1912
Titanic sinks on maiden voyage
Four days out of Southampton the largest ship ever built struck an iceberg on a glassy North Atlantic night. There were lifeboats for only half the two thousand two hundred aboard. Fifteen hundred drowned or froze in black water. The century's faith in engineering progress took its first very public wound.
Fenway Park opens
On the same day the Titanic sinking dominated the front pages, a small baseball park with an odd-angled left-field wall opened in Boston's Fens. It would still be in use a century later, the oldest park in Major League Baseball. American urban landscape had a new and stubborn minor landmark.
First Balkan War breaks out
Montenegro, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece launched a coordinated attack on the decaying Ottoman Empire in Europe, forming the Balkan League. Within weeks Ottoman armies collapsed and centuries of Turkish rule in the Balkans ended. The victors then turned on each other in a second war over the spoils. The region would soon light the fuse that blew up the continent.
Wegener proposes continental drift
A young German meteorologist pointed out that the coast of Africa fit neatly against the coast of South America and suggested the continents had once been joined and had drifted apart. Geologists laughed at him. Fifty years later, the theory of plate tectonics proved him right. Wegener had died in a Greenland blizzard, long before he was believed.
Paul Ehrlich's magic bullet
Paul Ehrlich introduced Salvarsan, his treatment for syphilis, the first chemotherapeutic drug. Chemistry could now cure a disease, not just ease it. Ehrlich had coined the term magic bullet for a drug that would hit a pathogen without harming the host. Modern pharmaceutical medicine had found its first triumph and its guiding metaphor.