The Six

2

The World in 1912

In 1912, humankind was on the move, building bigger machines and pushing them to the horizon. Many people - mostly men - were searching for work for the first time, not just over the hill but across oceans, farther from their homes than they had ever imagined.

When workers in Northern Ireland hammered the first rivet into place on the steel hulk that would become RMS Titanic, railways and steamships had already existed for decades, but as the new century began, people began demanding superlatives in their travel: bigger, further, faster. At the start of the twentieth century, humans were finally reaching the furthest points on the globe. In 1909, American Robert Peary and his team became the first known humans to stand on the geographic North Pole, while Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and his expedition arrived at the South Pole in December 1911. Although climbers had reached the top of the highest mountains in Africa and South America at the end of the nineteenth century, summiting the world's highest peaks in the Himalayas and the Karakorum were decades away. Slowly, surely, the world was becoming a smaller, or at least more accessible, place.

In the air, as early as 1875, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin had been fooling around with designs for airships that combined a giant balloon filled with hydrogen and a gondola that could be attached to carry pilots and a navigation assembly, along with cargo, passengers and weapons. On 24 April 1912, the Imperial German Navy ordered its first Zeppelin for military use. But airships remained in their nascent stage and the idea of using them for a transatlantic passenger service was no closer than space travel.

Two brothers in the United States, Orville and Wilbur Wright, made their first successful aeroplane flights in 1903. But almost a decade later, humans were not measurably closer to flying in them from one continent to another. Like airships, militaries eyed aeroplanes for use in reconnaissance or aerial bombardment, but not for the large-scale transport of people or machines.

Wealthy people began to buy automobiles for recreation and local transportation but, although their popularity was growing, the Ford Motor Co. didn't open its first assembly line to build cars until 1913. However, the slow adoption of the automobile initiated a transformation that would last throughout the rest of the century.

Although no country was even close to being 50 per cent connected, electrification was altering the landscape in large cities around the world and starting to creep out toward more rural areas. Cities like London, New York and Shanghai all had electric streetlights before 1900, but delivering power to dense urban populations was easier and less expensive than stretching kilometres of new power lines to serve fewer customers. The construction of new improved roads suitable for automobiles also paved the way for power lines to be installed alongside them.

In the first years of the twentieth century, coal powered the world. It heated homes, powered factories and provided the fuel that pushed trains down the track and great ships across the oceans. They may have been called steamships, but coal fires generated all the necessary steam. When the White Star Line's passenger ship Olympic made its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York in 1910, it used about 3,500 tons of the black stuff, averaging a speed of 21.7 knots (about 40kmh/25mph). Oil as a potential fuel source was discovered in quantity in 1875 but remained a decade or so away from widespread exploitation and use.

With aircraft and automobiles not yet viable, to cover significant distances by land, one boarded a train. Massive rail networks already stretched across North America, parts of Europe, India and from Moscow to Manchuria. If a person wanted to cross an ocean in 1912, one bought a ticket on a regularly scheduled voyage, preferably aboard the swiftest ship one could afford.

The tallest building in the world, the Woolworth Building at 233 Broadway in New York, was in the final stages of completion, reaching 792ft (241.4m). It would hold that title for eighteen years.

Mass communications and media came mostly from the printed word, namely books and large-circulation newspapers. The year's bestsellers show English-language readers' interest in their wider world - or at least, fanciful, fictionalised versions of it. Arthur Conan Doyle, best known as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, sold bushels of The Lost World, about an expedition to the Amazon that discovers prehistoric animals, including dinosaurs - a Jurassic Park before there was Jurassic Park. Swinging out of the trees came Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes, a human raised by non-human primates in an African jungle.

Silent films were becoming popular. Films at the time were fifteen to twenty minutes in length, with title cards instead of recorded dialogue, and were often accompanied by a live organist or orchestra in the cinema. Directors like D.W. Griffith and Mack Sennett directed multiple films per year, and early performers like brothers John and Lionel Barrymore, sisters Lillian and Dorothy Gish, and Mary Pickford became known to the public.

The technology to record and play music existed, but a phonograph or early Victrola player was still out of the financial reach of the average person. People enjoyed playing music at home. Live music and theatrical performances were well established and popular, especially in cities, along with touring musicians and circuses that would visit more far-flung areas.

Sports leagues in Europe and North America were starting to take shape. In the United States, sixteen teams, all in cities east of the Mississippi River, opened the Major League Baseball season. The Boston Red Sox began 1912 on the road against the New York Highlanders. The visitors looked forward to inaugurating their new home stadium, Fenway Park, on 20 April. Later that year, American university teams would play the first season of modern college football, with new rules, including four downs, or attempts to gain 10 yards, awarding 6 points for a touchdown score instead of 5 and shortening the field to 100 yards in length - rules that remain in force today, both in college and professional American football.

In the United Kingdom, Blackburn Rovers won their first English Football League title. Then, as now, twenty teams in the top division played thirty-eight matches, with Blackburn finishing above their nearest rival, Everton. Preston North End and Bury were relegated. In cricket, England retained the Ashes and won the sole instalment of a competition called the Triangular Tournament on home ground, defeating the only other two test nations at the time - Ashes rival Australia and third opponent South Africa.

Stockholm, Sweden, hosted the 1912 Summer Olympics from 6-22 July, with twenty-eight nations, almost all from North America and Europe, along with Australasia (a combined Australia and New Zealand team); Chile; Egypt; South Africa; Turkey; and, in the first Olympic appearance by an Asian nation, Japan. Native American athlete Jim Thorpe won the gold medal in the modern pentathlon and the decathlon, two of the United States' twenty-six golds, the most won by any single country. Hosts Sweden led the total medal count with sixty-five.

Europe and Africa

As of April 1912, the United Kingdom already had its third monarch of the new century. King George V, a grandson of Queen Victoria, had been on the throne for fewer than two years, following the death of his father, King Edward VII. Only a few months earlier, George V became the first and only British monarch to attend his imperial durbar in India. Herbert Henry Asquith of the Liberal Party served as His Majesty's Prime Minister. Britain remained the world's greatest power, ruling from the world's largest city, London, with the sun always shining upon the Union Jack somewhere.

Europe was enjoying an extended period of peace, but the undercurrents of revolution and war were already coursing through the continent. In Vienna, an aspiring artist named Adolf Hitler made a living as a day labourer and on the side, sold his watercolour paintings of city landmarks - paintings that seldom included any depictions of his fellow Viennese, or any other people, for that matter. In between making mediocre art and other odd jobs, he first began to consume antisemitic literature and form his diabolical ideas about the Jews and where he thought they belonged in European society.

An established Russian political revolutionary, Vladimir Lenin, had taken up residence in Paris and seized upon the works of dead German economist and philosopher Karl Marx. In January 1912, Lenin and his followers broke away from other Russian socialists and formed an organisation that would later become colloquially known as the Bolsheviks.

In South Africa, an Indian lawyer and activist named Mohandas Gandhi had begun advocating non-violent resistance to racist policies there, founding a utopian community called Tolstoy Farm near Johannesburg.

North America

The increasing wealth, industrial output and military might of the United States had grown during the nineteenth century, and waves of immigration there continued. The year began with forty-six states and ended with forty-eight. New Mexico became the forty-seventh state on 6 January, with Arizona finally joining on 14 February to realise Manifest Destiny, a political and military philosophy that expanded the growing country from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. That year, the Governor of New Jersey, Democrat Woodrow...