1928
Fleming discovers penicillin
Returning from holiday to his cluttered London lab, Alexander Fleming noticed a mold had colonized one of his bacterial plates and killed the staph around it. He wrote a paper nobody read and moved on. Ten years later others would turn the accident into a miracle drug that saved more lives than the war killed.
Mickey Mouse premieres in Steamboat Willie
At the Colony Theatre in New York a small round-eared mouse whistled his way through a synchronized cartoon, one of the first with a fully integrated soundtrack. Walt Disney, broke and desperate, had staked everything on sound. The audience howled with delight. A new empire of animation, merchandising, and American childhood was taking shape in a rented California shed.
Jinan incident
Japanese troops clashed with Chinese Nationalist forces in the Shandong city of Jinan, slaughtering thousands of Chinese civilians and diplomats in an incident that fueled Chinese hatred of Japan for a generation. It was one of the preliminary skirmishes of what would eventually become the Second Sino-Japanese War nine years later, the bloodiest theater of the Pacific conflict.
Stalin launches first Five-Year Plan
To catch up with the West in ten years or be crushed, Stalin ordered forced collectivization of peasant farms and breakneck industrialization at any human cost. Kulaks were liquidated as a class; villages were emptied and their grain confiscated. Steel output soared and millions starved. The Soviet Union became an industrial power on a foundation of corpses and coerced labor.
Kellogg-Briand Pact
Fifteen nations signed a treaty in Paris renouncing war as an instrument of national policy, with the American and French foreign ministers as its architects. Eventually sixty-two nations signed on. It was the high-water mark of interwar idealism. It had no enforcement mechanism and was broken everywhere within a decade. Still, its language seeded later war crimes law and the United Nations Charter.
Amelia Earhart crosses the Atlantic
At thirty, Amelia Earhart became the first woman to cross the Atlantic by airplane, though on this first flight she was only a passenger. Four years later she would fly it solo, the second person after Lindbergh to do so. She became the most famous woman pilot in the world before disappearing over the Pacific in 1937.