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Merchants and Bankers
From 1900-1950

Trade - an international perspective

This Merchants and Bankers Listings website is years old and is now (from 2009) undergoing a marked identity change. Its timeline material on economic history (for 1560-1930) is being moved to a website managed by Ken Cozens and Dan Byrnes, The Merchant Networks Project. This will empty many of this website's pages which have always been in series. In due course, Merchants and Bankers Listings will carry information from the Crusades on the early development of what became “capitalism” in Europe to 1560 or so. As well as a conglomeration of data on modern developments, mostly on modern/technical industry, computing, and for the future, today's climate change problems. The editor's view is that in the context of climate change, the views of Merchants and Bankers (and Economists, politicians), the keepers of matters economic, are due for a considerable shake-up. If this website can encourage the shake-up, and help inform it reliably, well and good. -Ed

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The Merchant Networks Project

	The history websites on this domain now have a companion website on a new domain, at Merchant Networks Project produced by Dan Byrnes and Ken Cozens (of London). This website (it is hoped) will become a major exercise in economic and maritime history, with some attention to Sydney, Australia.

NB: Data to 1929 is contained in the website The Merchant Networks Project

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.

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If you value the information posted here, and the projects of these websites in general, you may like to consider making a donation to help reduce our production costs? It would be greatly appreciated. Options include: paying via PayPal which this website uses - Ed

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 Abyssinia. (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.

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 guerrillas 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 guerrillas 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: Mathematician 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 guerrilla 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 guerrilla 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 depiction in the 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

June 2007: 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 trademarked 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.

1843: Countess of Lovelace, Ada Byron, translates an Italian paper on Babbage's Engines, writing with such clarity and insight that her work becomes a premier text explaining the process now known as computer programming. Babbage called her his "Enchantress of Numbers".

1822-1870: Englishman Charles Babbage develops detailed plans for table-making Difference Engines and Analytical Engines, controlled by punch-carded calculators embodying many features of the modern stored-program computer. Although Babbage never completes his engines, he shows the potential of a programmable calculating device. Note that he had an assistant, a woman credited with actually writing the first computer program, though perhaps she never actually finished testing it, Ada Lovelace, a daughter of the poet Byron (who was bad, mad and dangerous to know).

1890: For actuarial purposes, the invention of punch cards, and so the origins of IBM, destined to become a world leader in the development and manufacture of machines aiding more efficient business activity and compilation/processing of data for accountants' use.
Punched card equipment is developed for the US Census by Herman Holerith. The company formed developed into IBM and a UK spin-off led finally to ICI.

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

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