6 Major Events That Happened 100 Years Ago
One hundred years isn’t a terribly long time in the grand scheme of things, but a look back at life in 1926 reveals just how much the world has changed in a century.
The global population was around 2 billion people in 1926, compared to more than 8 billion now. Global leaders included Japan’s Hirohito, then embarking on a tenure that made him the longest-reigning emperor in the country’s history, and England’s King George V, the grandfather of a future queen named Elizabeth.
In the United States, where Calvin Coolidge was serving as the 30th U.S. president, workers earned an average of 93.7 cents an hour. Those who saved up could buy a new car for under $1,000, while many could easily part with the 20 cents for a ticket to watch one of the new sound films of the day, featuring stars such as John Barrymore.
But as old-fashioned as some of those names and numbers seem now, the year also gave rise to seminal events that had major reverberations into the decades that followed. Here are six such moments, from the headline grabbers to the quiet groundbreakers, that unfurled in the gone-but-not-forgotten year of 1926.
January 26: A Working Television Is Demonstrated
Building on the work of 19th-century German engineer Paul Nipkow, Scottish inventor John Logie Baird unveiled his “televisor” to members of the Royal Institution in London with a transmission of a ventriloquist dummy’s face. Baird’s creation worked by way of rotating disks that converted slivers of captured light into electrical signals, which were picked up by a receiver that reconverted them back into light and produced fuzzy but discernable images.
As for the dummy’s head, this was less a comment on the dangers facing future couch potatoes than the practical matter of the incandescent lights used to provide illumination being uncomfortably hot and bright. Developing technology soon made the process safer for the live humans being recorded, and within two years, Baird also achieved both the first color and first transatlantic television transmissions.
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March 7: The First Transatlantic Phone Call
Following the successful one-way transmissions of electromagnetic voice messages from the United States to recipients in Europe in 1915 and 1923, AT&T engineers finally managed to foster the first two-way phone call between participants in New York and London.
According to observers, the subject matter of the consequential call was decidedly mundane for such a major moment, with the two sides reverting to the usual small talk of commiserating about the weather. The conversation has also been surprisingly downplayed in telecommunications history. A January 1927 call between the heads of AT&T and the British General Post Office, which paved the way for public use of the service, is often celebrated as the first “official” transatlantic phone call as it was more heavily publicized and marked the beginning of official transatlantic phone service.
March 10: The Book of the Month Club Launches
At a time when books were expensive and public libraries weren’t widespread, American advertising executive Harry Scherman unveiled a mail-order venture to bring reading material to the masses. His idea was a subscription service in which a panel of experts chose a hardcover book to be delivered to members every month, with the inaugural selection being Lolly Willowes, or the Loving Huntsman, by Sylvia Townsend Warner.
The Book of the Month Club quickly gained a following, with readers being introduced to now-classics such as Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. By the late 1980s, the service boasted 1.5 million subscribers. Although the business cratered with the arrival of the internet and online competitors, a revamped Book of the Month (minus “Club”) returned in 2015 with a new business model to keep the business competitive into a new century.
March 16: The First Liquid-Fueled Rocket Flight
A visitor to an Auburn, Massachusetts, farm in late winter 1926 would have encountered the curious sight of a 10-foot rocket and its supporting metal frame standing out from the snow-covered field. Its owner, Clark University physics professor Robert H. Goddard, was a longtime rocketry enthusiast who was enamored with the idea of achieving high-altitude propulsion. Believing the solution lay in the utilization of liquids over traditional gunpowder fuel, Goddard built his own working projectile to be powered by tanks of gasoline and liquid oxygen.
As with the Wright brothers’ first airplane flight, the modest measurements logged for this particular effort — the rocket was airborne for 2.5 seconds and reached an altitude of 41 feet — paled in comparison with the historical impact of the undertaking. Although the U.S. government showed little interest in Goddard’s work, he was belatedly recognized as a pioneer in the field that made space travel possible.
August 6: The First Woman To Swim Across the English Channel
Following the successful English Channel crossings of five male swimmers, American Olympic gold medalist Gertrude Ederle plunged into the water off France’s Cap Gris-Nez in her quest to become the first woman to accomplish the feat. Ederle had failed in a previous attempt, partly due to the thick one-piece bathing suit that slowed her down, but this time she embarked on the undertaking clad in a lighter one-piece suit and slathered in grease to protect against the cold water and jellyfish stings.
Buoyed by supplies of chicken legs and soup from the accompanying support boat, and by the promise of a new car from her father, an exhausted Ederle completed her 35-mile journey at Kingsdown, England, where an official reportedly asked for her passport. The “Queen of the Waves” received a more welcome reception back in the United States with a ticker-tape parade in New York City, while her time of 14 hours and 39 minutes remained a record — for men and women — until it was surpassed in 1951.
December 3: Agatha Christie Disappears
Already famed for her mystery novels, English author Agatha Christie offered up a whodunit of her own after slipping out of her Sunningdale home in England on a Friday evening and leaving her abandoned car to be found the following day. The subsequent search became international news, with fellow detective novelists Arthur Conan Doyle and Dorothy L. Sayers even enlisted to aid with their alleged expertise.
Following 11 days of speculation about her whereabouts and well-being, Christie was found at a Yorkshire spa, unhurt but said to be suffering from amnesia — a possible explanation for why she had registered under the name of her husband’s mistress. The author offered little public explanation of the matter, although she provided a possible clue to her reasons for suddenly vanishing when she divorced her husband less than two years later.
