1913
Stravinsky riot at Rite of Spring
At the Theatre des Champs-Elysees, Nijinsky's pagan dancers stamped to Stravinsky's shrieking strings and pounding timpani. The Paris audience howled and threw programs. Fistfights broke out in the aisles, and police were called to restore order. Modernism had arrived with a scandal, and the twentieth century could hear its own violent, dissonant pulse in the score.
Ford opens the moving assembly line
At Highland Park, Michigan, Henry Ford broke car assembly into eighty-four steps and passed the chassis down a moving line. Model T build time fell from twelve hours to ninety minutes. He doubled wages to five dollars a day so his workers could buy what they made. Mass production had arrived, and with it a new way of living.
Rutherford models the atom
At Manchester, Ernest Rutherford fired alpha particles at gold foil and found most passed through, but some bounced back. It was, he said, as if you fired artillery at tissue paper and it came back at you. His model of a tiny dense nucleus with orbiting electrons reorganized physics. The atom had a shape.
Federal Reserve Act signed
Woodrow Wilson signed a bill creating the Federal Reserve System, America's central bank, with twelve regional branches and a board in Washington. The law passed after decades of fighting over banking panics. The Fed would become the most powerful economic institution in the world, for good and bad, over the next hundred years.
Suffragettes march on Washington
The day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration, eight thousand women marched down Pennsylvania Avenue demanding the vote. Crowds of men heckled and grabbed at the marchers; police barely intervened, and over a hundred women were hospitalized with injuries. The outrage gave American suffragists the press attention they needed. Seven years later American women would finally have the franchise.