1927
Heisenberg states uncertainty principle
Werner Heisenberg, working on a problem in the new quantum mechanics, showed that you cannot know both where a particle is and where it is going with perfect accuracy. The universe, at its smallest scales, was genuinely fuzzy. Einstein hated it. Most physicists, eventually, did not. Classical certainty was gone for good.
Chiang Kai-shek purges communists in Shanghai
After cooperating with Chinese communists against the warlords, Chiang Kai-shek turned on his allies in Shanghai, using Green Gang gangsters and Nationalist troops to slaughter thousands of labor organizers and party members in a single bloody week. The first united front was over. The Chinese Communist Party went underground and to the countryside, where Mao was waiting.
The Jazz Singer opens in New York
Al Jolson turned to the camera and said, Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet. Audiences nearly jumped out of their seats. Sound had entered cinema. Within three years the silent film industry, with its mime geniuses and orchestral pits, was gone, and Hollywood spoke a new commercial language.
Lindbergh lands in Paris
After thirty-three hours alone in a single-engine Spirit of St. Louis, chewing sandwiches and fighting sleep, Charles Lindbergh touched down at Le Bourget to a crowd of a hundred and fifty thousand. The first solo non-stop New York-to-Paris flight made him the most famous man alive. The airplane had shrunk the Atlantic.
Shanghai massacre turns China communist
Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists, allied with Shanghai's Green Gang, massacred their Communist partners in the streets of the city, killing thousands of labor organizers. The first united front collapsed. Mao and his comrades, chased into the countryside, began building a peasant army. The seeds of 1949 were planted in the gutters of Shanghai.
Trotsky expelled from Communist Party
After losing the Soviet power struggle, Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party he had helped found. Exiled first to Kazakhstan, then abroad, he would wander Europe warning against Stalin for thirteen years before an agent with an ice axe caught up to him in Mexico City in 1940.