1912 - Wikiwand

1912 (MCMXII) was a leap year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and a leap year starting on Sunday of the Julian calendar, the 1912th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 912th year of the 2nd millennium, the 12th year of the 20th century, and the 3rd year of the 1910s decade. As of the start of 1912, the Gregorian calendar was 13 days ahead of the Julian calendar, which remained in localized use until 1923.

From top to bottom, left to right: The Titanic sinks on her maiden voyage, killing over 1,500 people and becoming one of history’s deadliest maritime disasters; the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden introduces electronic timing and public address systems; the First Balkan War sees the Balkan League of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, and Montenegro push the Ottoman Empire out of Europe; the Lena massacre in the Russian Empire kills hundreds of striking gold miners, fueling revolutionary anger; the death of Emperor Meiji ends the Meiji era in the Japanese Empire and begins the Taishō period; and the Novarupta eruption in the U.S. Territory of Alaska becomes the century’s most powerful volcanic event.

Quick facts

1912 in various calendars
Gregorian calendar	1912 MCMXII
Ab urbe condita	2665
Armenian calendar	1361 ԹՎ ՌՅԿԱ
Assyrian calendar	6662
Baháʼí calendar	68–69
Balinese saka calendar	1833–1834
Bengali calendar	1318–1319
Berber calendar	2862
British Regnal year	2 Geo. 5 – 3 Geo. 5
Buddhist calendar	2456
Burmese calendar	1274
Byzantine calendar	7420–7421
Chinese calendar	辛亥年 (Metal Pig) 4609 or 4402 — to — 壬子年 (Water Rat) 4610 or 4403
Coptic calendar	1628–1629
Discordian calendar	3078
Ethiopian calendar	1904–1905
Hebrew calendar	5672–5673
Hindu calendars
- Vikram Samvat	1968–1969
- Shaka Samvat	1833–1834
- Kali Yuga	5012–5013
Holocene calendar	11912
Igbo calendar	912–913
Iranian calendar	1290–1291
Islamic calendar	1330–1331
Japanese calendar	Meiji 45 / Taishō 1 (大正元年)
Javanese calendar	1841–1842
Juche calendar	1
Julian calendar	Gregorian minus 13 days
Korean calendar	4245
Minguo calendar	ROC 1 民國1年
Nanakshahi calendar	444
Thai solar calendar	2454–2455
Tibetan calendar	ལྕགས་མོ་ཕག་ལོ་ (female Iron-Boar) 2038 or 1657 or 885 — to — ཆུ་ཕོ་བྱི་བ་ལོ་ (male Water-Rat) 2039 or 1658 or 886

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This year is notable for the sinking of the Titanic, which occurred on April 15 and the outbreak of the First Balkan War in October.

In Albania, this leap year runs with only 353 days as the country achieved switching from the Julian to Gregorian Calendar by skipping 13 days. Friday, 30 November (Julian Calendar) immediately turned Saturday, 14 December 1912 (in the Gregorian Calendar).

Events

January

January 1 – The Republic of China is established.^[1]
January 5 – The Prague Conference (6th All-Russian Conference of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party) opens.^[2]
January 6
- German geophysicist Alfred Wegener first presents his theory of continental drift.^[3]
- New Mexico becomes the 47th U.S. state.^[4]
January 8 – The African National Congress is founded as the South African Native National Congress, at the Waaihoek Wesleyan Church in Bloemfontein, to promote improved rights for black South Africans, with John Langalibalele Dube as its first president.
January 12 – In the 1912 German federal election the Social Democrats for the first time becomes the party with the most seats.^[5]
January 14 – Raymond Poincaré forms a coalition government in France, beginning his first term of office as Prime Minister on 21 January.
January 17 – British polar explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott and a team of four become the second expeditionary group to reach the South Pole.
January 18 (Old Style January 5) – Prague Conference: Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik Party break away from the rest of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.
January 22 – The Overseas Railroad officially opens with Henry Flagler, its owner, arriving on the first train to Key West, Florida, to a cheering crowd of 10,000.
January 23 – The First International Opium Convention is signed at The Hague to restrict exports.

February

February 12 – The Manchu Qing dynasty of China comes to an end after 268 years with the abdication of the Xuantong Emperor Puyi in favour of the Republic of China.
February 14 – Arizona is admitted as the 48th state.^[6]
February 24 – Battle of Beirut: Italy makes a surprise attack on the Ottoman port of Beirut, when the cruiser Giuseppe Garibaldi and the gunboat Volturno bombard the harbour, killing 97 sailors and civilians.
February 29 – Serbia and Bulgaria secretly sign a treaty of alliance for a term of eight years, with each pledging to come to the defense of the other during war. The treaty of alliance would eventually be dishonored in World War I.

March

March 1 – Albert Berry is reported to have made the first parachute jump from a flying airplane.
March 6 – Italian forces become the first to use airships in war as two dirigibles drop bombs on Turkish troops encamped at Janzur, from an altitude of 6,000 feet.^[7]
March 7 – Roald Amundsen, in Hobart, Tasmania, announces his success in reaching the South Pole the previous December.
March 12 – The Girl Scouts of the USA is founded by Juliette Gordon Low, in Savannah, Georgia.
March 16 – Lawrence Oates, dying member of Scott's South Pole expedition, leaves the tent saying, "I am just going outside and may be some time."
March 22 – The State of Bihar is formed out of the erstwhile State of Bengal, in British India.
March 27 – Mayor Yukio Ozaki of Tokyo gives 3,000 cherry trees to be planted in Washington, D.C., to symbolize the friendship between Japan and the United States.
March 29 (probable date) – Robert Falcon Scott and the remaining members of his South Pole expedition die.
March 30 – The French Third Republic establishes the French protectorate in Morocco by the Treaty of Fes with Sultan Abd al-Hafid of Morocco.

April

April 1 – A partial lunar eclipse takes place, the first of two lunar eclipses this year. It is the 61st lunar eclipse of the 111th Saros cycle, which started with a penumbral lunar eclipse on June 10, 830 AD and will conclude with another penumbral lunar eclipse on July 19, 2092.
April 10 – White Star liner RMS Titanic departs from Southampton, England, with more than 2,200 passengers and crew on her maiden voyage, bound for New York.
April 11 – RMS Titanic makes her last call, at Queenstown in Ireland.
April 14–15 – Sinking of the RMS Titanic: RMS Titanic strikes an iceberg in the northern Atlantic Ocean and sinks with the loss of more than 1,500 lives.^[8]
April 14 – Santos FC, a Brazilian association football club, is founded in State of Sao Paulo.^[9]
April 16 – Harriet Quimby becomes the first woman to fly across the English Channel.
April 17
- Lena massacre: Russian troops kill or wound 500 striking gold miners in Siberia.
- A hybrid solar eclipse is the 30th solar eclipse of Solar Saros 137.
April 18 – Cunard Line vessel RMS Carpathia arrives in New York with the 705 RMS Titanic survivors.
April 20 – Fenway Park in Boston, Massachusetts opens.
April 24 – English association football club Barnsley win the FA Cup.
April 30 – Carl Laemmle founds Universal Studios as the Universal Film and Manufacturing Company in the United States.

May

May 1 – ʻAbdu'l-Bahá lays the cornerstone for the Bahá'í House of Worship in Wilmette, Illinois.
May 5 – The 1912 Summer Olympics open in Stockholm, Sweden. Modern Pentathlon is contested for the first time in these games.
May 11 – Alaska becomes a territory of the United States.
May 13 – In the United Kingdom, the Royal Flying Corps (forerunner of the Royal Air Force) is established.
May 23 – The Hamburg America Line's SS Imperator is launched in Hamburg and is the world's largest ship.
May 30 – Pioneer aviator Wilbur Wright (of the Wright brothers) dies of typhoid fever in Dayton, Ohio.

June

June 6 – The Novarupta volcano is formed in Alaska by a VEI 6 eruption, the world's largest (in terms of matter emitted) in the 20th century.
June 26 – Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 9 is premiered posthumously by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Bruno Walter.^[10]
June 30 – Regina Cyclone: Canada's deadliest tornado strikes Regina, Saskatchewan, killing 28 people.

July

July 1 – Harriet Quimby, who set the record as the first woman to fly the English Channel two months previously, dies in Squantum, Massachusetts, after her brand-new two-seat Bleriot monoplane crashes, killing both Quimby and her passenger.
July 12 – The United States release of Sarah Bernhardt's film Les Amours de la reine Élisabeth is influential in the development of the movie feature. Adolph Zukor, who incorporates Paramount Pictures on May 8, 1914, launches his company as the distributor. Paramount celebrates its centennial in 2012.
July 30 – Emperor Meiji of Japan dies; he is succeeded by his son Yoshihito, who becomes Emperor Taishō. In the history of Japan, the event marks the end of the Meiji period and the beginning of the Taishō period.

August

August 1 – The Jungfrau Railway is inaugurated with the opening of the subterranean Jungfraujoch railway station in the Bernese Oberland of Switzerland, Europe's highest at 3,450 metres (11,320 ft) above sea level.^[11]
August 4 – United States occupation of Nicaragua: U.S. Marines land from the USS Annapolis in Nicaragua, to support the conservative government at its request.^[12]
August 12 – Sultan Abd al-Hafid of Morocco abdicates.
August 21 – The first Eagle Scout (Boy Scouts of America) earns his rank.
August 29 – A typhoon strikes China, killing at least 50,000 people.^[13]

September

September 4 – The government of the Ottoman Empire agrees to the demands put forward in the Albanian Revolt of 1912.
September 28 – W. C. Handy publishes "The Memphis Blues" in the United States.

October

October 8 – The First Balkan War begins: Montenegro declares war against the Ottoman Empire.
October 10 – The Maternity Allowance Act goes into effect in Australia, but excludes minorities.
October 14 – John Flammang Schrank attempts to assassinate Theodore Roosevelt in Milwaukee.
October 16 – Bulgarian pilots Radul Minkov and Prodan Toprakchiev perform the second bombing with an airplane in history, at the railway station of Karaagac near Edirne, against Turkey.
October 17 – Krupp engineers Benno Strauss and Eduard Maurer patent austenitic stainless steel.^[14]
October 18 – Italy and the Ottoman Empire sign a treaty in Ouchy near Lausanne, ending the Italo-Turkish War.
October 18–21 – First Balkan War: The Greek navy captures the island of Lemnos for use as a forward base against the Dardanelles.^[15]
October 24 – First Balkan War: Battle of Kumanovo – Serbian forces defeat the Ottoman army in Vardar Macedonia.
October
- Edgar Rice Burroughs' character Tarzan first appears in Tarzan of the Apes, in American pulp magazine The All-Story.
- Sax Rohmer's character Fu Manchu first appears in the first story of The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu in English pulp magazine The Story-Teller.

November

November 5 – 1912 United States presidential election: New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson wins over former president Theodore Roosevelt and incumbent president William Howard Taft.
November 11 – William Lawrence Bragg presents his derivation of Bragg's law for the angles for coherent and incoherent scattering from a crystal lattice, creating the field of x-ray crystallography, and making possible the eventual imaging of the double helix of DNA.^[16]
November 25 – Românul de la Pind, the longest-running newspaper by and about Aromanians until World War II, ceases publication.^[17]
November 28 – Albania declares independence from the Ottoman Empire.

December

December 3 – Bulgaria, Montenegro, and Serbia (the Balkan League, but not Greece) sign an armistice with the Ottoman Empire at Çatalca, temporarily halting the First Balkan War after 2 months. (The armistice will expire on February 3, 1913, and hostilities will resume.)^[18]
December 18 – Piltdown Man, thought to be the fossilized skull of a hitherto unknown form of early human, is presented to the Geological Society of London (it is revealed to be a hoax in 1953).
December 24 – Merck files patent applications in Germany for synthesis of the entactogenic drug MDMA (Ecstasy), developed by Anton Köllisch.^[19]

Date unknown

1912 date-mark on the apex of a building at Springfield, Birmingham, England.

Casimir Funk identifies vitamins.
Sylhet is reconstituted into the non-regulation Chief Commissioner's Province of Assam (Northeast Frontier Province).^[20]
The Scoville Unit (used to measure the heat of peppers) is devised and tested by Wilbur Scoville.
Wilfrid Voynich discovers the eponymous manuscript in the Villa Mondragone.
The Government College of Technology, Rasul is established in the Punjab.
Ludwig von Mises publishes his foundational The Theory of Money and Credit in the original German.
Articulated trams are invented and first used by the Boston Elevated Railway.^[21]