The 20th Century: 100 Years of History by Decade Quiz

Answer: 1945

The justification for dropping atomic bombs on Japanese cities was that it would end the war and it would save lives on both sides. The former statement proved to be true, the second is controversial. The Pacific War ended when Emperor Hirohito announced the Japanese surrender on August 15 1945, six days after the dropping of the second bomb on Nagasaki. The saving of American lives is also likely to be true given the Americans were preparing to invade the main Japanese islands after Okinawa on two fronts. Operation Torch, on Kyushu, was scheduled for November 1. With Operation Coronet the main island of Honshu would be invaded in the spring of 1946. The two operations combined were called Operation Downfall. These invasions would have caused large American casualty numbers for three reasons:
1. Field Marshall Hisaichi Terauchi had ordered that every Allied prisoner of war (around 100 000 men) be killed if the Americans invaded the Home Islands
2. There were few good landing sites on the four main islands; both sides knew this and it was assumed that Japanese forces would be concentrated at these places.
3. Japanese military culture had the determination to fight literally to the death. The Japanese saw suicide as the honorable alternative to surrendering. This was called "gyokusai", or, "shattering of the jewel". In 1944 Prime Minister Hideki Tojo had asked his people for "100 million gyokusai," and that the entire population be prepared to die.

Many argued that Japanese lives would be saved as well as the country had little access to food and was starving. However, the two atomic bombs killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. The mechanism was compared to the fire bombing of Dresden and Tokyo (the latter never happened). It appears no-one considered the thousands of later deaths from radiation-related illness due to the literal fallout of the atomic bombs.

Answer: 1928

Sir Alexander Fleming, a Scot and a scientific researcher, is credited with the discovery of penicillin in 1928, whilst working at St Mary's Hospital in London. Returning to his lab after a two week break, he discovered that a mold had developed on a contaminated staphylococcus culture plate. He noticed that the culture prevented the growth of staphylococci, a major cause of bacterial infections. He published this information in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology in 1929, which read in part, "The staphylococcus colonies became transparent and were obviously undergoing lysis ... the broth in which the mold had been grown at room temperature for one to two weeks had acquired marked inhibitory, bactericidal and bacteriolytic properties to many of the more common pathogenic bacteria."

Fleming ceased his work on penicillin in 1931 but in the same year, Howard Flory and Ernst Chain, researchers at University of Oxford are credited with the development of penicillin for use as a medicine by developing way to propagate the fungus in commercial quantities by 1942. Penicillin drastically reduced the number of deaths and amputations of troops during World War II.

The discovery of penicillin changed the world of medicine enormously. With its development, infections that were previously severe and often fatal, like bacterial endocarditis, bacterial meningitis and pneumococcal pneumonia, could be easily treated. Other antibiotics, penicillin derivatives, were developed subsequently. It is really impossible to imagine what the world would be like without penicillin. One must question whether there would be a discipline of infectious diseases as we know it today if it not for the discovery of penicillin.

Pneumococcal pneumonia was treated in the 1930s with limited success withantisera and sulfonamides, but use of these treatments ceased when the more effective penicillin was used. Pharmaceutical industries quickly began to assess a variety of other natural products for antibacterial activity, which led to even more effective antibiotics, such as streptomycin, aminoglycosides, tetracycline and later, fluoroquinalones.

Penicillin for the treatment of major infections such pneumococcal pneumonia and bacterial endocarditis never had a randomized, controlled trial. This was because the difference with treatment was so obvious that the now mandatory randomized controlled trial was bypassed in order to produce penicillin more quickly to reduce fatalities caused by infectious disease.

Answer: 1903

Orville Wright piloted the first powered airplane approximately 20 feet above a Kitty Hawk beach in North Carolina on December 17, 1903. The flight lasted 12 seconds and covered 120 feet. A total of three more flights were made later that day with brother Wilbur the pilot on the record flight that lasted 59 seconds and covered 852 feet.

The brothers began their flight experiments in 1896 at their bicycle repair shop in Dayton, Ohio. Kitty Hawk Beach was chosen as a proving ground because of a known constant wind. In 1902 they went to the beach with a glider they had manufactured and made more than 100 successful flights.

To move to powered flight, no automobile manufacturer could provide an engine that was both light and powerful to lift their plane, the Wright flyer. They therefore designed and built their own. On the day before their successful flight the brothers notified several newspapers but only one, the local journal, actually mentioned the event.

Answer: 1991

In 1991 in Switzerland Tim Berners-Lee, a computer programmer introduced the World Wide Web to the world: an Internet that was not just a method to send files from one computer to another but was itself became a "web" of information that anyone on the network could access. Berners-Lee had created the Internet that we take for granted at our fingertips today. However, the infrastructure required to create the internet had been developed as early as the sixties.

In 1962, a scientist from M.I.T. called J.C.R. Licklider proposed a solution to the problem of the Cold War concern of a Soviet attack on the US telephone network: a "galactic network" of computers that could talk to each another. In 1965, another M.I.T. scientist developed a way of sending information from one computer to another that was called "packet switching". Packet switching breaks data down into blocks called packets, before sending it to its destination. In 1969, ARPAnet (a network of computers in three states) delivered its first message: a "node-to-node" communication from one computer to another - the word "Login" of which the first two letters reached the second remote computer.

By 1979, a computer scientist named Vinton Cerf had solved difficulties in connecting a network of computers, by developing a way for all of the computers on the world's mini-networks to communicate with one another. This invention was called "Transmission Control Protocol," or TCP. Later came a second method known as "Internet Protocol", known today as TCP/IP. This, as described by a writer in the popular press, was "the 'handshake' that introduces distant and different computers to each other in a virtual space". This protocol facilitated the Internet into a worldwide network. Tim Berners-Lee took this work a step further and introduced the World Wide Web: an Internet that was not just a method to send files from one place to another but was itself a "web" of information that anyone on the Internet could retrieve. The invention of the first browser, "Mosaic" then renamed "Netscape" soon followed.

Answer: 1914

Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie were shot and killed by a Bosnian Serb nationalist during an official visit to the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo in June 1914. Bosnia and Herzegovina had been annexed by Austria-Hungary in 1908. The annexation had troubled Serbian nationalists, who believed these two territories should be part of Serbia. A group of Serbian nationalists devised to kill the archduke during his visit to Sarajevo. Gavrilo Princip shot the royal couple at point-blank range, whilst in their official procession, killing both.

This triggered a rapid chain of events, as Austria-Hungary blamed the Serbian government for the attack. Russia supported Serbia. In July, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia after demanding presenting an ultimatum to Serbia. Russia then declared war on Austria-Hungary, Germany declared war on Russia, and France and Britain declared war on Germany and Austria-Hungary. This was the start of World War I.

Answer: 1939

Poland was prime real estate, a wide flat fertile plain. In 1938 Hitler viewed the conquest of Poland to bring Lebensraum, or "living space," for the German people. In his plan, the "racially superior" Germans would colonise Poland and the native Slavic people would be expelled. German expansion had already occurred with the annexation of Austria and then with the occupation of the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia in 1939. No hostilities has been raised by the major powers in these prior takeovers, and Hitler hoped the same would occur with his invasion of Poland.

On August 31, Nazi SS troops in Polish uniforms faked an invasion of Germany, damaging several small facilities on the German side of its border with Poland. A few dead concentration camp prisoners in Polish uniforms were left at the scene as additional evidence of the so-called Polish invasion. Nazi propagandists publicised this "invasion" as an "unforgivable act of aggression" and retaliated less than eight hours later when 1.5 million German troops invaded Poland along its 1,750-mile border with Germany. At the same time the German Luftwaffe bombed Polish airfields, and Polish naval forces in the Baltic Sea were attacked and warships sunk. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler stated the invasion was a defensive action. Great Britain and France took exception, and on September 3, they declared both war on Germany, starting World War II.

Answer: 1961

At the end of World War II in 1945, Germany was divided into four Allied occupation zones. Berlin, was also divided into occupation sectors, despite being geographically within the Soviet zone. In 1948 the United States, Britain, and France introduced the newly created Deutsche Mark in their sectors of Berlin. This caused the USSR to launch a land blockade of West Berlin to force the allies to abandon the city. This was thwarted by a massive airlift as Britain and the United States provided West Berlin with food and fuel which lasted until May 1949 when the Soviets ended the blockade.

Between 1949 and 1961, over 2.5 million East Germans migrated from East to West Germany, mostly via West Berlin. Khrushchev wanted this movement in Berlin stopped. During August 12-13, 1961, East German soldiers constructed a barrier made up of more than 30 miles of wall through the centre of Berlin. East Berliners were not allowed to pass into West Berlin. On August 15, they began replacing barbed wire with a concrete wall, 15 feet high in places. In western Europe and North America, the Berlin Wall was a symbol representing communist oppression. Around 5,000 East Germans escaped across the Berlin Wall to the West, but 191 were killed trying.

The wall came down in 1989 in the face of the democratisation of Eastern Europe. A year later Germany was united again.

Answer: 1957

The Soviet Union launched the earth's first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957. This was seen as something far more important than the launch of the first artificial satellite: In the Cold War climate of the time, it instilled fear in America who now believed the Soviets were technologically superior to the Americans whose attempts to launch an artificial satellite had all failed

In World War II Germany had almost launched an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). Now German scientists were assisting both sides to produce ICBMs but the Soviets launched theirs first soon after the Sputnik launch, further enhancing their technological advancement.

Sputnik's success had a major impact on the Cold War and in the United States. Fear of falling behind caused U.S. policy makers to increase funding for both space and weapons programs. In the late 1950s, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev boasted about Soviet technological superiority and growing stockpiles of ICBMs, so the United States worked simultaneously to develop its own ICBMs to counter what it assumed was a growing stockpile of Soviet missiles directed against the United States. Sputnik had fueled both the space race and the arms race as well as increasing Cold War tensions due each country trying to devise new methods of attacking the other. The space race was "won" when the Americans landed on the moon a mere twelve years later, twelve years after Sputnik.

Answer: 1986

The cause of the Chernobyl disaster was attributed to poor design of the nuclear reactor and inadequately trained personnel. Additional factors such as lack of regulation and disaster unpreparedness resulted in thousands of deaths due to radiation exposure. This information took years to be reported and, because of the near miss at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, global fear of nuclear energy emerged and the industry which was seen as the saviour to the non-renewable fossil fuel industries, faltered.

The accident destroyed the Chernobyl 4 reactor and killed 30 workers within three months. Acute radiation syndrome (ARS) was confirmed in another 134 cases killing 28 people within a few weeks of the accident. An additional nineteen more subsequently died from ARS between 1987 and 2004. Over 20 000 people living in the six countries surrounding, and including Ukraine subsequently contracted thyroid cancer due to radioactive iodine being released into the atmosphere.
In 2011, Chernobyl was declared safe for habitation and it ironically became a tourist attraction. There were no major nuclear accidents in the world between 1986 and 2011.

Answer: 1919

The Treaty of Versailles was the formal end of WWI, exactly five years from the day it began. It was meant to bring peace to the world and Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Point Plan was the genesis of the treaty. Indeed the treaty did contain a charter for the League of Nations. However, it placed the burden of war guilt wholly on Germany. As well it imposed severe reparations payments on Germany, most of which were not paid. The treaty also created an increased number of new smaller nations which were less stable than the larger fewer pre-war larger nations . As such the treaty ultimately did not address the issues that caused the outbreak of the war in the first place and indeed, its lasting resentful legacy on the German nation contributed to the reasons another massive global conflict commencing 20 years later. The French wanted Germany to pay a heavy price for the war so it would never be invaded by Germany again. In addition to forcing Germany to accept the war and pay massive payments to other countries, the treaty forced Germany to give up territory to adjacent nations Belgium, Czechoslovakia and Poland, return Alsace-Lorraine regions to France and give up all of its overseas colonies and territories in the Pacific and Africa to the Allies. Germany also had to reduce its army to 100,000 men and its navy to 15,000 and dismantle its air force and submarine fleet.

Most Germans were angry about the Treaty of Versailles, calling it a "Diktat" (dictated peace). This unrest manifested itself in the government of the new Weimar Republic and facilitated the rise of Hitler.