions were born in India: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. These religions are followed by 25% of the world's population.

In 1907, the British Plague Commission in India reported an outbreak of bubonic plague that took six months just to move 300 feet.

As a gesture of contempt for a defeated monarch, the Rajah of Partabgarh crowned a jackal as ruler of Garwara. The jackal reigned for 12 years.

A few decades ago, when a bus fell into a river just outside New Delhi, all 78 passengers drowned because they belonged to two separate castes, and did not share a rope that would have allowed them to climb to safety. 

More mosques (300,000) are in India than in any other country. 

India is the world's largest democracy, with an estimated 550 million voters. 

In 1974, H. M. Chennabasappa, Public Works Minister for the state of Kamataka, India, informed the state legislature that his political enemies had hired witches and sorcerers to kill him. The state's chief minister ordered senior police officials to find the sorcerers. 

Despite the fact that it has been illegal to demand a dowry as a condition of marriage in India since 1961, in 1987 at least 1,786 Indian brides were killed by their husbands or their husbands' families because their dowries were too small.

In Pandhurna, India, the annual Gotmaar Festival is held. After a full moon in early September, all activity in the village ceases, and the males of the village divide themselves into two groups, spending the rest of the day attempting to injure or kill as many of the opposing group as possible by throwing rocks.

The first temple in the world made out of granite is the Brihadeswara Temple at Tanjavur, Tamil Nadu, India. The shikhara of the temple is made from a single 80-tonne piece of granite. The temple was built in just five years (1004–1009), during the reign of Rajaraja Chola.