08/02/1900 | Thursday | Decisive day 01 of 100
Kodak Brownie camera launches in America

Full list  |  Top Kodak slogan: 'You push the button, we do the rest.' Jean-Luc Godard: 'Photography is truth.'

USA, THE AMERICAS. An additional swell within the bigger movements of the twentieth century was the expanding production and penetration of newspapers. Large print runs of newspapers had been technically possible for many decades but usually served limited geographical urban areas. This focus expanded during the 1900s because elites in the industrialized world, as much as revolutionaries in the developing world, recognised power lay in distributing and controlling more news to rural settings. The countryside was, after all, where most people still lived in 1900. Indeed within a few decades the professional role of journalism acquired such great prominence that it eclisped the old professions of the church and stockbroking. Auberon Waugh summarised the change like this: 'Generally speaking, the best people nowadays go into journalism, the second best into business, the rubbish into politics and the shits into law.'

But in the early 1900s there was a missing dimension to this expanding proposition: the ability of the audience to comprehend the new product. Much of the printed word was not always digestible in a world riddled with illiteracy. This was especially inhibiting in developing rural countries (usually colonised if they had useful natural resources) where education was still nasty, boring and short. There, it was not just a case of pictures being worth a thousand words. It went beyond that. Pictures were pretty much the only words some could comprehend. So imagery was immensely significant in 1900 - drawings of historical incidents, family portraits describing a destiny, picture books with subtle educational or not-so-subtle political messages. Yet it still relied on expensive oil paintings and other creations that needed too much effort to produce. 

When the Brownie camera appeared photography was still a complicated business with rather contrived output. George Eastman promised to change all of that with ‘you press the button, we do the rest’ slogan. It was an incredible difference based on a valid promise, producing easily and quickly small snapsots based around a standard image size of 2.25 X 3.25 inches (57mm x 83mm). Instantly the Brownie turned photography into a popular interest and affordable activity for millions. It was the first camera to be genuinely simple and uncomplicated. Essentially a cardboard box it featured a tiny lens able to reliably produce clear square pictures.

As important as simplicty was cheapness. The first Brownie cameras sold for US$1. It also worked in a handy and idiot-proof way, for the most part, using prerolled film that sold for around fifteen cents.

This trinity of benefits – simple, cheap, easy – made Kodak’s Brownie a huge and strikingly quick success. Although this first version of the camera ended production within months a quarter of a million sold. The cash generated allowed more innovations and in particular Kodacolor Film first appeared in the 1940s and 35 mm cine moving film in the 1950s. Kodak marketing also cannily targeted children to keep the revenue stream expanding as audience turned into adults with more disposable income. The name of the always-improving cameras emerged from children’s cartoon characters, the Brownies, and later models carried names like Baby Brownie, the Boy Scout Brownie and the Brownie Junior. Kodak earned such massive profits that it became one of the world’s biggest employers. Within Eastman's life (he died in 1932) all told there were nearly a hundred versions of the Brownie before production stopped. Even into the 1960s Kodak sold millions of the Brownie 127.

The critical change heralded by the Brownie was making images and insights into daily life much more open to the masses not only to see but to create. Relatively poor individuals were able to photograph calamities like the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. Soldiers also soon showed the small cameras could easily be taken to war. Indeed, images returning this route from the Great War and then World War Two, rather than through official censors, meant it was less easy to disguise the brutality of war.

By the end of the twentieth century photography or the ‘imaging industry’ defined an important part of stockmarkets. George Eastman, the former bank clerk who made it big, inspired a dozen more photographic companies around the world. Henri Cartier Bresson, one of the leading lights in modern photography, considered mastering photography was both a ‘great physical and intellectual joy.’

01/01/1901 | Tuesday | Decisive day 02 of 100
Australian Federation

Full list |  Top Sir Henry Parkes (1815–1896) and Australia's 'Father of Federation': 'If there is any part of the habitable globe where men are free, it is Australia. In regard to the supreme authority of Government, it is no figure of speech to say that we Australians are held to the Empire by a golden link. It could not be of lighter weight or of more intrinsic value. The British tie gives us a standing in the world... [but] Our liberties are absolutely in our own keeping.' 1901 Commonwealth Constitution. Section 127: 'In reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted.'

AUSTRALIA, AUSTRALASIA. Ideas about imperial control also changed during the 1900s. As Britain’s Queen Victoria began her long period of nearly-being-dead-but-not-quite many inside Britain and inside British colonies expected a lessening in imperial control. 

There was some reason for expecting this of post-Victorian Britain. Foremost among the important European imperial powers, Britain had already divvied up what looked like juicy imperial spoils. By a combination of diligent Anglo-Saxon directness in commerce and law and naval prowess at sea the United Kingdom had grabbed the largest share. Admittedly in 1900 there were still tussles here and there but these were principally over marginal lands like the African interior. Even there Britain and France, the two ascendant powers in Africa, had worked out how to mostly stay away from each other. Conflict mostly involved other minor Europeans with generally more ambition than tenacity.

But the cost of maintaining an imperial presence in important lands was far larger than ever anticipated during the nineteenth century. Garrisons had to be sent. Trade had to be taxed. Energy needed to be injected into far away places. Even though land ownership was relatively clearer over the world’s valuable coastal areas there was still a gnawing and growing question: could Europe maintain control? 

A critical signal came with the foundation of the Australian federation in early 1901. A grouping of British colonies dotted throughout the Australian continent joined not into a patchwork of connected countries, as perhaps might have happened in Africa, but into one large country that saw itself related to its creators but not controlled by them. Australia had been created in one bold move. In fact the only other significant adjustments after this involved the distant islands of New Zealand, which acquired its own dominion status in 1907, and South Australia ceded the Northern Territory to the Commonwealth of Australia in 1911.

The only real disputes arose over a new capital and never came to involve any fighting. True to form a British compromise settled on a new capital in an unusual way. Sydney and Melbourne, both cities named for prominent British politicians, could not agree that the other would be capital. As neither would yield the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), roughly equidistant between the two, was carved from New South Wales in 1911. Melbourne was only the temporary capital from 1901 to 1927.

Meanwhile the signal sent back to London and to the rest of the world was roughly this: expect imperial control emanating from Europe and across their empires to ease rather than intensify. 

Even by the end of the twentieth century, a hundred years after immigration had escalated the Australian population to 20 million, the spread was still tiny relative the land space (regardless of habitability). Australia was 7.7 million square kilometres – nearly double the size of India containing 1 billion – and with its two people per square kilometre had density is equal to Mongolia. It was less even than the other two mega-land spaces of Canada (3 people per square kilometre) and Russia (9 people per square kilometre)        

The rugged frontier spirit and the former prisoner accusation dominated the island continent. Some of it was fair. At the end of the century Australians committed more serious assaults per head than any other nation on earth (713 assaults per 100,000 people) – double the average of Britain (379 per 100,000). They also stole more from each other (6,200 thefts per 100,000 compared to 6,000 in Britain). But they also embodied a spirit of mateship and forgiveness. Despite high pockets of crime the incarceration rate was low. The total imprisonment rate in Australia in 2000 was only 98 per 100,000 – much lower than United Kingdom (124 prisoners per 100,000 people) and the prison-frenzied Americans (668 prisoners per 100,000).                     

07/09/1901 | Saturday | Decisive day 03 of 100
Boxer Rebellion against European imperialism fails in China

Full list  |  Top Chinese Empress Cixi, 1899: ‘They think that China, have neither money nor troops, would never venture to go to war with them. They fail to understand.’ Sir Robert Hart, inspector-general of China's customs, 1901: 'Twenty millions or more of Boxers, armed, drilled, disciplined and animated by patriotic – if mistaken – motives will make resident in China impossible for foreigners… In fifty years time there will be millions of Boxers in serried ranks and war’s panoply at the call of the Chinese government: there is not the slightest doubt of that.'

CHINA, ASIA. Australian federation was significant not just for Europe but for what it signalled from the fringes of Asia. Within that vast continent in 1900 lived nearly two-thirds of all people. The consolidating Australian story brought into sharp contrast the mess in which they lived. By some estimates produced as little as ten per cent of global wealth in the 1900s despite having literally dozens of countries and quasi-countries and expansive natural resources. The under-performance of Asia still existed in 2000 but had improved somewhat. Then with 52% of the worlds population it still generated an under-nourished and under-whelming 21% of global purchasing power

Thus in 1900 was a central question for Asia: what living arrangements and methods of government would govern Asia in the 1900s? Would it be similar or different to Australia? 

The answer was a little bit of many things but all involved in some way the two largest countries. India and China were the two natural power power poles in the continent. Between them they contained nearly half of humanity. Yet both existed under very different situations. Static might best describe India’s condition in 1900. British muscle still dominated the subcontinent even though ineptitude had sown the seeds of ruin. Callousness had already germinated several of these seeds and more would germinate in the run up to the 1940s. 

China, however, was in a much more striking stew than India. China may have accidentally avoided India’s experience of direct administration by outsiders. Before 1900 China opened under duress only a dozen or so ports to foreign traders. But few outsiders other than missionaries and marginal small traders bothered much with the vast and rather anarchic interior. Such limited intrusion might have been a blessing for competent governments. But China did not have competent government; in fact in 1900 it had almost a mirror opposite.

India at least could watch as the British handled dissent more or less decisively if brutally and carelessly. The 1900s, however, threw up telling evidence of just how useless Chinese elites were in handling domestic disputes like the Boxers.
A slain European diplomat turned the fizzing mess into a full-scale historical turning point. In the summer of 1901 an international relief force of over 2,000 troops departed from the coastal Tianjin inland for Beijing. The Empress Dowager imediately ordered it be blocked and foreign troops killed. Meanwhile in Beijing the Boxers burned churches and foreign residences. The signing of the Boxer Protocol in 1901 became the penultimate revolution that tippled the Qing era into its death spasms.

There was a sense this would be a messy turning point when the Empress declared her belief the Boxers could dodge bullets. Relatively small but immeasurably stronger European and Japanese armies settled into Beijing and other critical cities around the Chinese coast. When it finally dawned on Empress Cixi that, after all, bullets have immutable laws of physics she fled the capital for Xian. Shortly afterwards she undertook to execute some rebels and pay war reparations.

The dramatic turnaround received instant loathing across China. True, not all Chinese agreed with the Boxer’s brutality or their quaint physical beliefs. But their wishes to remove foreigners or at least reduce their rights and end the slur of extra-territoriality were real and deeply shared passions. The Empress’ belief that these resentments could be easily discarded proved misguided in the extreme. Just as the age of mass media started to penetrate China, indeed the number of both formal and underground Chinese-language newspapers with dissenting views was growing, the Boxers and their Empress Protector offered a perfect royal scoop.

Eventually the greatest beneficiary of this fascination with useless yet austere monarchy was a Chinese republican doctor called Sun Yat-sen. The Kuomintang, or Chinese Nationalist Party, appeared on the stage within a few years of the Boxer fiasco. When their resentment finally transformed into organisation in 1911 it gained power from the Qing almost overnight – courtesy in large measure of the Boxer fiasco.

10/12/1901 | Tuesday | Decisive day 04 of 100
Nobel Prizes in science/literature/peace launch in Sweden

Full list  |  Top Alfred Nobel: 'It is my express wish that in awarding the prizes no consideration be given to the nationality of the candidates but that the most worthy shall receive the prize, whether he be Scandinavian or not.' Albert Einstein, winner of Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921: 'To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.'

SWEDEN, EUROPE. While the 1900s showed a consolidating Australian continent, an Indian subcontinent staying the same, and a Chinese mess steadily worsening, it also signalled science was embarking on a special journey. The 1900s, indeed, started a journey of scientific discovery and new inventions that would run throughout the century. The ebb and flow of war and the creation and recreation of great and less great nations never completely subdued this steady and usually helpful scientific advancement. Sewn within the fabric of the twentieth centuryscience was always there, quietly, steadily, sometimes ruthlessly advancing. 

Nobel prizes almost perfectly marked this unchanging tempo of scientific discovery. The prizes first appeared in 1901 as the brainchild of the wealthy industrialist, Alfred Nobel, who made most of his money by inventing and commecially exploiting dynamite. (George Bernard Shaw later said he could forgive Alfred Nobel for inventing dynamite but not for creating the prizes.) He was not hopeful - writing before his death about the peaced prize he said 'I am skeptical as to its results' but had enough money to try.

Early winners of the Nobel prizes were a little less eye-catching than later years. Few remember people like Sir William Ramsay, the Scottish chemist who won the 1904 chemistry prize, or Lord Rayleigh, the English physicist who won the 1904 Physics prize. Perhaps the most memorable early winner was Henri Dunant who won the first Peace prize in 1901. This was for his work as mentor of the Red Cross, which also won as an organisation in 1917 and 1944 for its war work and again in 1963. Other early winners of literature, physiology/medicine, chemistry and physics sometimes faded into oblivion but selection improved greatly as the century progressed.

All told during the twentieth century approaching one thousand Nobel prizes were awarded. In terms of recipients some worrying signs. During the century the Nobel peace prize was won 16 times by entities (individuals or organisations) based in the United States (second place to United Kingdom with 11 awards); economics by 23 Americans (second to United Kingdom, 8), physiology or medicine by 44 Americans (second to United Kingdom, 18), physics by 41 Americans (second to United Kingdom, 8) and Chemistry by 36 Americans (second to United Kingdom, 22). Only in one field – literature – have there been more prizes award to non-Americans. France has won the Literature Nobel prize 13 times compared to America with 12 wins and Britain with 8 wins.

Over 95% of prizes went to men. Marie Curie was one of the rare exceptions. She shared the Physics prize in 1903 with her husband and Henri Becquerel for work on radiation and won the chemistry prize herself in 1911 for work on radioactivity. The two largest winners by country were the US and UK.

Nevertheless dozens of countries have produced at least one winner and by the 1920s, after only a couple of decades, the prizes had become of global interest. Almost all the famous names were there, from Alexander Fleming (Medicine prize in 1945 with Ernst Chain and Howard Florey) to Albert Einstein (Physics in 1921).

Three American presidents won Peace prizes. Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 for work in resolving the Russo-Japanese war of 1905 and Woodrow Wilson in 1919 for efforts to resolve the First World War. Jimmy Carter won in 2002 for work on human rights and democracy.

Some were famously absent like Gandhi who was nominated five times during the 1930s and 1940s and never won. But the Nobel organisation cannily expanded awards so organisations could receive them rather than just clever or noteworthy people. The Institute of International Law, the Red Cross, United Nations and Amnesty International received awards, for example, and often several times over. Almost all were proud to receive the recognition. Only Jean-Paul Sartre refused the Literature prize in the 1960s and Le Duc Tho refused the prize in the 1970s - the one he won jointly with US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

Alfred Nobel also tied the prizes into money. This kept the interest alive and the impact meaningful. Although early winners were by default paid in Swedish kroner the prize awarded soon switched to the more global currency of American dollars. At over a million dollars it was enough to make a difference in people’s lives.

31/05/1902 | Saturday | Decisive day 05 of 100
Britain defeats Boers in South Africa

Full list  |  Top Winston Churchill, 1900: 'What is the true and original root of Dutch aversion to British rule? It is the abiding fear and hatred of the movement that seeks to place the native on a level with the white man … the Kaffir is to be declared the brother of the European, to be constituted his legal equal, to be armed with political rights.' Arthur Conan Doyle, 1902: 'That the heavy losses caused us by the war were borne without a murmur is surely evidence enough how deep was the conviction of the nation that the war was not only just but essential - that the possession of South Africa and the unity of the Empire were at stake.'

SOUTH AFRICA, AFRICA. Australian federation had already hinted that a new and likely diluted form of imperial connection might appear. This would probably favour, or at least tolerate according to preferences, the decentralized and increasingly decollared underdog. The signing of the Treaty of Vereeniging in May 1902 - a final end to the protracted Boer War in southern Africa - confirmed this trend of loosening masters from mastered would continue. After the conclusion to the Boer War recognition seeped around not just London but the wider colonised world at just how difficult and expensive it was for Britain and other European countries to uphold colonial power at distance. 

Arguably this looked like an odd and irrational conclusion for by pretty much most metrics the Boer War was a decisive military victory for London. By some estimates as many as 30,000 Boer farmhouses were destroyed and the Transvaal and Orange Free State ceased to exist as Boer republics. So stout was the British victory that by the end of the 1900s (the Union of South Africa appeared only in 1910) Westminster fashioned a post-war medley of colonies into a single new country blessed with several deep sea ports and ample natural resources. Cohesive, not always, but still the new British creation was cohesive enough dominated the sub-Saharan part of the Dark Continent throughout the rest of the twentieth century.

However the amalgamation of a new big dominion was not treasured by the different tribal groupings at the southern tip of Africa. Used to division rather than unity that stored up a whole series of troubles. Nor and of more telling and immediate threat was it treasured by increasingly restless elements within the working classes of British society. One comment at the outbreak of the war: 'The Lord Mayor of London appeared in his robes and made a speech to the crowd. I cannot remember his exact words, but they announced that after intolerable insults from an old man named Kruger, Her Majesty's government had declared war upon the South African Boers. There was terrific and tumultuous cheering. Top hats were flung up after the crowd had sung "God Save the Queen". I don't believe I joined in the cheering. Certainly I did not fling up my top hat. Brought up in the Gladstonian tradition to the Liberals, and being, anyhow, a liberal-minded youth hostile to the loud-mouthed jingoism of the time, I was not swept by enthusiasm for a war which seemed to me, as it did to others, a bit of bullying by the big old British Empire.  

Costs for the British win shocked everyone. It took the British Army, and Royal Navy who escorted the troops, nearly half a million military personnel and quite colossal funds to subdue no more than ninety thousand Boers, many of whom fought part-time, juggling war with agricultural commitments that brought them in and out of action. Yet the  Boers successfully besieged three important British garrisons at Ladysmith, Mafeking and Kimberley and forced the extensive British forces down the mercenary route. Rotating British regiments organised between them at least 15,000 native Africans into mobile trackers and reconnaissance roles and nearly twice that number, 25,000, as armed blockhouse guards. Bound at least technically to Mother England the white dominions were also invited to chip in and delivered 12,000 Australians, five of whom received the Victoria Cross, plus 7,000 Canadians and 6,500 New Zealanders.

It might have been an even more expensive win if others had come to help the Boers. America and Holland both at various stages hinted around at least some support. A delegation of Boers visited Washington but from the Roosevelt administration received naught for their conflict.   

Yet even the vastness of the expanded British force proved immediately indecisive. It needed three years of fighting, hard and brutal stuff with sieges and deaths in the hundreds a routine occurrence, to secure victory. The brutality struck in particular Winston Churchill, future British Prime Minister, Arthur Conan-Doyle and Rudyard Kipling, all future authors. At one stage Boer forces led by Jan Smuts reached within a hundred kilomteres of the once-thought-impregnable sea port of Cape Town.

While the British may have bested the Boers in the end it was the defeated that showed convincingly guerrilla wars could strain imperial powers to breaking point. Using smokeless powder the Boers were able to snipe at British infantry from up to two kilometres. From now on not only London but nearly everyone else counting up the mathematics of independence knew that it was especially stretching and bordering on the impossible for imperial powers to fight and win modern wars. Recognition seeped around London that the military was worryingly hidebound to the last time they had faced serious (European) opposition dated as far back as the Crimean war of 1853-56.  

The distant fighting was not tiddlywinks for civilians either. Following the 1900 ‘Khaki election’ Britain’s Lord Kitchener famously evicted agricultural communities across the African veldt into centralised camps. By some reckoning approaching 30,000 (white) Afrikaans and 15,000 (black) Africans died in these early concentration camps. Reflecting a building racist tempo in the country the death rate was about one quarter for Blacks but more like one-thenth for white Afrikaans. Many commentators noted that in the 1930s Nazi Germany copied features of these camps. This is over stated. While the deaths embarrassed Britain analysis immediately after the war decided deaths came from disease and exposure rather than deliberate genocide seen in the likes of Dachau and Sorbibol. British fatalities were down to more mis-management than intent. But it was still a very shocking use of military power, beset by repeated symbols of its impotence, that illumintaed the desparate measures needed to impose control over unwilling peoples in distant lands.

Guerilla warfare defined nearly half of the war once Boers realized confronting British regiments directly was impractical. Rued one participant: ‘The Boers didn’t play the game fair and march out in pretty colours, flags flying and get merrily slaughtered. Wasn’t their scene.’ This canny approach to deflecting British military power did not go unnoticed by one Mohandas Gandhi, then a stretcher-bearer, and the lessons of avoiding direct conflict with stronger enemies soon reached India.

Arguably the human costs of defeating the Boers were negligible for Britain. From the world’s ascendant military force merely 8,000 were killed and there were around 13,000 non-combat casualties. In these relatively few losses lay Churchill’s barbed quip (the future Prime Minister experienced the war as a journalist-cum-adventurer) that it was ‘sporting of the Boers to take on the whole British Empire’. Perhaps the human cost was tolerable. But it needed nearly three years to win when conservative estimates, including Mr Churchill, had once reckoned under three months. Financial costs also increased with a GBP3million post-war indemnity paid to some Boers for restocking and repairing farm lands – in itself a message.

Sadly, the policy of dividing the races which was to become apartheid in the middle of the century took root in the Boer war. A political schism had anyway existed since the 1830s when the British emancipated slaves in the Empire – and including the Cape Colony. Dutch practices were less humane and preferred to allow for some form of slavery. This led to the ‘Great Trek’ of the 1840s when Boers migrated north and east into the Drakensberg mountains and Zulu territories of Natal. Black Africans, unsurprisingly, soon had no votes outside the British run Cape Colony. Winston Churchill On the Boer War, London to Ladysmith via Pretoria (1900): What is the true and original root of Dutch aversion to British rule? It is the abiding fear and hatred of the movement that seeks to place the native on a level with the white man … the Kaffir is to be declared the brother of the European, to be constituted his legal equal, to be armed with political rights.

17/12/1903 | Thursday | Decisive day 06 of 100
First powered flight in America

Full list  |  Top Orville Wright, 1904: 'With a short dash down the runway, the machine lifted into the air and was flying. It was only a flight of twelve seconds, and it was uncertain, wavy, creeping sort of flight at best; but it was a real flight at last and not a glide.' Leonardo da Vinci: 'When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.'

USA, THE AMERICAS. Shortly after the Boer War finished in Africa, during which many notable photographs taken by troops using Kodak Brownie cameras surfaced, another more famous photograph appeared from America. It was the image of the first propeller-driven aircraft in flight. 

Made in the wintery winds of late 1903 in Kitty Hawk along America’s Atlantic coast, and in front of only a few bemused lifeguards and sundry witnesses to a decisive turing point in history, the Wright Brothers flight finally achieved what had long been talked of but had long eluded practical invention – controllable and confident powered flight.

In truth the 1903 photograph looked a little more impressive than the reality. The initial Wright brothers accomplishment certainly improved on the earlier gliding flights accomplished in Britain in the 1850s by George Caley or in Germany in the 1890s by Otto Lilienthal. But despite the fervour and the frolics this was no large-scale government or military endeavor from Washington DC or a large corporation from New York. Rather it was the individual efforts of two small-scale bicycle manufacturers from Ohio. It depended on improvised and of dubious long-term use heavy engines that used water-cooling to drive piston engines.

The amateurish feel to the occasion showed. During early flights the bi-plane, meaning it had two wings one above the other, had an unnerving habit of darting into the ground rather like a wounded pheasant on August 12. Sudden landing often damaged the mainframe so badly that days were needed for repairs. When the Wright Brothers flying contraption finally did clear the ground without crashing the first heavier-than-air machine needed a dozen seconds to cover just over a hundred metres. As well as wobbly handling qualities it also needed two huge propellers placed aft of the wings, rather than foreward which became the more logical placement in time, and with each turning opposite to the other to undo the tendency of twisting the aircraft.  

But although it was fragile stuff it was still convincing enough for the idea and energy of powered flight to enter not only American but global thinking. It was also a real enough platform for future technology gurus to think through how things had changed. By 1905 and back in their native Ohio the Wrights managed to stay airborne for half an hour or more and to circle around rather than duck and dive in a straight line. Gravity and distance could finally be conquered. That was enough to convince the US Army (an autonomous US Air Force was still nearly four decades away) to purchase places for reconnaisance and artillery support.  

Arguably powered flight caused its greatest impact by reducing space and time between rulers and ruled. By the 1920s flight was consistently faster than trains and the cumbersome dirigbiles (huge air balloons) like the German Zeppelin, and this was still in the propellor age before jet turbines replacement of piston-engine driven propellors compressed time even more. During and after the 1910s successively speed (over 300 kph in the 1920s then over 500 kph in the 1930s and then into the jet age at speeds over 500kph in the 1950s) and altitude (over 5,000 metres in the pre-Second World War era and double that in the post-war era thanks to pressurised cabins) and distance were mastered.

The English Channel, the tiny but symbolic moat in the North Sea dividing Bold Britain from Enemy Europe, was almost overnight negated as a military defence strategy, by Louis Bleriot in 1909. When the Frenchman crossed the shoreline of southern England it did not take an Einstein to spot that he could have also crossed the Thames and inflicted all sorts of bombing misery on the nexus of the British Empire. The best the previously omnipotent Royal Navy did was signal the crossing around the Home Fleet. In 1917 London was bombed for the first time from the air. The sense of new vulnerability was reinforced and energised when the whole dashed Atlantic Ocean was crossed solo by first man, Charles Lindbergh in 1927 (also in that year Time Magazine's inaugural Person of the Year), then of all things woman, Amelia Earhart in 1932. When Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic (New York to Paris in 33 and a half hours) it was with funds not from uber-capitalists in New York or Paris or London. Rather the Spirit of Saint Louis was the venture capital idea from the agricultural heartland of America – Saint Louis was in Missouri in the mid-west – and aircraft manufacturers in California.  

In the 1930s long-scale flight was sufficiently advanced for an air race from London to Australia with en route stops in three Empire strongholds of Egypt, India and Singapore. From then on came planes like the De Havilland Comet in the 1950s which was the first passenger carrying jet plane that could transverrse not just countries but entire continents. Exceding 800 km/h this could fly at heights above 12,000 metres.

By 2000 and nearly a century of flight America was dominated by five big airlines using over 2,500 jets between then: American, flying 697 aircraft, United with 594, Delta with 584, Northwest with 409, and US Airways with 393. Europe’s Big Three national carriers were British Airways, with 357 aircraft, Germany’s Lufthansa with 298 aircraft, and Air France with 223 aircraft. Passengers in the United States were rattling through 984 billion passenger kilometres, by far the most, with Japan on 154 billion kilometres and Britain on 152 billion kilometres. Clearly there was a big correlation of wealth. The three mega-countries in terms of size were Australia with 73 billion kilometres, Canada with 63 billion kilometres, Russia with 44 billion kilometres.

As distance became less tricky communications improved. News of leaders and of events they caused, good or bad and often with photographic evidence, could now travel great distances and reach many more people. Indeed when Amelia Earhart landed in Ireland in 1932 there was perhaps the biggest if unnoticed symbolism that she carried an American newspaper with her. A bemused Irishman tried to dissect the significance. It was not written on the newspaper but shrieked out loud and proud throughout the capitals of Europe: Revolutions, or at least revolutionary thoughts, could fly around the world far, far, more quickly than before.

Indeed it was probably no accident that early plans for the aeroplane centred on more benign causes like improving postal services and newspaper delivery and - when applied to those with bigger pockets like the US Army - to reconnosance and artillery spotting. The adaptions in wide-bodied aircraft with pressurised cabins to transport large numbers of people commercially or drop bombs on large numbers of people were some years away. Not until World War One was there a specifically military Royal Air Force in Britain. Even then the development was still erratic and remained an indecisive military tool until the 1930s. The RAF emerged in 1918 as an amalgamation of the often rivals in the The Royal Flying Corps (RFC, formed in 1912) and Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS, formed in 1914). A distinct USAF, United States Air Force, only emered after World War Two.

For several decades instead, right through the Great Depression and into the 1930s, the American government subsidised post carried by airplanes. The subsidy was large enough to stimulate several dozen airline companies. Only when withdrawn did American air transport consolidate into a limited number of more familiar names like TWA, Trans World Airlines, United Airlines or American Airlines. 

05/09/1905 | Tuesday | Decisive day 07 of 100
Japan defeats Russia at Battle of Tsushima

Full list  |  Top Russian Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky, who committed suicide after the battle: 'The loyalty of the Japanese to their throne and country is unbounded. They do not suffer dishonour and they die like heroes.' US President Theodore Roosevelt, 1904: 'I was thoroughly well pleased with the Japanese victory, for Japan is playing our game.'

JAPAN, ASIA. The Battle of Tsushima in 1905, notoriously and nervingly saw tiny Japan defeat the Big Russian Bear. Of nearly fifty Russian ships that undertook the naval engagement only three survived to reach Vladivostok. The Japanese fleet under Admiral Togo destroyed six Russian battleships, captured two, and destroyed outright or nearly outright nine cruisers and practically every other Russian warship. The total cost to Japan was a modest three torpedo boats, 100 deaths and 500 wounded. In addition to the destroyed ships Russian lost way more - 4,000 Russian sailors killed, including a handful of important admirals, and more than 7,000 captured.

The moment was so important because Japan had prepared assiduously and acidically. Following naval skirmishes earlier in 1904 Japan's Admiral Togo had withdrawn the core of his fleet back to Japan for repairs and a rethink of tactics. Awaiting the arival of Russian Baltic Fleet (rechristened the second Pacific Squadron) the British-trained Admiral (three years at Portsmouth) had come up with new and innovative uses of day and night torpedo attacks, dusk attacks, early morning concentrated fire, clever use of heavily populated mine fields and above all close engagement at under 8,000 yards.

The victory was of notable significance for, in approximate order of significance, Asia, then Europe, and then the imperial world. Like much of the coastal parts of the African continent Asia had suffered many iniquities of European expansion during the nineteenth century. But the expansion was less tactile, you might say, as Asia contained relatively more coastline and had large but economically less valuable resources and populations inland. European presence was therefore less omnipresent than in the Americas, the Indian sub-continent or Australia, where the pressure to go inland and commit genocide proved sadly irresistible. 

In Asia, by contrast, imperial powers often confined themselves, or more correctly were often confined by circumstances, to trading ports and safer conclaves a little distance inland. Many Asians went largely untouched by colonialism. The only cosmetic changes was unfamiliar flags here and there, those not ripped down anyway, plus visits from European map-makers wearing funny hats. 

Despite this relatively less widespread colonial presence in Asia, by the 1900s the Japanese were melancholic at European and American infringements in what they considered their natural sphere of influence. Japanese resentment had its deepest roots in the tansforamtion of their country late nineteenth century when Meiji elites decided to, in effect, make their country into a European-like power. They might be in and of Asia but they would look like Europeans and quack like Europeans.

After the Meiji restoration of 1868 there was a lot of cosmetic change. Japanese dress included ties and uncomfortable collars rather than free-flowing kimonos and wooden clogs. Undeniably the banning of swords was an advancement as far as random public decapitation went. But there were deeper chanegs too. The Japanese capital for the first time featured something like bicameral democracy even though the Emperor stayed a living deity with the pwoer to dissolve what the former samurai class had created. Being a god-on-earth meant he was saved the trouble of campaigning for re-election. This Japanese self-transformation may have sounded like self-betrayal to some, in fact many were resistant to the whole westernisation push long after 1868, but by 1900 elites in Tokyo were already fixated on the overseas rights they thought it involved. Soon the Japanese would have their place in the sun, some true recognition for their god-emperor.

A likely rise in Japanese power certainly was the conclusion of Britain. Early in the 1900s the world’s ascendant military power reckoned its interests would be best served by signing an alliance with Japan. The Anglo-Japanese alliance of 1902 changed much in Japanese thinking. There was gossip in friendly terms about British generosity and common concord between two peaceful island peoples. This perhaps sounded pleasant in newspapers or newsreels but the reality was more ominous. The 1902 treaty symbolically showed Asia had produced its first modern (nearly) industrialised power that the Europeans would rather not fight. 

Many in Europe were secretly rather pleased, and at times amused, with the Russian defeat. The view held in America too. Roosevelt wrote privately to his son, ironically later to fight Japan in the 1940s: ‘I was thoroughly well pleased with the Japanese victory for Japan is playing our game.’ The game in this instance being to colonise Asia.

Overpowering a few thousand Boers in Africa had, after all, tired Britain financially and militarily, and certainly the emotional fatigue stayed around for some time longer. In making an allianced with Japan Britain conceded they were not about to mess with a whole country in a continent even further away than Africa. Doubtless matters might have been different if Japan held oil reserves or some other natural or tradable asset. But there was none of that. All Japan held in the early 1900s was dollops of envy and mountains and forests – an absence of natural resources that was to prove significant in the 1930s. 

It fell to Russia, ever a few steps short of dexterity, to corroborate the wisdom in Britain’s alliance. At the time their Empire was a colossal amalgamation. Unlike the geographically fragmented tapestry of patronage and patriotism that the British Empire it was almost entirely contiguous to each other, stretching across the whole Eurasian landmass from Atlantic to Pacific. Leveraged by defter hands this could have proved an immeasurably stronger bond. But in Russian hands it came out as a double-edged sword. Perhaps this lack of need to use navies explains why Tsarist Russia were so weak as to be defeated by the relatively new naval power of Meiji Japan. When the shiny new Meiji government destroyed the dull Tsarist military at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905 it foreshadowed not only the demise of Russia’s Tsarist regime. The inept Romanovs were gone within a dozen years. More importantly European sway generally diminished over what Japan now concluded was inherently theirs - north-east Asia and much else besides.

The Russian ships journey was a fiasco of imprssive proportions. Exiting from Latvia in October the flagship ran aground and a destroyer bashed into a battleship. In the North Sea, en route, the nervous Russians fancied some British fishing vessels were Japanese torbedo boats and lobbed shells in their direction. Dubbed the 'Battle of Dogger Bank' this nearly triggered war with Britain who sortied the Home Fleet in response and denied the russians use of the Suez Canal. They would have to reach Japan the long way, around Africa.

Admiral Nebogatov said before surrender: ''I'm an old man of over sixty ...You are young, and it is you who will one day retrieve the honour [sic] and glory of the Russian Navy. The lives of the 2,400 men in these ships are more important than mine!' Out of respect for his decision Togo allowed the Russian Admiral to keep his sword. 

Vladivostok is only 700 miles from Tokyo.

In symbolically transferring some vital naval power from West to East this final decisive moment of the 1900s ominously warned the world what to expect in the coming decades. Imperialism would need to lessen even more. And there would be countries around the world like Japan to ensure this happened promptly.