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Merchants and Bankers
From 1900-1950

Trade - an international perspective

This website, produced by Australian historian Dan Byrnes, is a no-frills, text-based website designed simply to list historical and genealogical information on many notable merchants and traders of what is termed, the Western World.

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9 July, 1900: Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act, passed by British Parliament, receives royal assent.

1900: World's first movie?: Made in Melbourne by Salvation Army, on Christian martyrs. Titled "Soldiers of the Cross". Audiences tended to faint at graphic presentations. Centenary reported on Australian TV on 13-9-2000. (This information disputed by some as to status as world/Australian first-ever movie - the other contender movie title is also Australian, however - on bushranger Ned Kelly).

Early 1900s: The philanthropic Saint James Society in the U.S. mounts a campaign to supply free samples of heroin through the mail to morphine addicts who are trying give up their habits. Efforts by the British and French to control opium production in Southeast Asia are successful. Nevertheless, this Southeast region, referred to as the 'Golden Triangle', eventually becomes a major player in the profitable opium trade during the 1940's.

1900: Appearance of Maybach and Daimler's spark-and-carburettor Mercedes auto.

1901: Drillers in Texas find oil and unleash the world's oil industry.

1901: By September is found "one of the most important discoveries in history of science", an ancient Greek computer, discovered in a shipwreck of first-century BC on island of Antikythera. By 1951, Prof. Derek de Solla of Yale University was interested in this object, using x-rays. (Source: James/Thorpe).

1901-13: Japan: Saionji Kinmochi and General Katsura Taro alternated prime minister position

1901: Japan: A massive wave of translation of European literature begins and continues for about a decade. Of particular importance are the works of Zora and Nietzsche, though at first their ideas are translated into bad melodrama.

12 December 1901: Guglielmo Marconi performs the amazing feat of bridging the Atlantic Ocean by wireless signal.
8 December 2001, The Australian newspaper publishes special supplement on ABC - Celebrating Radio, to mark the beginning of radio with the work of Marconi in 12 December 1901.

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1901: In Britain is patented a vacuum cleaner by a bridge engineer, Hubert Cecil Booth, a machine built on a horse-drawn cart with a long hose to be carried into a building.

1902: Women gain the right to vote in Australia (in the US in 1920 - in the UK in 1928).

1902-1925: Prolonged campaign by Abd al-Aziz Ibn Saud, brother of King Feisal, leaders of the Saud tribe, to bring the scattered tribes of Arabia under his rule.

1902: First true equal alliance between a Western nation (Britain) and a non-western nation (Japan) (- against Russia). Oriental Palace Hotel in Yokohama installs electric lights and fans.

1902: In various medical journals, physicians discuss the side effects of using heroin as a morphine step-down cure. Several physicians would argue that their patients suffered from heroin withdrawal symptoms equal to morphine addiction.
From website based on book: Opium: A History, by Martin Booth Simon and Schuster, Ltd., 1996. e-mail info@opioids.com

1903: Heroin addiction in US rises to alarming rates.

1903: Japan: First permanent movie house, The Electric Theater, built in Akasaka entertainment district, Tokyo.

1903: The Wright Brothers fly 36 miles in a biplane in the US, the first powered aeroplane flight (in a "heavier-than-air machine").

November 1903: Boer War ends.

1904-1905: Japan: Russio-Japanese War - victory (control of Korea). The peace treaty (broken by Teddy Roosevelt) strikes many as unfair, and riots break out.

1905: Albert Einstein publishes his Special Theory of Relativity.

1905: 5 September, Ending of Russo-Japanese War.

1905: Japan: Natsume Sooseki, professor of English at Tokyo Imperial University, publishes his I Am a Cat, and the work proves to be popular. Natsume Sooseki's image today graces Japan's most widely circulating denomination of paper currency, the 1,000 yen note.

1905: Japanese navy defeats Russia. Japanese prompted to build up their navy to beat US and UK naval presences in Pacific.

1905: US Congress bans opium.
From website based on book: Opium: A History, by Martin Booth Simon and Schuster, Ltd., 1996. e-mail info@opioids.com

1905: Partition of Bengal by Lord Curzon. (Partition annulled in 1911.)

1906: China and England finally enact a treaty restricting the Sino-Indian opium trade. Several physicians experiment with treatments for heroin addiction. Dr. Alexander Lambert and Charles B. Towns tout their popular cure as the most "advanced, effective and compassionate cure" for heroin addiction. The cure consisted of a seven-day regimen, which included a five-day purge of heroin from the addict's system with doses of belladonna delirium. U.S. Congress passes the Pure Food and Drug Act requiring contents labeling on patent medicines by pharmaceutical companies. As a result, the availability of opiates and opiate consumers significantly declines.

1906-10: Japan: Perhaps Japan's most important national literacy movement, Japanese Naturalism, erupts.

1906: China and England finally enact a treaty restricting the Sino-Indian opium trade. Several physicians experiment with treatments for heroin addiction. Dr. Alexander Lambert and Charles B. Towns tout their popular cure as the most "advanced, effective and compassionate cure" for heroin addiction. The cure consisted of a 7-day regimen, which included a five-day purge of heroin from the addict's system with doses of belladonna delirium. U.S. Congress passes the Pure Food and Drug Act requiring contents labeling on patent medicines by pharmaceutical companies. As a result, the availability of opiates and opiate consumers significantly declines.

1906: US historian Henry Adams (1838-1918) predicts that before 1950 there would be used, "explosives of cosmic force".

1907: Japan: Universal education for 6 years becomes reality

1907: Establishment of Japan's first car company, Hatsudoki Seizo, known since 1951 as Daihatsu.

1907: Emperor Kojong of Korea abdicates; he is succeeded by his son Sujong.

1907: The world's first air force is established as the aeronautical division of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer of the US Army.

1907: Establishment of Japan's first car company, Hatsudoki Seizo, since 1951 known as Daihatsu.

1907: Rise in Turkey of Young Turks movement.

24 January 1907: UK: First boy scout troop is organised by Sir Robert Baden-Powell.

In 1908: Australian businessman, William K. D'Arcy, a solicitor in Rockhampton, Queensland, finds the first oil in the Middle East. He had bought into the gold mine at Mount ? [lost citation - Ed]

1908: Japan: Conservatives object to Naturalism. Boshin Shosho is promulgated to improve the morals of the nation.

1908: Oil in vast quantities is found in Iran.

1908: Wright Brothers patent their flying machine in the US.

1908: Henry Ford introduces the Model-T automobile.

1908: US Atlantic fleet visits Australia, despatched by Pres. Theodore Roosevelt as a goodwill gesture and a show of potential firepower. Ships include: USS Connecticut, Kansas, Vermont, Louisiana, Georgia, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Nebraska, Minnesota, Ohio, Missouri, Virginia, Wisconsin, Illinois, Kentucky and Kearsage.
Check online at: http://www.hazegray.org/features/gwf

1909: The first federal drug prohibition passes in the U.S. outlawing the importation of opium. It was passed in preparation for the Shanghai Conference, at which the US presses for legislation aimed at suppressing the sale of opium to China.

1909: 1 February: The International Opium Commission convenes in Shanghai. Heading the U.S. delegation are Dr. Hamilton Wright and Episcopal Bishop Henry Brent. Both would try to convince the international delegation of the immoral and evil effects of opium.

1909: The first federal drug prohibition passes in the U.S. outlawing the importation of opium. It was passed in preparation for the Shanghai Conference, at which the US presses for legislation aimed at suppressing the sale of opium to China.
From website based on book: Opium: A History, by Martin Booth Simon and Schuster, Ltd., 1996. e-mail info@opioids.com

1909: 1 February: The International Opium Commission convenes in Shanghai. Heading the U.S. delegation are Dr. Hamilton Wright and Episcopal Bishop Henry Brent. Both would try to convince the international delegation of the immoral and evil effects of opium.

1910: After 150 years of failed attempts to rid the country of opium, the Chinese are finally successful in convincing the British to dismantle the India-China opium trade.

1910: Union of South Africa is formed from provinces of Cape of Good Hope, Natal, Transvaal and Orange Free State.

1910.196 - 1911.1: Japan: The High Treason Incident. Severity of censorship increases. Left-wing thinkers are suppressed. The "Winter Years of Socialism" continue until the end of WWI.

1910: Japan: Occupy (colonize) Korea. The first flight of an airplane in Japan.

1910: After 150 years of failed attempts to rid their country of opium, the Chinese are finally successful in convincing the British to dismantle the India-China opium trade.
From website based on book: Opium: A History, by Martin Booth Simon and Schuster, Ltd., 1996. e-mail info@opioids.com

1911: China: Declaration of a republic under Sun-Yat-Sen, who is succeeded by Chiang-Kai-Shek. Later arises the resettlement of Taiwan by such republicans.

By 1911, British explorer Sir Henry Wickham stands beside a large rubber tree in Malaya, grown from seeds be smuggled from Brazil to Kew, 1877 and probably earlier.

1911: Japan: Revision of Anglo-Japanese Alliance; US-Japan, Anglo-Japanese, German-Japanese Treaties of Amity, Trade, and Navigation

1911: First powered aircraft flight in Western Australia made by Joseph Hammond at Perth, in a Bristol Boxkite.

1912: The English capital of India is moved from Calcutta to Delhi.

1912: Brazil's monopoly of rubber production dies as the rubber plantations of the Far East begin to flourish.

1912: Japan: Emperor Meiji dies. End of Meiji period. General Nogi commits suicide to serve his Emperor in death.

1912: Japan: TAISHO Period (1912-26), Emperor Taisho

1913-32: Japan: Taisho democracy

1913: Japan: Political parties win power from other elites. The Women's Movement.

1914-1918 - Entry of Japan into WWI. Japan aligns itself with allies against Germany. Suffers only 1,210 casualties and prospers greatly from increased European demand for its industrial products. The transition from an agricultural society to an industrial one is facilitated.

1914: Formation of Indian Science Congress Association.

1914: Of an Australian population of over four million (4.6 million?), 800,000 been born in the UK. A vast majority had at least one British grandparent (the "crimson thread of kinship", and without the British connection the Australian economy would have foundered. About 331,000 Australian troops went overseas, 215,000 became casualties, 60,000 were killed. There was a 65% chance of becoming a casualty. Australia's voluntary enlistment rate was 7.5 per cent. Women spent 50 million hours knitting socks etc., and raised 16 million pounds for patriotic funds. Some 97% of Australia's population had ancestors in UK or Ireland; about 80% were English or Scots. Since 83% were born in Australia, 17% were recent migrants. Many of the early-enlisting were just off the boat, and possibly genuinely saw themselves as going to confront the enemies of "Home".
(Source: From an article by Carl Bridge in Quadrant.) But on views-of-the-day on social Darwinism, eugenics and racial purity, also the nature-nurture debate, see Paul Crook, 'War's Genetic Disaster? The First World War Debate over the Eugenics of Warfare, War and Society, Vol. 8, No. 1, May 1990., pp. 47ff.

1914: First use of the term, birth control. In June 1914 in a US publication, a term devised by women's rights activist Margaret Sanger and her friends.

August 1914: Australia is at war. (World War I)

4 August 1914: Britain declares war on Germany, which has just invaded Poland. The issue became civilization-against-barbarism.

October 1914: Turkey comes into WWI on Germany's side, and so threatened the east bank of the Suez Canal and on their common border with Russia.

1914: 17 December: The passage of Harrison Narcotics Act which aims to curb drug (especially cocaine but also heroin) abuse and addiction in US. It requires doctors, pharmacists and others who prescribed narcotics to register and pay a tax.

1915: First expression of Theory of Continental Drift (plate tectonics) by German meteorologist, Alfred Wegener. But little supportive evidence is found till the 1960s.

1915 -1921 Demands forced on China - a new concession from China.

21 February 1915: The Germans under Hindenburg heavily defeat the Russians under Siever at the Winter Battle of Masuria. Russians lose more than 20,000 men.

April 1915: Gallipoli: The ships carrying Australian troops are escorted in by Japanese cruisers.

June 1915: A wave of fervour in Australia as 12,500 men volunteer, twice the April intake. By November 1915, Australia was counted as having 60,000 men fit and of military age, govt. asked them if they are willing to enlist. By mid-1916, Australia thought it needed 128,000 men and was 47,000 short, before the Somme battle of July 1916, with huge casualties. Recruiting ran at 6000 men per month.

1915: Outrageous massacre: The Turkish Government massacres up to 1.5 million Christian Armenians as the Ottoman Empire dies. The Turkish leader of the day was Enver Pasha. Judged as one of the greatest crimes against humanity of the Twentieth Century, not surprisingly, later much admired by Adolf Hitler.

18-19 December 1915: Gallipoli: Allied withdrawal on nights, a spectacular success.

1915-1916: Hussein-McMahon correspondence. Britain promises to create an Arab kingdom in exchange for war support.

1916: Sykes-Picot Accords. Secret British-French agreement to divide the postwar Middle East between them.

1916: Mexico: A US force of 12,000 soldiers led by General John Pershing is ordered to Mexico to capture revolutionary leader Pancho Villa.

21 February 1916: Battle of Verdun in France begins World War One. It is the longest and bloodiest battle of the war with more than one million killed.

After July 1916: Australian radicals began to form anti-conscription groups. The trade union movement in NSW and VIC in Sept. 1916 declared against any form of conscription, and unionists warned of a general strike if conscription was introduced.

28 October 1916: A referendum in Australia on conscription, and anti-conscription won narrowly (voting not yet compulsory!!), 2,247,590 voting and NO won by 72,476 votes only.

1916: Arab revolt against Turkish rule. (See career of T. E. Lawrence, "Lawrence of Arabia", and his book, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

1917: Balfour Declaration. In exchange for war support, Britain promises Jews a "national home" in Palestine (without prejudice to the "civil and religious rights" of the non-Jewish population).

1917 Jerusalem recaptured by Allies, World War I following an Australian capture of Beersheba.

January 1917: Lenin in his Zurich exile, trumpeted his faith in socialism to a young audience, sadly concluded, "We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution". Soon he was to be told, "There is a revolution in Russia"". And Lenin could scarcely believe it. He rushed with Krupskaya to the lakeside for newspapers, and read telegraphed reports. He wanted mightily to find a way back to Russia. Might he pose as a neutral Swede? He met with other revolutionaries in Switzerland. Martov suggested the sealed train idea. Which appeared, with the help of Parvus (ie, Helphand).

About 28 February 1917: In three days the 400-year-old Romanov dynasty collapses. Whilst there is no new government, Czar Nicholas is at liberty, his authority still recognised in many parts of the country.

16 March 1917: (Lockhart, Reilly, p. 82): The Czar abdicates. The body of Rasputin, who had been murdered a few months before was dug up and burnt.

March 1917: Revolution in Russia, Lenin etc, see notes below/below.

3 April 1917: (Segal. p. 129) Lenin arrives in Petrograd. His followers had set out to provide an impressive reception, the whole square in the Finland Station was filled with welcomers, mainly soldiers lined the platform, which was decorated with banners and triumphal arches in red and gold.
4 April 1917: Lenin at the Tauride Palace to a meeting of Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and independents.

8 April 1917: Day after Lenin's theses appeared in Pravda, Kamenev in an editorial note repudiated them on the grounds that they assumed the end of the bourgeois democratic revolution.

13 April 1917: Lenin on a stopover in Stockholm refused to meet Helphand personally. Radek spent most of the day with him to act, apparently, as go-between, and Helphand spent most of April 13 with him. Lenin spent much money on the Bolshevik Press.

14 April 1917: Conference of the Petrograd Bolsheviks, Lenin proposed that the party work for the transfer of all power to the Soviets. Kamenev against this and he defeated.

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24 April 1917: All-Russian conference of the Bolsheviks. The party adopted the slogan, "All Power To The Soviets".

4 May 1917: Trotsky met by a delegation of internationalists from Petrograd, including Uritsky, from the Bolshevik central committee. Mensheviks sent no one to greet him. At the Finland Station, to an excited crowd, Trotsky called for a second, socialist revolution.

5 May 1917: Petrograd Soviet met to consider inclusion of socialist ministers in provisional government. Cries of "Trotsky. We want comrade Trotsky" soon rang out.

10 May 1917, Lenin and Trotsky meet.

3 June 1917: From early June, June 3 for three weeks, the first All -Russian Congress of the Soviets was in session.

1917: About 4 July: (J. Carmichael, on Trotsky, pp. 169-170)): The Right-wing elements in the Russian capital are stimulated by some news. The patriotic (ie, right wing) press had published documents to the effect that Lenin had been subsidised (to the tune of about 666 million US, two thousand million deutschmarks, thirty five million pounds) by the German General Staff - for the maintenance of a huge daily press throughout the country for propaganda purposes. Helphand was perhaps the principal channel for the money. The German intent being the immobilisation of the eastern front, which involved crippling the Russian Government, etc. (Later, Lenin in a letter to New Life, specifically denied any complicity with the Germans, or with Furtstenberg and Kozlovsky.)
By August 1917: By August, the Bolsheviks had 41 newspapers and journals, 21 in Russian, the rest in minority languages. Newspapers came out at the rate of one and a half million per week, or 320,000 per day, often distributed for nothing.

1917, 25 July, The Dutch spy known as Mata Hari, Margaretha Geertruida Zelle, sentenced to death for spying for Germany during World War One.

4 September: 1917: Trotsky released from gaol.

1917: Early September: (Lockhart, Reilly, p. 83). Lenin, in Finland, moved swiftly and secretly into the Russian capital.

25 October 1917: Russia: Around 6.30am, the Winter Palace is occupied "practically painlessly". German Govt. is still feeding money to the Bolsheviks to keep Russia out of the war. By 8 November, Lenin's policy was to make peace with Germany.

25 October 1917: The Civil War in Russia 1918-1919, published in 1919, was published on Lenin's orders. Lenin declared that "on October 25, 1917, civil war in Russia was a fact".
Others, Soviet historians, saw June 18, 1918 as the start of full-scale civil war. (Note: With Russian history, dates may differ by up to 13 days due to use of the Russian vs the European calendar).

1917: Hawaii: Death of Queen Liliuokalani, Hawaii's last sovereign (1838-1917).

1918: June forward: Germany has continued transmitting huge sums, forty million gold marks, both to the Bolsheviks and to their various rivals. (The Bolsheviks were banking on a German collapse.)

31 August 1918: (Lockhart, Reilly, p. 103) Dora Kaplan, a Social-Revolutionary, fired two bullets at point blank range at Lenin as he was leaving a meeting in Moscow. It was a miracle he was not killed outright.

Forgotten spot at Sierra Leone: Oct-Nov 1918: Twenty two Australian soldiers now buried in a Freetown cemetery, following action as reinforcements, plus some men with Capt. C Christiansen in Sep. 1917. Possibly dead of an influenza epidemic on British ships. The great influenza epidemic of 1918-1919 killed about 20 million people, more than WWI did.

11 November 1918: Peace in Europe, a day of great rejoicing, Armistice Day.

1918 - Siberian Expedition against Russian Revolution in concert with US and Great Britain. Rice riots, strikes, and open defiance of the National Family ideology.

1919: At Amritsar, India, British troops shoot nearly 380 of Ghandi's followers.

1919: Formation of Indonesian Communist Party.

1919: Japan: Versailles Peace Conference - first non-Western nation to have made it into the club of the Western great powers - German holdings in Shantung Provinces in China and German islands of the North Pacific became Japanese

1920: Prince of Wales visits Australia as a gesture of appreciation for WWI efforts, though he came as a "missionary of Empire".

10 January 1920: League of Nations organised with Australia as an original member.

1920: Japan: May First Day. Leftist intellectual trends alarm the authorities.

1920: First commercial radio broadcast in US and women also gain the right to vote in US.

1921: First meeting held of Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai. Thirteen delegates represent fifty members.

1921: Bulk wheat is first shipped from Sydney.

1921: First use of the word "robot", in a play, RUR, by Czech writer Karel Capek, from robota, meaning work.

1921: Revolutionaries meet in secret in Shanghai and establish Communist Party of China.

1921: Japan: Hara Takashi, popular Party Prime Minister, is assassinated.

1921-19222: Japan: Washington Conference - limit the ratio of the capital ships to between 3 and 5 with the US and Great Britain, not build bases beyond Hawaii and Singapore

1922-1948: Britain ruled Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq under League of Nations Mandates. France controlled Syria and Lebanon.

1922: Britain, France and Italy warn Greece against attempted occupation of Palestine.

1922 - Japan Communist Party founded.

1922: G. Marconi in Essex, UK, begins Britain's first regular broadcasting transmissions.

In the early 1920s, "there were about 600 car-maker wannabes in the US", who were outclassed by Henry Ford and the Model T. As Claimed in June 2000 in an Australian newspaper in respect of the massive recent failures of dot.coms and Internet start-ups of all kinds.

1923: The U.S. Treasury Department's Narcotics Division (the first federal drug agency) bans all legal narcotics sales. With the prohibition of legal venues to purchase heroin, addicts are forced to buy from illegal street dealers.
From website based on book: Opium: A History, by Martin Booth Simon and Schuster, Ltd., 1996. e-mail info@opioids.com

1923: Japan: Great Kanto Earthquake

In 1923: "There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom." said Robert Millikan, Nobel Prize physicist, 1923.

In the early 1920s, "there were about 600 car-maker wannabes in the US", who were outclassed by Henry Ford and the Model T. As Claimed in June 2000 in an Australian newspaper in respect of the massive recent failures of dot.coms and Internet start-ups of all kinds.

23 November 1923: Regular radio broadcasts begin in Australia.

1924: More to come

1925: The Klu Klux Klan stages a massive rally in Washington, USA, with 40,000 robed klansmen marching down Pennsylvania Avenue.

1925 - the vote was given to all adult males (Universal male suffrage). Legislation, the Peace Preservation Law, to suppress the left is enacted - a crime to advocate a basic change in the political system or abolition of private property (lacked emotional and intellectual support for the democracy). Scandals erode faith in party politics and government.

1925: In the wake of the first US federal ban on opium, a thriving black market opens up in New York's Chinatown.
From website based on book: Opium: A History, by Martin Booth Simon and Schuster, Ltd., 1996. e-mail info@opioids.com

1925: First use of word "sexy", regarded as an English expression in a French magazine.

1925: 19 July: Adolf Hitler publishes first volume of his manifesto, Mein Kampf.

1924-1926: Hitler is writing parts of his book, Mein Kampf at his "home" in Obersalzberg, Bavaria.

1926: World's first sound movies premieres in New York.

1926: Japan: Taisho Emperor dies. Asian markets became open because the Western nations left Pacific. influence from Russian Revolution labor movement JPN's foreign policy moved from the military orientation to policies more in line with business interests.

1926: Japan: SHOWA Period, Emperor Showa (Hirohito).

1926: Year television is born.
1926: John Logie Baird demonstrates television - a year later, talking pictures begin.

1926, Abolition of custom of harem-keeping in Turkey, as outlawed by Kemal Ataturk.

1927: Japan: General Tanaka Giichi - president of Seiyuukai - became prime minister - army - actual operations are free of civilian control. Writer Akutagawa Ryuunosuke commits suicide, leaving behind prophetic statement that Japanese society was falling into a dark valley. Economy collapsing. Many farmers forced to sell daughters into prostitution. Democracy appears to fail and political parties are blamed. Young military patriots seek spiritual solution.

1928: Japan: Army's assassination of the Chinese warlord in Manchuria

1928, The forward-thinking Hermann Potocnik (alias Hermann Noordung), a Croation army artillery expert and engineering consultant, draws an idea for a geostationary space station, termed "The Habitat Wheel". NASA has distributed copies of the drawing. See Potocnik's book, Das Problem der Befahrung des Weltraums: Der Raketen Motor. Published in Berlin by Carl Schmidt and Company; (The Problem of Space Flying) now available from NASA in English. Also about now (1929), a series of articles on The Problems of Space Flying published in the US. Potocnik corresponded with the German rocket scientist Hermann Oberth, who invented liquid-fuel rockets and "virtually launched the idea of space flight". Oberth in 1923 wrote an essay: "The Rocket into Interplanetary Space". Werner von Braun took some ideas here in 1929 as a schoolboy writing on space travel. Later US interests in space flight were stimulated by Willy Ley's book, Rockets: The Future of Space Travel Beyond the Stratosphere. (Viking). Arthur C. Clarke, today's guru, wrote an October 1945 article in Wireless World, citing his debt to Potocnik's ideas. In 1911 and 1926, a Russian school teacher, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky wrote on geostationary orbits.

Emmeline Pankhurst, (1858-1928), activist for women's rights and suffrage.

1928: Turkey is declared a secular state.

In 1927, "Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?" Question from H. M. Warner, Warner Brothers.

1928: The first all-talking feature film, The Lights of New York, premiers in New York.

1928: A South Seas Communist Party arises in Singapore, the Malayan Communist Party began in 1930.

1929: Japan: American stock market crash self sufficiency - population problem.

1929: Beginning of the world's Great Depression.

1930: Japan: The cabinet forces the navy to accept the London Naval treaty - heavy cruisers - 3-5 ratio of US and Britain - insubordination by the navy.

July 1930: The Great Depression: Australia faces a financial depression unparalleled.

1930: A communist conference in Singapore is attended by Ho Chi Minh, then in exile from Vietnam, based in Hong Kong, directed not by China but by Russian Communist Party's Far Eastern Bureau in Shanghai, of which bureau Western Intelligence was aware. Ho Chi Minh arrested later in Hong Kong and imprisoned till 1932.

October 1930: The Imperial Conference set for London.

September 1931: Opening of Japanese offensive in Manchuria. League of Nations helpless to do anything.

1931: Japan: Depression, Occupying Manchuria (staged incident, railroad) Military leaders assassinated the Prime Minister who forced the London Treaty Right wing terrorism becomes a primary force in governing Japanese foreign policy. Talking pictures introduced into Japan, throwing those who formerly explicated silent pictures in Japanese out of work. These people organize a union and urge the boycott of talking pictures.

1930s: AIDS evolved in the early 1930s in Africa from a benign ape infection to a human killer, but it remained in jungle until the age of jet travel and sexual revolution, according to a recent study by Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Reported: 10-6-2000

28 January 1931: An All-for-Australia League is launched at a meeting in Sydney.

1932++: http://www.nybookdistributors.com/wall_street/feature/credit_suisse.html< p> The history of Credit Suisse First Boston dates back to 1932, when The First of Boston Corporation was established as a subsidiary of The First National Bank of Boston. In 1923, as a result of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, The First of Boston Corporation severed its ties with The First National Bank of Boston, changed its name to The First Boston Corporation, and became the first (and for many years, the only) publicly-owned major investment banking firm. Several key members of Chase Harris Forbes Corporation, the securities affiliate of Chase National Bank, joined the new investment bank. With 650 employees and $9 million in capital, the firm soon became a leading bond underwriter and trader.

In 1946, Mellon Securities Corporation merged into The First Boston Corporation. Mellon's franchise with industrial clients led to some major deals: initial debt offers for the World Bank, Hydro Quebec, and a 2.2 million share offering for Gulf Oil Corporation in 1948 (the largest equity offering until that time). By 1947, The First Boston Corporation surpassed $1 billion in new capital issues, and in 1959 it reintroduced the credit of Japan to the American markets with the first offerings by its government since 1930.

This led to significant expansion in operations for The First Boston Corporation. By 1970, the Firm was raising more than $10 billion in new capital annually. In 1971, The First Boston Corporation joined the New York Stock Exchange, developed its equity, sales, research, and trading operations and soon established an equity business to complement its debt operations.

In 1978, The First Boston Corporation took the first step in its affiliation with Credit Suisse by replacing White Weld & Co. as a shareholder of Financiére Crédit Suisse-First Boston (formerly Société Anonyme du Credit Suisse et de White Weld), a leading international trading, investment banking and asset management group in Europe. Financiére Crédit Suisse-First Boston's main subsidiary, Credit Suisse First Boston Limited in London, became one of the premier Eurobond houses. In 1988, in conjunction with the combination of the firm's parent company, CS Holding. The First Boston Corporation became a privately-held company, renamed CS First Boston, Inc. Ownership of Financiére Crédit Suisse-First Boston passed entirely to The First Boston Corporation and, at the same time, The First Boston Corporation acquired all its own shares held by the public. As a result of this reorganization, CS Holding became a direct shareholder of the newly renamed CS First Boston, Inc.

From 1989 to 1993, CS First Boston operated through its three main regional subsidiaries: The First Boston Corporation in the United States, Financiére Crédit Suisse-First Boston in Europe and CS First Boston Pacific in the Asia/Pacific region. In 1993, CS First Boston integrated the three regional operations into one global investment bank and operated under a single name, CS First Boston until 1997.

1932: Japan: Founding of Japanese puppet state Manchuko in Manchuria.

1933: In the US, the prohibition of the use of alcohol is ended.

1933: Japan: Withdrawal from the League of Nations Mass arrests of leftists. The writer Kobayashi Takiji tortured and murdered by police.

1933: Adolf Hitler elected Chancellor of Germany.

1933: US President Franklin D. Roosevelt launches The New Deal, a package of economic reforms to end the Great Depression.

1934: Opening of British oil pipeline from Kirkuk (Iraq) to Tripoli (Syria).

1935: Communist Party of Australia is an established force in trade unions, with union secretaryships eg of metal working unions.

1935: Founding in England of Penguin Books, the first paperback publisher. Revolutionizing the reading habits of million of people.

1930's: The majority of illegal heroin smuggled into the U.S. comes from China and is refined in Shanghai and Tietsin.
From website based on book: Opium: A History, by Martin Booth Simon and Schuster, Ltd., 1996. e-mail info@opioids.com

1935: October: Major world crisis with Italy finally taking Abyssinia.
15 November 1935, Australia imposes trade sanctions against Italy after Italy's invasion of Abysinnia. (Ethiopia).

1936: Discovery of vast oilfields of Saudi Arabia.

1936: Britain's new Spitfire fighter plane goes on show for the first time at Southampton.

1936: Japan: Minseito - "Will it be parliamentary government or fascism?" - gained some seats, but outpowered by nationalists The 2.26 (Feb 26th). Incident - young army officers killed a number of government leaders and seized part of downtown Tokyo - another decline of the Diet.

25 June 1936: Japan bans import of Australian wool, wheat, and flour in retaliation for trade diversion policy.

July 1936: Outbreak of Spanish Civil War. Germany and Italy assist the right-wing General Franco, Spanish Republicans helped by the USSR.

May 1936: Formation of Australian Council for Civil Liberties.

March 1936: Germany marches into the Rhineland.

1936: "A rocket will never be able to leave the earth's atmosphere." Declared by The New York Times.

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1936-1939: Palestinian nationalist uprising against Britain. Britain proposes partition of area.

1937: Spring: US: American Federation of Labor estimates there are 9,70,000 people out of work.

1937: Japan: Army general prime minister eliminates all party participation in the cabinet 1937 - War against China, Control over Inner Mongolia and North China, unplanned fight between JPN and China - Chiang Kai-shek's government demanded an overall settlement of JPN's creeping aggression (but never colonized China) Mass media in Japan ordered to avoid anything anti-war, anti-military, anti-Japan. In December, the Japanese military in China goes berserk. There is the Rape of Nanking.

Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: Volume 3: Fighting for Britain - 1937-1946. Macmillan, 2001, 580pp. Palestine and expulsion of 250,000 Palestinians.

1937-1938; Russia, Stalin executes almost one million "counter-revolutionaries" while another five million are sent to the Gulag Archipelago. Stalin personally signed thousands of death warrants.

1938: Laszlo Biro introduces the first ballpoint pen.

1938-1939: Australian and UK policy is to direct a battle fleet based at Singapore to deny Japan access to India and Australia.

September 1938: Signing of the Munich agreement.

1939 and later: T. R. Fehrenbach, The Inside Story of the Swiss Banks. London, Leslie Frewin, 1966. (Zurich proverb, God rules Heaven and money on earth, Even the devil dances for gold.)

1939, Outbreak of World War Two.

1938, Switzerland: Historians by December 1999 say that Switzerland due to anti-Semitism from 1938, and in 1942, introduced discriminatory measures against Jewish refugees. The measures were based on cultural, political and social views, not views on race.
Item, The Weekend Australian, 11-12 December, 1999.

1938: Nylon toothbrushes first sold in US by Dupont in September 1938.

1939: With Igor Sikorsky's model VS-300, the first successful helicopter flight.

September 1939: War declared, Britain versus Germany over issue of invasion of Poland.

3 September, 1939: Following Britain's declaration of war, next day 4 September was FIRST allied shot in the war, fired from Fort Nepean, Port Phillip Bay. at an escaping German ship.

1890s to 1940: Average surface-air temperatures increase by about 0.25 °C. Some scientist see the American Dust Bowl as a sign of the Greenhouse Effect at work. (Greenhouse Timeline)

1940 to 1970: Worldwide cooling of 0.2 °C. Scientific interest in greenhouse effect wanes. Some climatologists predict a new ice age. (Greenhouse Timeline)

1940: First automatic dishwasher marketed in the US.

1940: Japan: The government bans all parties - Imperial Rule Assistance Association - no dictator and the system was not the product of a well-defined popular movement, but a change of mood, a shift in the balance of power Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis. 9/'40 - the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere - pacts with Germany and Italy 9/'40 - seized North Vietnam. 4/'41 - pact with Russia.

1940: In Western World, use of diaphragms, condoms and pessaries is becoming more common.

December 1940: Severe drought over most of Australia.

1940: 12 September, Four teenagers follow their dog as it disappears down a hole near Lascaux, France. They discover a 17,000 year old set of drawings, now known as the Lascaux Cave Paintings.

6 September, 1940: Prison ship Dunera arrives Sydney with over 2000 German and Austrian internees from Britain. On treatment of Jews are amongst them, see Cyril Pearl's book, Dunera.

11 June 1940: Australia declares war on Italy following Italy's declaration of war against Britain and France.

15 June 1940: Communist and fascist parties in Australia are declared illegal under National Security Act.

1940: May, See John Lukacs, Five Days in London: May 1940. Scribe Publications, 2001, 236pp.

1940: First automatic dishwasher marketed in the US.

1941: Japan: WWII, Dec. 7 (Dec 8 in JPN time) attack on Pearl Harbor under government of Tojo Hideki. 3 choices: - backing down in China; waging a war to seize the oil of Indonesia; negotiating a compromise settlement with the US. General Tojo Hideki became prime minister.

1941: During WWII, nine allied governments meet in London and pledge allegiance to The Atlantic Charter, an eight-point declaration issued by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British PM Winston Churchill.

December 1941: Japanese invade Malaya.

December 1941: 200 Malayan Communists are trained by British as stay-behind-guerrillas, later named as anti-Japanese army.

22 December, 1941: First US servicemen arrived to Aust to Brisbane. (Australian historian Marilyn Lake's view is that an army of foreign men in a country, sexualizes the female population.)

11 December 1941: Darwin, Australia, hears first air raid sirens.

8 December 1941: Australian PM Curtin declares war on Japan after Japanese attacks in Malaya, Thailand, Pearl Harbour, Singapore and Guam. Also declares war on Finland, Hungary and Romania.

Sunday 7 December 1941: Japan attacks US at Pearl Harbour.

December 1941: Japanese invade Malaya.

10 July, 1941: Allegations that up to 1600 Jews were massacred by their neighbours in Polish village of Jedwabne, north-east of Warsaw. See book by Jan Gross, Neighbours.

1941- June 2001: Lost Worlds is proud and pleased to record that McDowell, an Australian adventurer, has located, photographed and visited the hulk of the fearsome German battleship, Bismark, sunk in 1941 off the coast of Ireland. (Australian national TV, 23 June 2001).

8 June, 1941: Allied forces including Australian AIF 7th Divn invade Syria.

June 1941: Russia joins Western Alliance on invasion by Germany.

June 1941: Malaya: MCP Lai Tek offers to co-operate with British in Singapore.

June 1941: Malaya: MCP Lai Tek offers to co-operate with British in Singapore.

31 May 1941: Britain and Australian troops evacuated from Crete, but three battalions of 6th Divn are left behind and taken prisoner.

10 April, 1941: North Africa: Siege of Tobruk in progress.

1942: Japan: Performances of American and British music are banned.

1942: Japanese submarines visit Sydney, Australia.

26 November 1942: "Battle of Brisbane" riot between Australian and US troops.

September 1942: Malaya: 90 leading Malayan communists massacred by Japanese in Batu caves, but Lai Tek escapes.

August 1942: Malaya: Most of MCP central committee arrested by Japanese in Singapore.

August 1942: Malaya: Most of MCP central committee arrested by Japanese in Singapore.

26 August 1942: Japanese forces repulsed from Milne Bay.

27 July 1942: Australian women's land army established

25 July 1942: Townsville has first of its three raids by Japan.

21 July 1942: Japanese troops advance to Kokoda, New Guinea.

7 May 1942: Battle of Coral Sea rages, forces Japan invasion fleet to turn back, and abandon effort to take Port Moresby.

31 May 1942: Three midget Japanese submarines appear in Sydney Harbour. One sunk by depth charges, one tangles in boom nets and blown up by crew, third apparently escapes after torpedoing a naval depot ship.

Mid-April 1942: Japanese bombed fuel dumps at Darwin (as though conceding they were no longer interested in an outright invasion.)

18 April 1942: Macarthur takes up post as supreme commander of South-West Pacific Area, with HQ in Melbourne. Gen Sir Thomas Blamey in command of allied land forces.

28 March 1942: Sydney receives its first shipload of US servicemen. North of Northern Territory placed under military control.

17 March 1942: General Douglas Macarthur arrives in Australia from Philippines: Australia to be a holdfast redoubt.

8 March 1942: Australian forces in Java surrender to Japan.

3 March 1942: Japanese planes attack Broome, some 70 deaths. Later attack Whyndham.

March 1942: Looting in Darwin, which later made it difficult for compensations to be made.

2 March 1942: Australia declares war on Thailand.

2 March 1942: Broome finds a Japanese plane on reconnaissance over it.

February 1942: Fall of Singapore.

23 February 1942: Main Australian force on Timor surrenders to Japan.

19 February 1942: Darwin bombed by Japanese. A fortnight later, Broome bombed. ($4 million worth of damage there).

19 February 1942: Japanese Bombing: Darwin becomes the "Pearl Harbour" of Australia as 188 Japanese warplanes rained death on the city. "An episode long buried in shame an secrecy" writes Australian journalist Paul Toohey in The Weekend Australian, 17-18- February, 2001.

17 February 1942: Australian PM Curtin cables London for recall of the AIF 6th and 7th Divisions, from Middle East to Australia.

15 February 1942: Singapore falls to Japan, more than 15,000 Australians mainly of 8th Divn imprisoned. General Gordon Bennett escapes.

14 February 1942: Ships move from Darwin with nearly 2000 men for Timor, to reinforce Koepang.

8 February 1942: Japanese attack Singapore. Quite soon after December 7 Japan attacked Philippines and Malaya.

23 January, 1942: Rabaul New Guinea falls to Japan.

14 January, 1942: Australian troops engage Japanese for first time in Malaya.

11 January, 1942: Japan landed in Borneo and the Celebes, which brought Australia into range of Japanese air-bombers.

4 January, 1942: Rabaul in New Guinea bombed by Japan.

1942: Japanese submarines shell Newcastle and Sydney.

1943: Malaya: British Force 136 with Col. John Davis joins MPAJA to train guerillas and organise supply of weapons, ammunition, etc. by parachute and submarine.

1943: Adolf Hitler mobilises the entire German adult population for the country's war effort.

3 March 1943: Battle of Bismark Sea foils Japanese attempts to reinforce their New Guinea bases.
17 March 1943: Macarthur referred to the "Brisbane Line" plan as he reviewed his plans for Australia. Claiming that Australian plans before his arrival envisaged northern Australia in the hands of the Japanese. (Australian author Paul Burns in the late 1980s publishes book proving "Brisbane Line" never existed)

2 May 1943: The Japan made 54th attack on Darwin with level-bombers and Zeroes. What transpired about unskilled use of Spitfires was subjected to blanket censorship.

1943: "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." Thomas Watson, IBM president.

1943: British Force 136 with Col. John Davis joins MPAJA to train guerillas and organise supply of weapons, ammunition, etc.

1943: Death of the Serbian-American inventor, Nikola Tesla died 1943, some of whose ideas may have been behind the invention of electric light and radio(?).

1943: The Computer Age begins with a machine called Colossus, housed in Britain, invented by Tommy Flowers.

1943: "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." Thomas Watson, IBM president, 1943. (A 2003 finding is that in fact he never said this!)

1944: US secretary-of-state Cordell Hull works for the establishment of the United Nations and is awarded the 1945 Nobel Peace Prize. He died in 1955.

1944: Bano: Steel guitars, ukuleles, and banjos outlawed.

13 October 1944: Liberal Party of Australia founded at a conference of 18 anti-labor organisations. Formally constituted in December 1944.

1945-52: Japan: Allied Occupation of Japan. Occupation troops include British, Australian, and other allied forces, but the Soviets are excluded and it is generally an American show. Ultimate power within Japan resides with the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, S.C.A.P., or, General Douglas MacArthur.

August 1945: Japanese surrender forestalls British landings to Malaya, MPAJA gains control from Japanese in some areas.

1945 - Atomic bombs: 8/6 - Hiroshima; 8/9 - Nagasaki. 8/8 Russians joined the War against Japan. 8/14 (Aug 15 in J time) unconditional surrender - Potsdam Proclamation. 668,000 civilians were killed in aerial bombardments

1945: Author Arthur C. Clarke invents a scheme to use satellites to relay radio signals, at about 37,000 kilometres.

1945: Use of first atomic bomb on Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki, closing World War Two.

1945: Malaya: In Perak Province Malaya, the Malaysian Communist Party secretary was Chin Peng later the leader of the Communist Malayan insurgency against British. One Lai Tek is an agent for the Japanese.

1945: History is not bunk after all where Ford is concerned: Reacting to long-standing criticism to effect that Henry Ford admired Adolf Hitler and was anti-Semitic, Ford Motor Company has produced a 144-page report commenting on claims that it profited from dealings with the Nazi war machine during World War Two. Ford in the US has long denied that it maintained control over a subsidiary in Germany, Ford-Werke in Cologne - which subsidiary may have used forced or slave labour. Ford describes its re-examination of matters in Nazi Germany as "exhaustive and uncompromising". The report is titled, Research Findings about Ford-Werke under the Nazi Regime, and Ford's chief of staff, John Rintamaki, said the report had uncovered no new information leading Ford (US) to modify its view that it had lost effective control of Ford-Werke under the Nazi regime, although Ford US had "a controlling stake". The German plant used about 2000 forced/slave labourers, about 45 per cent of its total work force. Ford US will however now make further appropriate donations to groups concerned about the issues. Before 1939, Henry Ford had accepted from Hitler, The Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest honour Germany could confer on a foreigner. Forde-Werke manufactured military trucks and track-drive armoured personnel carriers. The new report suggests that Nazi policy was to force some manufacturers to use forced/slave labour provided by the Nazi-German government. (Reported in Australia 8 December 2001)

1945, The term "bug" is invented to describe something in hardware (later in software) which might interfere with efficient computer operation. The term was coined by Grace Hopper, later a US admiral. A website on her work is available from a US naval vessel.

1945-1946: After WWII, Britain occupies Vietnam briefly before the French return.

February 1945: Collapse of US-Soviet unity after Yalta conference, largely over issue of Poland. Churchill remarks on the Russian "Iron Curtain". USSR could not be argued back to its 1939 boundaries.

25 April 1945: H. V. Evatt and F. M. Forde represent Australia at the 50-nation United Nations Conference on International Organisations in San Francisco. Evatt (an Australian) later a UN leader.

6 August 1945: Atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and on the 9th, at Nagasaki.

2 September 1945: General Macarthur accepts Japanese surrender on board USS Missouri, in Tokyo Bay. Later is a requirement for Japanese emperor to relinquish his status as a deity.

22 September 1945: French troops return to Vietnam after WWII to re-assert French rule.

1945: Author Arthur C. Clarke invents a scheme to use satellites to relay radio signals, at about 37,000 kilometres.

1944-1947: Jewish-British War. Jewish groups in Palestine try to expel Britain. Mainstream Jewish fighters under David Ben Gurion are called Hagana. They later become the Israeli army. Two separate military groups (Irgun Zvai Leumi led by Menachem Begin and Lehi or the Stern Gang led by Yitzhak Shamir) resort to assassination and bombings. Many British soldiers and Arab civilians are killed.

Early 1940s: During World War II, opium trade routes are blocked and the flow of opium from India and Persia is cut off. Fearful of losing their opium monopoly, the French encourage Hong farmers to expand their opium production.
From website based on book: Opium: A History, by Martin Booth Simon and Schuster, Ltd., 1996. e-mail info@opioids.com

1939-1945: World War II. Holocaust kills nearly six million Jews. Many survivors look to Palestine for refuge.

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1935-1945: Question: Why is it that one never reads in a history book on the continued funding, or not, of universities in Germany and France? When presumably, Germany at least needed a regular supply and maths, engineering and chemistry graduates?

1945: To the end of World War Two, Hitler's own doctor thought that Hitler was criminally insane. (Is a second opinion actually needed here?) (World TV news reports, 28 April 2000)

Lost in the world of international high finance since 1933-1945? SBS TV in Australia screens fascinating documentary, Banking with Hitler. On the BIS, an international finance institution which among other things after 1918 handled German reparations payments to Allied nations. British economist Maynard Keynes argued successfully during World War II, when the Nazis had increasingly used BIS for deeply criminal purposes, that the BIS should not be disbanded as it could be useful still at the end of the war. (Reported 4 March, 2000)

1946: Winston Churchill delivers his later-famous "iron-curtain speech" in Fulton, Missouri, USA. "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Baltic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent".

1946: ENIAC - the first electronic digital computer, is switched on.

1946: Establishment of Republic of Philippines.

1946: Japan: New constitution - effective from 3/3/47 women gained legal equality and the vote (universal suffrage) Emperor - symbol of state and the unity of the people Article 9 - Disarmament Prime Minister - elected by the lower House judicial system - independent of executive interference Zaibatsu - dissolved - attempts to revive industry - took 10 yrs to become mid 30's standard per capita Land Reform policy began - tenancy was reduced to only about 10 % of the land union organization religious freedom compulsory education - 6 -9 yrs Liberal Democratic Party, Communist Party, Socialist Party, Democratic Socialist Party, Komeito (Clean Government Party - Soka Gakkai) Japan is an utter mess.

1946-1947: Japan: 1st Yoshida Government.

1946: Malaya: Begins Malayan war against communism as rival communists vs Koumintang gangs work in Chinese community. British Malayan Union insults the Muslims, and also offers full citizenship to Indians and Chinese in Malaya. Chinese are 38 per cent of Malayan population, and Koumintang and MCP compete for their allegiance.

March 1946: Churchill's famous "Iron Curtain speech" in Missouri, re USSR expansionism.

1945-1946: Outbreak of Indochina War. UK and Holland trying to find peaceful solutions to post-Imperial problems. US initially deplores outbreak of this war, but does not object to French policy re a re-conquest of Vietnam etc. Gradually, US drops its detachment and became involved in the struggle for Indochina.

In 1946: "Television won't last because people will get tired of staring at a plywood box every night."
Darryl Zanuck, co-founder, 20th Century Fox.

13 December 1946: UN approves Australian trusteeship of the former mandated territory of New Guinea. 1975, New Guinea given independence from Australia and its own sovereign state.

19 December 1946: the First Indochina War begins when Viet Minh forces under Ho Chi Minh attack French troops in the north.

1943: A UK contender for the first computer, Bletchley Park's "Colossus" machine is designed by Alan Turing to break the German Lorenz cipher code. His machine is programmed with switches and cables but has no memory.

1945: American Vannevar Bush, viewed by many as the father of hypertext, writes a ground-breaking article describing a device called a memex, which seeks to extend human memory by organising information by association. He idea is never built, but the concepts he outlines later inspire many visionaries.

1945, The term "bug" is invented to describe something in hardware (later in software) which might interfere with efficient computer operation (a live moth had become stuck in a relay of the Harvard Mark II computer, a literal bug). The term was coined by Grace Hopper, later a US admiral. A website overview on her work is available from a US naval vessel.

To 1945, Britain and the US were placed in the awkward position of not being able to act on some knowledge of likely German military moves, for fear of risking that the Germans would become aware that the Allies had cracked some ENIGMA codes.

1945: Matchematician John von Neumann theorises that on the architecture of a practical computer, identifying the key concepts of arithmetic logic, memory, control unit, and interface with a human operator. His architecture provides the foundation for future computing developments.

1945-1947: Burma gains its independence from Britain at the end of World War II. Opium cultivation and trade flourishes in the Shan states.
From website based on book: Opium: A History, by Martin Booth Simon and Schuster, Ltd., 1996. e-mail info@opioids.com

1947, Two Bell Lab scientists invent the transistor, an item about as tall as the face of a wristwatch. By 2001, organic nano-transistors are being worked on.

Computing history: 1947, Invention of the transistor.

1947, US: Two Bell Lab scientists invent the transistor, an item about as tall as the face of a wristwatch. By 2001, organic nano-transistors are being worked on.

1947: Britain decides it cannot bring peace to Palestine and turns the matter over to the UN. In Resolution 181 the UN votes to partition Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian states with an international enclave around Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Arab leaders reject the plan and insist on a united Palestine with a secular government. Fighting begins between Jews and Palestinians. Many Palestinians become refugees.

1947: Indian independence from British colonial rule. Many Muslims break away to live in Pakistan.

5 February 1947: A long-range weapons establishment at Salisbury, WA with a rocket range at Woomera, South Australia. (Now Weapons Research Establishment).

February 1947: Malaya: Moves in MCP against a Vietnamese, Lai Tek (possibly a triple agent); he disappeared and so did party funds, his fate a mystery. Lai Tek is succeeded in MCP by Chin Peng. The former anti-Japanese army is now to be reactivated as Malayan People's Anti-British Army. Riots of 1948 in Malaya, then Chin Peng decided to mobilize the guerilla army from jungle camps as anti-British. On 17 June 1948, is declared a state of emergency, the anti-Communist war in Malaya has officially begun.

1 July 1947: NSW introduces the 40-hour working week, for workers under state awards on working/employment conditions.

21 July 1947: Australia: Immigration minister Calwell signs an agreement with the International Refugees Organisation for Australia to accept displaced persons from Europe. First acceptances arrived in November 1947, including Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians.

1947: When British commonwealth is shut out from US atomic secrets, after 1946, and British PM Clement Atlee wants to develop an independent British atomic bomb, the Australians rush to open the South Australian desert in 1947, and later, when the US preferred Arizona to an Australian site, Australia offers Maralinga to the use of the British. The 1950s Blue Streak rocket scheme to develop a nuclear delivery system was Anglo-Aust. Tests cease in the early 1960s.

1947: Malaya's year of strikes, some 300 strikes. In Calcutta was a Moscow-sponsored conference of Asian communist parties and armed struggle was to break out all over Asia, with Mao Tse Tung soon to prevail in China.

1947-8: Japan: Katayama Government. The only interlude of non-conservative, socialist government in postwar Japan.

1948-9: Japan: 2nd Yoshida Government.

1948: World's first turbine-propeller aircraft, the Vickers Viscount, makes its maiden flight.

1948 - Reserve course. S.C.A.P. ousts U.S. and Japanese progressives from administration and undertakes policy of deflation.

1948-1972: Corsican gangsters dominate the US heroin market through their connection with Mafia drug distributors. After refining the raw Turkish opium in Marseilles laboratories, the heroin is made easily available for purchase by junkies on New York City streets.
From website based on book: Opium: A History, by Martin Booth Simon and Schuster, Ltd., 1996. e-mail info@opioids.com

1948: With Britain out, Jews proclaim a Jewish state. Local Palestinians and army units from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon engage in an escalating war to prevent the partition of Palestine, the creation of a Jewish state, and Israeli expansion into the proposed Palestinian area. Israeli units defeat the combined Arab armies. What the UN had designated as the Arab state is split into three parts: some is taken by Israel and incorporated into their new state; the tiny Gaza Strip is held by Egypt and governed by them; the largest remaining component--generally called the West Bank of the Jordan River--is held by Jordan. The UN had proposed that Jerusalem and other holy places become an internationally-governed entity. In the fighting, Jerusalem was divided into Israeli west and Jordanian east. The 1948 defeat was a major humiliation for the Arab world. Within a few years, the governments of Egypt and Syria are swept away in military coups and the king of Jordan is assassinated. Defeat of Arab armies.

1948-1950: Of 1,200,000 Palestinians in the Mandate, 725,000 or more are driven out of their homeland or flee the fighting that accompanied the creation of a Jewish state. Only l60,000 remain in Israel itself. The Israeli government allows only a very few to return after the war is over. By 1950, over one million live in UN-supported refugee camps in Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan. The camps become centers of political militancy.

1948: Kashmir's Hindu ruler, Hari Singh, considers independence, then chooses to join India when Pathan tribes, backed by Pakistan, cross the northern border. UN ceasefire divides Kashmir into two, with Pakistan controlling the northern third only. UN resolution on status of Kashmir never arises.

August 1948: Britain withdraws from India.

June 1948: Malaya: MCP orders mobilization and ex-MPAJA men recalled to reform eight regiments of guerilla army and government declares state of emergency.

April 1948: Russia imposes the Berlin Blockade. US responds with an airlift.

March 1948: Communist conference in Calcutta decides on armed revolution in s/e Asia. Violence erupts in Malaya.

March 1948: Communist conference in Calcutta decides on armed revolution in s/e Asia. Violence erupts in Malaya

February 1948: Russia absorbs Czechoslovakia. The US re-enacts its draft for military service.

February 1948: British Govt. abandons plan for Malayan Union and proposes a Federation of states instead, plus Penang and Malacca.

1949 - Hideki Yukawa becomes the unshared Nobel laureate in physics.

1946, Development of computer, ENIAC. Another contender for "the first computer" is the US Army's ENIAC, a huge, high-speed calculator programmed with cables and switches which is modified in 1948 to add memory, giving it full computer status.

1947: Invention of the transistor: Two Bell Lab scientists invent the transistor, an item about as tall as the face of a wristwatch. By 2001, organic nano-transistors are being worked on.

1948: UK: The first modern computer is the Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM - also known as Baby), a valve computer built by Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn at the University of Manchester.

1949-52: Japan: 3rd Yoshida Government.

1949: Chinese Nationalists organise Supreme Council under Chiang Kai-Shek, and begin to move forces to Taiwan (once known as Formosa).

1949: North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) comes into effect on the world stage.

1949: The South Vietnamese Army created with French officers and non-coms as auxiliary to French Union forces. (When the French left in 1965 they left behind a leaderless, defeated, disorganized and poor administration force. See depicion in noted movie, Apocalypse Now Redux version. )

1949: China has a Communist government.

January 1949: Output of new trainees in Malaya raises police strength from 9000 to 50,000. Army units arrive from Britain.

February 1949: Malayan Chinese Assoc formed by Tan Cheng Lok, aims to attract villagers from communism after collapse of Koumintang and aided by Chinese commercial community.

April 1949: Malaya: Chin Peng's hopes for a popular rising fails. His party withdraws deep into jungle to regroup and is renamed Malayan Races Liberation Army MRLA. Resettlement of 423,000 isolated Chinese squatters into New Villages begins; idea later in Vietnam as Strategic Hamlets program.

June 1949: Emperor Bao Dai becomes nominal leader of Vietnam under the French.

September 1949: Russia explodes an atom bomb.

October 1949: Communist Chinese victory in China.

December 1949: Percy Spender, Australian Minister for External Affairs from Dec 1949, is among the first to accept/enunciate what President Eisenhower was to call "the domino process". That is, re "the domino theory" as later applied during Vietnam War.

1950: See next file in series

- Dan Byrnes (otherwise indicated in these pages as -Editor)

Note: You will find even greater detail than is given here, for specific periods in American - English - Australian history, with regard to merchants, traders, bankers and financiers, as part of the website, The Blackheath Connection...

Many graphics seen on this website are used courtesy of Joan O'Donovan and her specialty graphics website.

Stop Press: For late entries

Madness continues in "Only in America": The madness for copyrighting continues in the USA: The delusion continues, fostered by the determined irrationalities, arrogances, ignorance and unrealities of the US legal system, that Americans can claim copyright on whatever they like, whenever they like, whyever they like, and the rest of the world can go hang. Now, "patented yoga has Indians in a twist". A few American "entrepreneurs", including an Indian-born "yogi", have tried to patent aspects of the ancient practice of yoga. (What would Buddha think?) Hundreds of "yoga-related patents, copyrights and trademarks have been issued in recent years" in the US, and  the Indian Government is reportedly furious with the USA. Health ministries, commerce ministries, have become involved. An Indian official has wondered aloud how anything connected with yoga, which has been in the public domain for up to 6000 years, could conceivably be patented? The mad Americans pretend that they can distinguish between "traditional knowledge" versus "intellectual property". Deluded US authorities have issued 150 yoga-related copyrights, 134 patents on yoga accessories and 2315 yoga-related trademarks. Yet yoga has only become popular in the USA since the 1970s. It has since been stripped of its cultural and religious overtones and yoga is now a part worth US$3 billion yearly of the general US fitness industry. The worst offender here is the Indian-born one, aged 61, a real culture-traitor, Bikram Choudhury, who has 900 "yoga studios" around the world - who first copyrighted a "yoga sequence" in 1978 and tradmarked Bikram Yoga in 2002. (The Indian government has also lately been fighting to protect basmati rice and tumeric from Western patents in recent years, rather as the French have unreasonably had to fight to protect the word "champagne" in respect of the marketing of effervescent wines.) Well, this website has had enough of this madness from the US. This website with backing from www.worldsanity.org/ has now decided to take out a world-wide patent on common sense, put the patent out as part of the open-source movement under a typical GNU licence, and as hopefully to soon be ratified by UN, so enabling any responsible group of citizens anywhere in the world to bill the US government one million (US$1 million, repeat US$1 million), every time one of its so-called "corporate-citizens" abridges any notion of international common sense about anything! (You'll be able to download authoritative, stable and reliable source codes on common sense, well-annotated binaries on wisdom, well-secured PDFs on ordinary honesty, decency and morality, and torrents of bit-torrents of ways to go about it all from Linux-run servers fitted with Apache and managed as it happens by descendants of Mark Twain.) The monies so collected will go to International Red Cross/Red Crescent. The expenditure of these monies so-collected will be audited (per this website's lobbying of all US members of Congress so that they soon pass a relevant law) by the Secretary of the US Treasury in his spare time, as part of his fulfillment of his official, repeat, official duties. (Item, The Australian, via The Times, 1 June 2007) This gathering US madness continued with a story in Weekend Australian, (11-12 August 2007), as ABC in Australia has reported that Australian coffee makers are reacting angrily to attempts by Nestle to copyright images of coffee-drinking. Imagine this! Image1 at issue is of black coffee in a white cup as seen from above. Image2 at issue is of a red coffee mug as seen from the front. If Nestle is successful on this in Australia, coffee makers and even ordinary cafes will risk prosecution for breach of copyright if they display such images. All this is madness, and for the birds! So on behalf of the world's free-flying birds and their nesting habits, this website has freely decided to sue Nestle for inappropriately embodying the generic word "nest" in its trademarks and also for outright theft of the French word, "le". Because nature and common sense set the real precedents in life on this planet, not the dementias of US legal system! Is this clear? - Ed   

Chronology of Computers and The Net

Follows a chronology of some milestones in the history of computerisation and the development of the Internet and multimedia. There is little consideration of technological development for radio/TV, nor of software for desktop publishing. (Page numbers given below are from a book by Sinclair.)

Please Note: Any items of the list of recommended reading are presented in terms of date of publication (the most recent last)

1801: The French Jacquard loom may have been the world's first programmable device. A sequence of punched cards defined a pattern to be woven by a machine.

1898: Valdemar Poulson invents tape recording of sound, the technology is not refined until the 1940s.

1913: New Zealander George Julius invents the Automatic Totalisator, a complex electro-mechanical calculator which is the earliest, one-line, real-time, data-processing and computation system.

1924, IBM abandons its old name of Computing-Tabulating Recording Co., p. 165.

1940, Concept of a "computer" better refined in the UK. Some of the mathematical work came from British-Polish intelligence efforts to crack the codes used by "the ENIGMA machine" used to transmit coded German military orders. Polish intelligence officers had been aware of the existence of ENIGMA before Poland was invaded by Germany and brought their knowledge to Britain.

Below are items still uncollected

1879: Melbourne Australia becomes first city to publish its telephone directory. (White Pages in today's terms)

From 1790s: Re Tasmania, By the 1790s, sealers are increasingly visiting Bass Strait, and one people incident is this - George Briggs finds an Aboriginal mistress who has a daughter, Dolly, probably the first mixed-race baby born in Tasmania (?), later reared in Launceston. Dolly later had a liaison with ex-convict Thomas Johnson and had 13 children, apart from which they became wealthy and respected, owning more than 20 houses, some shops, a hotel, a tannery and a colliery. See see fixc also profit, Diana Wyllie, Dolly Dalrymple, PO Box 764, Childers, QLD 4660, 2004, 85pp.

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