On the third page you will find important events of the time starting with the 20th century.

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1901 The death of queen Victoria (1819-1901) was another sign for the decline of Europe prior to the two world wars. Already after the death of Prince Albert  1861 Victoria had little contact with intellectual and artistic subjects and so remained happily unaware of the unsettling new directions being explored in the world around her.

1908 October Henry Ford 1863 - 1947 announces the Model T and by introducing the assembly line 1913-1914 he is able to reduce the prices and make it affordable (the Model T cost $950 in 1908 and $290 in 1927) in order to capture the widest possible market and meet the price by volume and efficiency.

1914-1918 World War I. Germany is able to start a war with a Serbian killing an Austrian. Germany opens another Pandora's box with the support of Lenin to make peace with Russia. It is Woodrow Wilson who enters the war 1917 and with his fourteen points he is able to end it. After the treaty of Versailles he suffers a nervous collapse and stroke of paralysis, a bad omen whether this peace creates more problems than it solves.

1928 Steam Boat Willie is the first appearance of Mickey Mouse in an animated cartoon film. After the transition to sound in motion pictures in 1927 when The Jazz Singer, a motion picture with the popular singer Al Jolson, brings the novelty of sound to the movies, Walt Disney (1901-1966) changes his just developed new character and gives him his voice. In 1932 he also introduces color to his movies and in 1935 he releases a version of the classic fairy tale that he calls Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first feature-length animated film. His movies are successful especially after the great depression that follows

1929 Black Tuesday, October 29. The stock market crash of the New York Stock Exchange at Wall Street shows the risks of buying stocks on margin.

1938 Two Stanford-Students William Hewlett and David Packard build in a garage at 367 Adison Avenue, Palo Alto, California, Silicon Valley an audio-oscillator. Since then the real estate price of this area soars.

1939-1945 World War II. Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement politic only postpones the war but the Hitler-Stalin Nonaggression Pact starts it. France not too well protected by the "Maginot Line" learns that this is not like the first World War. Hitler gets so enraged by the fact that the new British government under Winston Churchill is not so easily fooled by stopping the tanks at Dunkirk that he looses the Battle of Britain. This is his first but not his last defeat. 1941 Dec. 7-8, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor gets the US out of his isolation policy and eventually leads to the use of a new weapon - the Atomic Bomb - on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by US president, Harry S. Truman. Together with the discovery of the Jewish Holocaust the new peace will be different from the last and eventually the hot war only changes into a cold war.

1961 August 12-1989 November 9 the Berlin Wall (Antifaschistischer Schutzwall) stands for the inhumanity behind the ideas of Karl Marx that didn’t even work in his own country.

1973 OPEC conference influenced by the Yom Kippur War in October shows that oil is a limited resource.

1981 August 12, IBM introduces the PC a personal computer and builds a triumvirate with Microsoft for their operating system MS-DOS and Intel using their 8086 as CPU.

1990 in May the MS-Windows version 3.0 is introduced. Although Xerox and Apple already had their own Graphical User Interface it is this version that takes commercially off.

1994 Marc Andressen and Jim Clark form Mosaic Communications Corp. (now Netscape Communications) in order to commercialize the Mosaic web browser, initially developed by at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ at the University of Illinois http://www.uiuc.edu/ in Urbana-Champaign. The web browsing tool becomes wildly popular, and the growth of web "pages" and "sites" begins to take off.

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