The beginning of the century saw a society still strictly divided by class, Britain with a vast colonial Empire, and an optimism in the advance of science and technology which had so changed the previous century.
On December 17th, 1903, Orville (1871-1948) and Wilbur Wright (1867-1912), cycle makers and repairers who had experimentd with powered flight, made a number of flights at Kill Devil Hill, Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in their heavier-than-air machine, the "Wright Flyer". The fourth and only controlled flight of the day, piloted by Wilbur Wright, covered 259 meters (852 feet) in 59 seconds. By the latter part of the 20th century, aeroplanes had become a means of mass-transport.
The faith in technology as mankind's salvation was severely dented by the horror of the Titanic disaster of 1912 when the "unsinkable" liner slid to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean with the loss of so many lives - of the 2,228 souls on board, only 705 survived.
In 1913, Henry Ford (1863-1947) introduced "production lines" using moving assembly belts into his plants manufacturing his already famous "Model T" motorcar enabling an enormous increase in production at low cost and revolutionising manufacturing industry and the availability of manufactured goods to the masses (half of all cars in the US were Model Ts by 1918 and fifteen million were produced by 1927 - a record unequalled for another 45 years).
In 1914, Europe tumbled headlong into the four years of the horror which was the First World War as a whole generation was wiped out in the trenches. Determined that such a calamity should not befall humankind again, the survivors made the League of Nations, precursor of our modern United Nations which had been mooted before the war without much enthusiasm, a reality.
Not only did the "Great War" etch itself on the maps of Europe and empires, but it also fundementally changed society. The lowly stable-hand and the Lord's son were thrown into the same muddy and bloody trenches, hour after hour, day after day, week after week - and they died in the same futile charge "over the top" which might, or might not, gain a few feet of territory. Following the experiences of the war and the peace of 1918, return to the heirarchical soceity which had existed in 1914, with the master clearly superior over his servants was impossible.
In the meantime, the vast medieval giant in the east which was Russia, a huge agrarian economy relying on peasant labour and ruled over by the Tzars, was abruptly thrown into the twentieth century by revolution. Widespread starvation, exacerbated by the country's involvement in the Great War, coalesced into the "February Revolution" of 1917 when the Liberal-Democrat movement took root amongst the soldiers of the capital Petrograd and led to the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II.
On November 7th (Russia was still using the Julian Calendar so period references gives the date as October 25th was again rocked by the "October Revolution" led by the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin who led his leftist revolutionaries upon the ideas of Karl Marx. This time, the downfall of the ineffective Kerensky Provisional Government did not elvolve from sporadic protests but was deliberately planned. Although the October Revolution was a bloodless coup d'�tat, it threw Russia into a bloody civil war costing thousands of lives and resulting in the Communist dictatorship which would dominate world politics and bring life on the planet close to extermination by nuclear war until the collapse of Russian Communism in 1991.
Alexander Fleming had witnessed first-hand the devastation which bacterial infection could inflict during the war. It was in 1928, while checking petri-dishes innoculated with Staphylococcus bacteria at St Mary's Hospital in London before their cleaning that he noticed an area around a mould was clear of bacterial colonies. Further investigation showed that the mould, Penicillium notatum, produced penicillin, the first of many anti-biotics to be discovered over succeeding decades, and revolutionised mankind's ancient battle with these deadly micro-organisms.
Following the Great War, the United States experienced an economic boom based on new technologies, production processes, management and the increased use of installment credit and, despite a short recession in 1927, the boom continued until September 1929. The bubble burst in October 1929 with frantic selling on "Black Thursday" October 24th, "Black Monday" October 28th and "Black Tuesday" October 29th. Stock prices continued to fall from their record high in September, losing 62 per cent in November and, by June 1932, ninety-one per cent had been lost on the American stock market and the rest of the world followed in the Great Depression".
In the 1930's the Nazis rose to power in Germany under Adolf Hitler and persued a policy of territorial expansion. On their invasion of Poland in September 1939, Britain delcared war against Germany and the world was thrown into another great conflict - World War II.
As World War II draw to a close in 1945 and the Allies liberated Europe, they discovered the horror of the concentration camps which had been established by the Nazis as extermination centres carrying out their policy of ethnic cleansing based on eugenics to the extreme of killing over six million people.
The victory in Europe still left war raging in the Pacific with the loss of huge numbers of Americans. In an (as it turned out, successful) attempt to bring the conflict to a swift conclusion, President Roosevelt authorised the dropping of the first atomic bomb detonated in anger on the Japanese town of Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945 and, three days later, on Nagasaki. The two atomic bombs are estimated to have claimed 214,000 lives.
After the war, various Nazi leaders were tried for "war crimes" including genicide but the victories Allies by-passed the fact that they themselves adopted a policy of crippling German industry and thus German war supplies by the wholesale bombing of German industrial cities with the loss of some half a million civilian lives.
Eugenics, the attempt to understand human behaviour in terms of physical characteristics, regardless of its merits or otherwise as a science, had been discreditted by the political extreme to which the Nazis had taken it. The void in attempts to understand the causes of human behaviour was filled by social anthropologists such as the American Margaret Mead (1901-1978) who studied cultures such as those in the Pacific whose social conventions were very different from those prevailing in the West. The new fashion was to consider differences in behaviour as being caused by environmental factors. This new tack, when reversed, suggested that the individual could be changed by changing his or her environment and, if this was applied to hundreds of thousands of individuals, society itself could be changed.
The new view of the causes of human behaviour was to have a profound effect on political policies through the
remainder of the century, from the proclaimed aim (if rarely met in practice) of
"reforming" rather than
"punishing" criminals, through the relinquishing of
the colonies of Empire whose inhabitants could no longer be yoked to the theory that they were
"inferior" and in some way
"unfit" to govern themselves, to the
implementation of the "Comprehensive" education system
in the UK which assumed that all children, given equal oportunities, could achieve equal results.
| 1912.Apr.15 | | The stern
of the Titanic rose vertically at 0217h as she slid to the bottomof the
Atlantic Ocean | | BAAAGBHQ | | 1967.Dec.03 | | First human heart transplant performed by Dr Christian Barnard in South Africa | | BAAAGBKS |
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