1926
Baird demonstrates television
In a London attic John Logie Baird transmitted the flickering image of a ventriloquist's dummy across a few feet of wire. The picture was blurry and orange. The scientists he invited to watch were unimpressed. Within a generation the little machines would be in every parlor in the Western world, rearranging family life.
British General Strike
Coal miners walked out, then transport workers, printers, dockers, and ironworkers joined them in solidarity. For nine days Britain held its breath as middle-class volunteers drove buses and the cabinet nearly panicked at the specter of revolution. The TUC called it off without winning anything. The defeat shaped British labor relations, and the left's sense of its own limits, for half a century.
First television transmission
In a London attic, John Logie Baird successfully transmitted the image of a ventriloquist's dummy's face across a few feet of wire. The resolution was terrible; Baird's machinery was a nightmare of spinning disks. But the moving human face had traveled through space as an electrical signal. Television had been born in a dusty room.
Byrd flies over the North Pole
American aviator Richard Byrd and his pilot Floyd Bennett claimed to have flown a Fokker trimotor over the geographic North Pole from a base on Spitsbergen. Later analysis of his diary suggested he had turned back short. The glory was real enough at the time. A parade on Broadway followed.
Agatha Christie disappears
The thirty-six-year-old mystery writer vanished from her Berkshire home, leaving her car near a chalk pit. For eleven days, fifteen thousand volunteers searched the countryside while the press speculated she had been murdered. She was found at a spa hotel in Yorkshire under the name of her husband's mistress. She never explained.