50 Fun Facts About 1913

Which painting, stolen from the Louvre in 1911, was recovered in Florence in December 1913?

The Mona Lisa had been taken by Vincenzo Peruggia, a Louvre worker who had helped build its glass case. Police had even questioned Pablo Picasso over the theft.

Which newspaper puzzle did Liverpool-born journalist Arthur Wynne introduce in the New York World in December 1913?

The crossword was first printed under the name word-cross. Britain waited until 1924 for a newspaper to run one, when the Sunday Express adapted a Wynne puzzle.

Which US mail service, launched on New Year's Day 1913, was used weeks later to send a baby to his grandmother?

Parcel post carried eight-month-old James Beagle a few miles in a rural carrier's wagon, as he was just under the 11-pound limit. It broke postal rules, yet several more children followed.

Which European capital was home at some point in 1913 to Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky, Tito and Freud?

Vienna housed all five in one section of the city. Stalin stepped off a train that January with a passport in a false name, while Hitler was a rejected art student lodging in a doss-house.

Which present-day California national park recorded 134°F in July 1913, long listed as Earth's hottest air temperature?

Death Valley logged the reading at Greenland Ranch, now called Furnace Creek, though some modern meteorologists doubt it. The same spot had hit its coldest on record, 15°F, that January.

What did the Sixteenth Amendment, ratified in February 1913, give the US Congress the power to collect?

Income tax has been levied by Washington ever since. Until 1913, customs duties and excise taxes had been the government's main sources of revenue.

Which car's build time fell from over twelve hours to about 93 minutes after a moving assembly line started in 1913?

The Ford Model T was built on a conveyor-driven line at the Highland Park plant in Michigan. The method needed less manpower as well as less time, and Ford kept cutting the car's price.

Which activist, later at the heart of the Montgomery bus boycott, was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, in February 1913?

Rosa Parks lay in honor in the US Capitol rotunda after she died in 2005, the first woman given that tribute. Her refusal to move from her seat in 1955 had set off the boycott.

Which Underground Railroad conductor died in Auburn, New York, in March 1913 and was buried with semi-military honors?

Harriet Tubman had also served the Union Army as an armed scout and spy. Her raid at Combahee Ferry freed more than 700 enslaved people.

Which Russian composer's ballet The Rite of Spring caused an uproar at its Paris premiere in May 1913?

Igor Stravinsky wrote it for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, with choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky. The word riot only became attached to the first night in reviews written about a decade later.

Which New York City rail station, opened in February 1913, has more platforms than any other station in the world?

Grand Central has 44 platforms, all below ground, on two levels. It stands on the site of two earlier stations with similar names, the first dating to 1871.

Which US institution was created two days before Christmas 1913 in response to the financial panic of 1907?

The Federal Reserve was set up as twelve regional banks, a design meant to diminish Wall Street's influence. Its bill had passed the House in September but met stronger opposition in the Senate.

Which US president, inaugurated in March 1913, became the first since John Adams to address Congress in person?

Woodrow Wilson revived a custom that Thomas Jefferson had dropped in 1801 as too monarchical. For more than a century, presidents had sent a written message for a clerk to read aloud.

Which American athlete lost two Stockholm gold medals in 1913 for having played semi-professional baseball?

Jim Thorpe's past came out that January in the Worcester Telegram, and amateur officials took it far more seriously than the public did. The medals were restored as replicas in 1983, 30 years after he died.

Which future US president was born in January 1913 on his family's lemon ranch in Yorba Linda, California?

Richard Nixon was born into a poor Quaker family, in a house his father had built. A library and museum opened at the birthplace in 1990.

Which sprinter, born in Oakville, Alabama, in September 1913, went on to win four gold medals in Berlin in 1936?

Jesse Owens was the youngest of ten children of a sharecropper. His haul of four golds was not equaled until Carl Lewis won the same events in 1984.

Which alloy did Harry Brearley first cast in Sheffield in August 1913 while trying to stop gun barrels wearing out?

Stainless steel was a later name: Brearley first called his alloy rustless steel. It made affordable cutlery possible and expanded Sheffield's traditional trade.

Which waterway's Gamboa Dike was blown up in October 1913 by a telegraph signal sent from the White House?

The Panama Canal joined the Atlantic and Pacific at last when the blast flooded the Culebra Cut. The US president had sent the signal himself.

Which touring stage comedian signed a $150-a-week contract with Keystone Studios in September 1913 to start in films?

Charlie Chaplin thought Keystone's comedies crude but liked the idea of a new life in films. He was hired to replace Fred Mace, a star who intended to leave.

Which physicist published a 1913 trilogy of papers describing how electrons are arranged around the atom's nucleus?

Niels Bohr met resistance from older physicists such as Rayleigh and Lorentz, while Einstein's generation saw a breakthrough. His theory gave the first theoretical basis for the spectral lines of hydrogen.

Which Bengali poet, author of Gitanjali, became in 1913 the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature?

Rabindranath Tagore won on the strength of a small body of work he had translated into English himself. Two of his songs later became the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.

Which coast-to-coast road for automobiles, dedicated in October 1913, ran from Times Square to San Francisco?

The Lincoln Highway was the first national memorial to the assassinated president, nine years ahead of the one in Washington, D.C. Its first recorded length was 3,389 miles.

Which US coin was redesigned in 1913 to show a Native American on one side and an American bison on the other?

The nickel's bison was, by its sculptor's account, an animal named Black Diamond. A handful of that year's coins kept the old Liberty Head design: only five are known, and one sold for over $1 million in 1996.

Which North American peak was first climbed in June 1913 by a party led by Hudson Stuck and Harry Karstens?

Denali was the name Stuck himself preferred to Mount McKinley, and he used it almost exclusively in his account of the expedition. Walter Harper and Robert Tatum completed the summit team.

In which 1913 race did Eugène Christophe carry his broken bicycle over ten kilometres to a forge and mend it himself?

The Tour de France judges still penalised Christophe, because a seven-year-old boy had pumped the bellows for him. The hours lost in the Pyrenees cost him a race he had been well placed to win.

In which sport did 20-year-old amateur Francis Ouimet beat British stars Harry Vardon and Ted Ray at the 1913 US Open?

Golf was widely seen in America as a pastime for the wealthy until Ouimet, a former caddie, won an 18-hole playoff in the rain. His own caddie, Eddie Lowery, was ten years old.

Which planned capital city was officially given its name by Lady Denman at a hilltop ceremony in March 1913?

Canberra was announced as the name on Kurrajong Hill, now Capital Hill and the site of Australia's Parliament House. Lady Denman was the wife of the governor-general.

Which sporting symbol did Pierre de Coubertin create in 1913 to represent the inhabited continents of the world?

The Olympic rings were unveiled in the August 1913 issue of the magazine Olympique. The five interlocking circles are blue, yellow, black, green and red on a white field.

Which Alsatian doctor and organist left Europe in 1913 to found a hospital at Lambaréné in present-day Gabon?

Albert Schweitzer took along a piano fitted with organ pedals, built for the tropics and delivered by river in a huge dug-out canoe. He received the Nobel Peace Prize for 1952.

In which Dutch city did the Peace Palace, paid for by industrialist Andrew Carnegie, open in August 1913?

The Hague received the palace as a courthouse for the Permanent Court of Arbitration, a body created in 1899 to end war. Within a year of the opening, Europe was fighting the First World War.

Which Balkan state attacked its former allies in June 1913 and lost territory on several sides within weeks?

Bulgaria was compelled by the Treaty of Bucharest to cede Southern Dobruja to Romania, while the Ottoman Empire took back Adrianople. The Second Balkan War ran only from 29 June to 10 August.

Which country's King George I was shot dead in March 1913 during an afternoon walk in a newly captured city?

Greece's George I was walking in Thessaloniki, taken from the Ottomans months earlier, after almost 50 years on the throne. The gunman said on arrest that the king had refused to give him money.

Which French pilot, namesake of a Paris tennis stadium, first flew non-stop across the Mediterranean in 1913?

Roland Garros was a self-taught pilot who made the crossing to Tunisia in a Morane-Saulnier. The stadium that hosts the French Open was named in his memory in 1928.

Which German engine inventor vanished from the steamer Dresden in September 1913 while crossing from Antwerp to England?

Rudolf Diesel was heading to a company meeting in London and went to his cabin after dinner on board. In the diary he carried, a cross was drawn beside that day's date.

Which 1913 children's novel by Eleanor H. Porter gave English a byword for an unfailingly optimistic person?

Pollyanna is an eleven-year-old orphan sent to a stern aunt in Vermont, where she wins the town over with what she calls the Glad Game. A bias towards the positive is now known as the Pollyanna principle.

Which French novelist paid to publish Swann's Way himself in 1913 after several publishers turned it down?

Marcel Proust had been turned down on the advice of André Gide, who was put off by a few minor syntax errors while leafing through the manuscript. Gide wrote to apologise early the next year.

Which author of The Devil's Dictionary vanished in 1913 after setting off to see the Mexican Revolution first-hand?

Ambrose Bierce was never seen again. The Devil's Dictionary had begun as an occasional newspaper item and first appeared as a book in 1906 under the title The Cynic's Word Book.

Which fastener, redesigned by Gideon Sundbäck, went on sale in 1913 and was later named after a brand of rubber boots?

The zipper got its name in 1923, when the B.F. Goodrich Company used the fastener on a new kind of galoshes. In its early years it mostly closed boots and tobacco pouches.

Which North American region was battered in November 1913 by the White Hurricane, a blizzard that destroyed 19 ships?

The Great Lakes have never known a deadlier natural disaster: more than 250 people were killed. Hurricane-force winds blew for long periods over four of the five, and Huron was hit hardest.

Which Civil War battlefield hosted over 53,000 veterans of both sides at a 50th anniversary reunion in 1913?

Gettysburg drew old soldiers from 46 of the 48 states, about 8,750 of them Confederate. No larger reunion of Civil War veterans was ever held.

Which 1913 New York exhibition introduced Americans to Cubism and to Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase?

The Armory Show took its name from the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue, rented for $5,000, and later travelled to two more cities. Its formal title was the International Exhibition of Modern Art.

Which British actress, born in Darjeeling in November 1913, won two Best Actress Oscars for playing Southern belles?

Vivien Leigh won as Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind and as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. She was born Vivian Mary Hartley.

Which football coach, born in Brooklyn in June 1913, later had the Super Bowl trophy named in his honor?

Vince Lombardi won the first two Super Bowls with the Green Bay Packers. In his youth he had enrolled in a six-year seminary program to become a Catholic priest.

Which scientific term did Scottish doctor Margaret Todd coin in 1913 for atoms that share a place in the periodic table?

Isotope comes from the Greek for the same place. Todd, a family friend, suggested it to chemist Frederick Soddy while he was explaining his ideas to her, and he went on to win a Nobel Prize in 1921.

Which nickname stuck to Britain's 1913 law that freed hunger-striking suffragettes, then rearrested them once recovered?

The Cat and Mouse Act followed a public outcry over force-feeding. Its nickname likened the government to a cat that lets its prey go only to pounce again.

Which Italian fashion house began in 1913 as a leather goods shop in Milan's Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II?

Prada started out as Fratelli Prada, selling imported English leather goods. Founder Mario's son had no interest in the business, so his daughter Luisa ran it for almost twenty years.

Which name did baseball's New York Highlanders officially adopt in 1913, a decade after joining the American League?

The Yankees had been created when two owners bought the rights to the defunct Baltimore Orioles. Fans tied the earlier name to the club's elevated home in Upper Manhattan.

Which construction toy did magician A. C. Gilbert first sell in 1913, inspired by girders rising beside a rail line?

Erector Set kits came from Gilbert's Mysto Manufacturing Company of New Haven, which until then had made magic tricks. The idea struck him on a train to New York as power lines were going up.

Which suffragist organized the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington on the eve of the presidential inauguration?

Alice Paul planned the march down Pennsylvania Avenue with Lucy Burns, and it was the first suffragist parade the capital had seen. Their committee raised and spent over $25,000 on the cause that year.

Which college football team stunned Army 35–13 at West Point in 1913 with an attack built on the forward pass?

Notre Dame relied on long, accurate throws from quarterback Gus Dorais to Knute Rockne. It was the first major contest in which a team used the pass regularly from start to finish.