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Millennium: 2nd millennium
Centuries: 19th century · 20th century · 21st century
Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s
1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s
Categories: BirthsDeaths
FoudingsDisestablishments

The 20th century of the Christian Era began on January 1, 1901 and ended on December 31, 2000. According to the Gregorian calendar, 2000 was the first century leap year since 1600.

The century saw a major shift in the way that vast numbers of people lived, as a result of political, ideological, economic, social, cultural, scientific, technological, and medical change and progress. Terms like ideology, world war, genocide, and nuclear war entered common usage. Scientific discoveries, such as the theory of relativity and quantum physics, drastically changed the worldview of scientists, causing them to realize that the universe was fantastically more complex than previously believed, and dashing the hopes at the end of the 19th century that the last few details of scientific knowledge were about to be filled in. Accelerating scientific understanding, more efficient communications, and faster transportation transformed the world in those hundred years more rapidly and widely than at any time in the past. It was a century that started with horses, simple automobiles, and freighters but ended with luxury sedans, cruise ships, airliners and the space shuttle. Horses, Western society's basic form of personal transportation for thousands of years, was replaced by automobiles and buses within the span of a few decades. These developments were made possible by the large-scale exploitation of fossil fuel resources (especially petroleum), which offered large amounts of energy in an easily portable form, but also caused widespread concerns about pollution and long-term impact on the environment. Humanity explored outer space for the first time, even taking their first footsteps on the Moon.

The nature of change[]

Due to continuing industrialization and expanding trade, many significant changes of the 20th century were, directly or indirectly, economic and technological in nature. Inventions such as the light bulb, the automobile, and the telephone in the late 1800s, followed by supertankers, airliners, motorways, radio, television, antibiotics, frozen food, computers and microcomputers, the Internet, and mobile telephones affected the quality of life for great numbers. Scientific research and technological development was the force behind vast changes in everyday life, to a degree which was unprecedented in human history.

Events[]

1900 - 1909[]

  • 1901: wikipedia:Queen Victoria dies at age 82, which marks the end of the Victoria Age.
  • 1905: The First Electric Toaster.
  • 1905: A Radio Transmitter goes live, meaning the First Radio.
  • 1906: The wikipedia:Electric Washing Machine is invented.
  • 1906: Britain launches the battleship HMS Dreadnought, the fastest and heaviest armored warship yet ever built.
  • 1907: Norwegian women gain the vote.
  • 1908: Vacuum Cleaner is Invented.

1910's (10's)[]

(Note: Help Edit the decads, if you can, add in links to significant events featured on other pages)

1920's (20's)[]

1930's (30's)[]

1940's (40's)[]

  • 1945 2nd world war ends

1950's (50's)[]

1960's (60's)[]

1970's (70's)[]

1980's (80's)[]

1990's (90's)[]


Developments in brief[]

Also see (for more details of general history): wikipedia:20th century events.

See also[]

References[]

Based on an extract from the Wikipedia:20th Century article

Sources[]

  • UNESCO (2008-02-28). "The Twentieth Century", History of Humanity. VII, Routledge. pp. 600. ISBN 978-0-415-09311-8. 

External links[]

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