Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
1912 German geologist Alfred Wegener (1880-1930) publishes his theory of continental drift; it is
dismissed until evidence collected since the 1960s shows him to be generally correct.
1912 The Titanic , a British passenger liner supposed to be unsinkable, hits an iceberg and sinks,
leaving a death toll of some 1,500. (The wreck of the Titanic was found in 1985 off Newfoundland.)
1913 The Greenwich meridian is accepted internationally as the prime meridian.
1913 The auto-assembly line is introduced by Henry Ford. Cars are built as they move along a con-
veyor, reducing assembly time from twelve and a half, to one and a half hours, radically reducing
the cost of an automobile.
1913 The Balkan Wars. In two wars, the Ottoman Empire loses almost all of its European territory.
1914 The Panama Canal opens, linking the Pacific to the Atlantic by way of the Caribbean Sea. The
forty-mile canal was begun in 1903 after American warships aided a revolt that created the nation
of Panama out of Colombia.
1914 Red and green traffic lights are introduced in Cleveland, Ohio.
1914 The First World War begins. It will last until 1918 and result in a redrawing of the maps of
Europe and the various European colonial possessions around the world.
1915 German Hugo Junkers constructs the first fighter airplane.
1917 The Russian Revolution overthrows Tsar Nicholas II and installs a Communist regime under
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870-1924), founder of the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet state.
1917 The Trans-Siberian Railroad, the world's longest railroad, is completed. Begun in 1891, it
stretches 5,787 miles from Moscow to Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan, and opens up the vast wil-
derness of Siberia to development.
1917 The Balfour Declaration promises a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
1919 The Treaty of Versailles, ending World War I, is imposed on Germany and its allies. Under the
treaty, Germany is stripped of its African colonies and the Alsace-Lorraine region is given to France.
At the same time, major portions of the Middle East—formerly part of the Ottoman Empire, which
had been allied to Germany—were divided among the victorious allies. The British took control of
Palestine, the Transjordan, and Mesopotamia. The French gained control of Lebanon and Syria. The
former empire of Austria-Hungary and the states of Montenegro and Serbia disappeared from the
map. They were carved up and would eventually become Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia.
For the new Poland, a corridor to the Baltic Sea was carved out of Germany and the former German
port of Danzig become the Polish city of Gdansk.
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