The 1900s in Ten Events
9 min read
The twentieth century was the most violent and the most transformative hundred years in human history. It opened with the first powered flight and closed with a planet linked by the World Wide Web. In between came two world wars, the atomic bomb, revolutions that reshaped whole societies, the end of European empires, the race to the Moon, and the long standoff of the Cold War. No previous century changed so much, so fast, for so many people.
Saeculum holds hundreds of events from the 1900s. This guide gathers ten of the highest-significance turning points and arranges them in order, so you can follow the century's great arc — from the machines that shrank the world to the ideologies that fought over it, and finally to the networks that would define the century to come.
Flight, and the war that ended the old world
The century began with a twelve-second miracle. In 1903, on the dunes at Kitty Hawk, Orville and Wilbur Wright achieved the first sustained, controlled, powered flight of a heavier-than-air machine. Within a single lifetime, powered flight would carry passengers across oceans, drop bombs on cities, and lift human beings off the planet entirely.
The optimism of the new century did not last. In 1914 the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo triggered a chain of alliances that plunged Europe into the First World War. When Germany invaded Belgium and Britain declared war, the continent's great powers marched into a conflict they expected to win by Christmas. Instead, four years of industrialized slaughter in the trenches killed millions, toppled four empires, and shattered the confident world of the nineteenth century for good.
The first controlled, powered flight — a technology that would reshape travel, war, and eventually spaceflight within a single lifetime.
The murder of Franz Ferdinand ignites a war that kills millions, topples four empires, and ends the long nineteenth century.
Revolution, crash, and a second war
The strains of the war brought down the old order. In 1917 two revolutions in Russia overthrew the Tsar and then swept the Bolsheviks to power in Petrograd, creating the world's first communist state and beginning an experiment in remaking society that would shape global politics for the rest of the century.
Peace proved fragile. In 1929 the Wall Street Crash wiped out fortunes and tipped the industrial world into the Great Depression, throwing millions out of work and feeding the extremism that followed. A decade later, in 1939, Germany's invasion of Poland began the Second World War — a conflict even larger and deadlier than the first, fought across the globe and marked by the industrialized murder of the Holocaust.
The Tsar falls and the Bolsheviks seize Petrograd, founding the first communist state and a rival vision of the modern world.
The stock market collapse triggers the Great Depression, a global economic catastrophe that helped fuel the rise of extremism.
Germany's invasion of Poland opens the deadliest conflict in history, fought across the globe and scarred by the Holocaust.
The atomic age and the space race
The Second World War ended with a new and terrible kind of power. In 1945, after the Trinity test lit the New Mexico desert, atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, forcing Japan's surrender and opening the nuclear age. For the first time, humanity possessed the means to destroy itself — a shadow that would hang over the whole Cold War.
The same rocketry that could deliver warheads could also reach space. In 1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, stunning the world and igniting the space race. Twelve years later, in 1969, the United States answered by landing Apollo 11 on the Moon — the first time human beings set foot on another world — even as, more quietly, the first message was sent across the ARPANET, the ancestor of the internet.
The Trinity test and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki end the Second World War and open the nuclear age.
The first artificial satellite launches the space race and the anxieties of the Cold War into the sky.
Humans walk on another world; the same year, the ARPANET carries its first message, seeding the internet.
The Cold War ends and the web begins
For four decades the world was divided between the American and Soviet blocs, a standoff that shaped everything from proxy wars to the Olympics. In 1989 that order cracked open: as reform swept the Eastern bloc, the Berlin Wall fell, reuniting a divided city and symbolizing the collapse of communist rule across Europe. In the same year, at a physics laboratory in Geneva, Tim Berners-Lee proposed the World Wide Web.
The old superpower rivalry ended two years later. In 1991 the Soviet Union dissolved into fifteen independent states, closing the Cold War and leaving the United States as the sole superpower. That very year the World Wide Web opened to the public — a coincidence that neatly marks the century's turn from a world defined by ideology and armies to one increasingly defined by information and networks.
The symbol of a divided Europe comes down as communist rule collapses; the same year, Berners-Lee proposes the Web.
The Cold War ends as the USSR breaks apart, the same year the World Wide Web opens to the public.
How to read the century as a whole
Read in order, the ten events tell a story of acceleration and extremity. The century's machines — the aircraft, the rocket, the bomb, the computer network — repeatedly multiplied human power for both creation and destruction. Its ideologies — communism, fascism, liberal democracy — fought over how that power should be used, in wars and revolutions that touched every continent. And its final years, with the fall of the Wall and the birth of the web, opened the networked, uncertain world we still live in.
To see the industrial and imperial world the twentieth century inherited, read the Industrial Age; to see where its final chapter leads, follow the timeline into the contemporary era of networks and climate. The 1900s are the century in which the modern world reached both its greatest heights and its darkest depths — often within the same decade.
Frequently asked
What was the most important event of the 1900s?
The two world wars reshaped the century more than any other events, redrawing borders, ending empires, and killing tens of millions. If a single moment must be chosen, the atomic bombings of 1945 stand out: they ended the Second World War and opened the nuclear age, defining the Cold War that followed.
Why was the twentieth century so violent?
Industrial technology made war deadlier than ever, while powerful competing ideologies — nationalism, communism, and fascism — gave states both the means and the motive for total war. The result was two world wars, the Holocaust, and numerous revolutions and genocides, even as the same era produced extraordinary advances in medicine, rights, and technology.
How did the Cold War shape the century?
After 1945 the world divided between the American and Soviet blocs, a rivalry that drove the arms race, the space race, and proxy wars across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It ended between 1989 and 1991 with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, leaving a single superpower and a rapidly globalizing world.
How did the twentieth century end?
It ended with the collapse of the Cold War order and the dawn of the information age. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, just as the World Wide Web opened to the public — a shift from a world defined by armies and ideologies to one defined by networks.