Full list  |  Top Henry David Thoreau, US writer, 1906: 'The startings and arrivals of the cars are now the epochs in the village day.' J G Ballard, British writer, 1970: 'What our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths.'

GERMANY, EUROPE. If there is one momentous change in the twentieth century on which commentators concur politely it is the arrival of motorways. At the start of the twentieth century roads were ad hoc matters. Often broken, usually narrow, invariably winding, their one consistent accomplishment was inhibiting fast four-wheeled transport. 

Economists argued for longer, wider, and straighter roads. This was perhaps not intellectual wizardry at its finest for the Romans had reached similar conclusions some millennia earlier. There were, admittedly, some advances on the Roman thinking such as constant rather than intermittent passing points. In modern jargon, this meant 'four lane motorways' (or more) rather than two-lane thoroughfares. 

Fittingly, the first autobahn (a ten kilometre stretch) impressed an American soldier, one Captain Dwight Eisenhower, who was not slow to recall it took over sixty days for military convoys to cross the continental United States. Fast-forwarding to 1950s America, by then the world's premiere motor car society, a certain President Dwight Eisenhower passed the first Federal Act For Highways. This merged the jumble of American freeways into over 65,000 kilometres of a connected 'Interstate Highway System'. 

True to form the Americans could not resist complicating a simple idea. Thus, unlike the German autobahns with limitless speed the Americans restricted speed at somewhere around 110 kilometres per hour. Nevertheless the American application of a German idea reappeared around the world, with or without the limits to speed, and by the end of the twentieth century every large society on earth ran motorways. 

Full list  |  Top Benito Mussolini, 1934: 'Imperialism is absolutely necessary to a people which desires spiritual as well as economic expansion. It is Italy’s mission to civilize Africa. Italy’s position in the Mediterranean gives her this right and imposes the duty upon her.' US President Franklin Roosevelt, 1939: 'I fear that both dictators [Hitler and Mussolini] think their present methods are succeeding because of the gains they have made in Albania, Hungary and Yugoslavia.'

Sadly, the record shows Italy and indeed Europe might have avoided much pain if King Victor Emmanuel and other elites had stood up to Mussolini's Black Shirts. The compromise of letting things take their course was admirably Gallic, perhaps, but it was also a tragic miscalculation for Mussolini was never, in the end, that militarily dexterous. Earlier in the summer of 1922, in August in Milan, his organisation had siezed control of a city to expunge the Communist leaders.  

There was the sheen of military authority, true, though all the big fascist leaders had that. Horses and jodhpurs were fairly accessible in the 1920s and beyond. True also, when Mr Mussolini said he preferred 'fifty thousand rifles to fifty thousand votes' practical people like the King believed him. Mussolini alone spoke out about the recent 1922 treaty that limited Italian naval armament to the same as France (175,000 tons) and much less than Japan (315,000 tons) and far less than the UK and US (525,000 tons each).

Yet there was always something vaguely inept in Mussolini they should have spotted. Anyway in the March on Rome, as it became later, Mussolini had stayed away from what might have turned into an ugly scrap. Others certainly did. There is a handy story clarifying this, from when the clouds of war were starting to swirl around Europe. Nazi Foreign Minister Ribbentrop warned two British politicians, Eden and Churchill, that Italy would support Germany in any conflict. Churchill quickly replied this was only fair as 'we had them last time.' 

The historical record largely supports Churchill's doubts. Bashing fuzzy-wuzzy sorts in Africa, as Mussolini did in the 1930s, was perhaps something. Yet when the real fighting started Mussolini accomplished the rare trilogy of rescue by Germany not once, not twice, but three times. There was the failed attack on Greece in 1940; the 1941 failed 'support' to Germany invading Russia; and finally the North African failure. As icing on the torta di guasto, German paratroopers even rescued Mussolini from disaffected Italian fascists. A sterner hand in 1922 might have avoided it all.

Full list  |  Top Howard Carter, 1922: 'I was struck dumb with amazement, and when Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand the suspense any longer, inquired anxiously, 'Can you see anything?' it was all I could do to get out the words, 'Yes, wonderful things.' Then widening the hole a little further, so that we both could see, we inserted an electric torch.' Jon Manchip White, author of The Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamen in 1977: 'The pharaoh who in life was one of the least esteemed of Egypt's kings has become in death the most renowned.'

EGYPT, AFRICA. Dating from around 1350 BCE (making it around 3,300 years old on discovery) Howard Carter’s excavated tomb illuminated Egyptian pharaohs like never before. The story and the tomb's contents preoccupied thousands and enthralled millions globally for all the remaining decades of the century. Pharaoh Tutankhamen might not have been much alive but posthumously he became the twentieth centuries most renowned pharaoh.

It turned out King Tutankhamen died in his late teens. From what emerged from the tomb plus other sources Egyptologists concluded he reigned for around a decade and left this earth as one of the lesser Egyptian rulers. Indeed so minor was his tomb by the regal standards of the Valley of the Kings that it was built over for the Ramses VI tomb, a pharaoh from two centuries after Tutankhamen. The contents of the Ramses tomb had long been looted but helpfully its shell was left as intact camouflage for the humble tomb four or so meters below.

It took Carter years to untangle the camouflage. By the summer of 1922 cash from his benefactor, the English Lord Carnarvon, was dwindling as fast as His Lordship's patience and but for some good fortune Carter would have left Egypt soon afterwards as one more anonymous Egyptologist with more ambition than luck.

It was worth the wait. Inside the largely undisturbed mausoleum Carter and his team found a colossal variety of objects designed to make the pharoah's afterlife more civilised: boats, chests, cooking pots, funeral couches, gloves, necklaces, oars, ornaments, thrones, shoes, and statues. Particularly eye-catching were some statues of protective black jackals. There were also military possessions like arrows, bows, daggers, dismantled chariots, shields and swords.

So special and varied were its contents that it was a fortnight before the Carter-Carnarvon group felt able to conclude on the extent of riches and curiosities. It took some years before Tutankhamen’s possessions went formally on display at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and on loan to other places around the world. But when the relics did finally appear the exhibits enthralled and captivated countless people in many different ways. It wasn't just archaelogists either. Barbara Cartland, the romantic novelist, was one of the many European visitors to the tomb in the 1920s: ‘I saw all this wonderful pink on the walls and the artefacts. I was so impressed that I vowed to wear it for the rest of my life.’ What might have emerged from intact larger tombs, some of which were five times and more larger than Tutankhamen, caused even more wonder.

Despite the years of toil Carter still recorded in his private diary a sense of regret about the discovery and the way it was exploited: ‘Three thousand, four thousand years maybe, have passed since human feet last trod the floor on which you stand, and yet, as you note the signs of recent life around you – the half-filled bowl of mortar for the door, the blackened lamp, the finger mark upon the freshly painted surface, the farewell garland dropped upon the threshold – you feel it might have been but yesterday. Time is annihilated by intimate details such as these, and you feel an intruder.’

The sense of intrusion was emphasised by the ultimate purpose of the collection. In addition to more than 5,000 items were three bodies: two stillborn children, taken as the daughters of Tutankhamen, and the embalmed body of Tutankhamen himself. The pharoah's body lay within four nested sarcophagi. Innermost was a weighty solid gold coffin – over 100 kg – with the famous mask.

King Tut far eclipsed the other significant discovery from the ancient world in the twentieth century, the 8,000 lifesize terracotta warriors in Xian in central China. Discovered in the 1970s these warriors were part of the mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor from around 200 BC. By that time Tut had been in his tomb for over 1,100 years.

A central reason for King Tut’s prominence among archeological discoveries in the twentieth century was simple supply and demand. In the early twentieth century, as for much of the nineteenth century, European demand for new Egyptian treasures was extensive simply because from over sixty known tombs in the Valley of the Kings, and a similar number in the nearby valley of Queens, over several millennia seemingly they had all been plundered. Several had Latin vandalism from the Roman Empire that had brought the three thousand year pharoanic era to a close, around 30 BC. Rarity only encouraged demand. Academics and adventurers and archaeologists poured over the area around the tomb and many other areas for countless years but the supply was paltry. Indeed by the 1990s new ground-penetrating radar had confirmed what many suspected in the 1920s: there were no more significant and untouched tombs left other than Carters find. No other tomb appeared in the twentieth century and the only other pharoanic-era tomb was a minor find in the 2000s, by American explorers.

As perhaps the last great find to emerge from the Valley it was no surprise that rumours surfaced about the curse of Tutankhamen. In part this was down to Carter who observed the tomb had been broken into on two occasions soon after the pharaoh was buried. Yet somehow it had proved immune to complete exploitation. After each break-in the tomb was resealed. Was this not proof of powerful protective forces?

Several everyday misfortunes took on sinister twists. In Egypt a pet bird belonging to Carter was devoured by a cobra and in England Lord Carnarvon’s dog died – both around the time the tomb was opened. Lord Carnarvon, central benefactor of the project and without whom Tutankhamen's tomb would have stayed intact, died within five months, in Cairo, and so did his brother five months after that, in England. One of the other casualties of the curse left an ominous suicide note: ‘The curse that fell upon me is so strong that I have no other choice but to submit myself to it’

In reality there was no such curse. Most of the two-dozen individuals associated with discovering and excavating the tomb lived on for decades. Only half a dozen, so around one quarter, died within a decade and in innocent enough ways. Carter himself should have topped any curse list. Yet he lived on, curse free, for another 17 years and died peacefully in London in 1939.

Towards the end of the century, as fascination with the 'curse' ebbed away, a more driving curiosity took over. How did the young pharaoh die? When x-rays in the 1960s revealed a well nourished nineteen year old with an injury to the back of the skull conspiracy theories concluded that he had been murdered by a member of the royal court. Or if not the royal court then the killer was someone else important enough to get close enough to bash him on the head.

The fascination seemed endless. More x-rays happened in the 1970s, around the time the tomb became a World Heritage site, and later too came CT scans and facial reconstructions and lengthy detective pieces in National Geographic.

Like the curse the assassination theories were more insinuation than substance. The pharaoh died much less tragically or perhaps more tragically according to how you look at routine-but-fatal accidents. Yet more X-rays revealed an impacted wisdom tooth and a broken left femur. The latter was concluded to be the killer blow. Around the break in the thigh bone was broken skin and a detached knee cap. Perhaps the injury arose from a fall, or maybe a push, from his horse-drawn chariot or perhaps not, that would forever be Ancient Egypt’s secret, but from this injury gangrene had set in. The poison had killed him soon afterwards.

Tutankhamen ultimately provided archaeology with a fillip not seen since the Rosetta Stone helped decipher hieroglyphics in the 1820s. Understanding of life in ancient Egypt advanced notably and so too did funding and new archaeology techniques. It is fair to say that European opinions about Egypt also tilted. Before Tutankhamen there had been a sense of Egypt as more about Africa and the sub-Saharan mosaic. To some extent Shakespeare's play Anthony and Cleopatra, written in 1623, and Verdi's opera Aida of 1892 had reinforced this Egypt-in-African thinking. But Tutankhamen’s tomb helped alter this thinking. Egypt after Tutankhamen looked less of Africa and more like a special and unique case; the classic civilization apart.

Full list  |  Top George Orwell, 1937: 'Twenty million people are underfed but literally everyone in England has access to a radio. It is quite likely that fish and chips, art-silk stockings, tinned salmon, cut-price chocolate, the movies, the radio, strong tea and the Football Pools have between them averted revolution.' British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, 1982: 'Only the BBC could ask a British Prime Minister why she took action to protect our ships against an enemy ship that was a danger to our boys.'

BRITAIN, EUROPE. Compared to history's first ever radio broadcast (fittingly enough in Chicago during the summer of 1920) the first BBC radio broadcast was a more reserved and traditional affair. The announcer wore tie and tails, perhaps reflecting his funding by an elected government he was free to criticize, a ticklish condition needing polite manners, you might assume. though the funding arrangement was not too ticklish to prove unworkable.

Within half a century the tie and tails had gone but a publicly funded broadcaster allowed to criticise the sources of its funds had become a fixture of British life. 

The need for public broadcasting was obvious by the early 1920s. Already in America there over 500 private radio broadcasters. Marconi (both the man and the company) had shown radio was hugely successful in improving day-to-day matters like weather forecasts and planning sea transport. It was only time before entertainment and education entered the mix. Rural communities also felt disconnected from urban centres. Spreading universal suffrage added to the pressure. 

Originally the British government set up a British Broadcasting Company, Ltd. Shortly afterwards this became the British Broadcasting Corporation or BBC and based on a license fee - the first was ten shillings per household per year. The guiding hand was John Reith who as general manager and then director-general saw the BBC applied a brawny commitment to neutral broadcasting. In return, the British government ensured the BBC held a monopoly on television until 1950s and radio until the 1970s. Innovations included the Radio Times, first published in 1923 which circulated to a wide audience the programs being shown.

In America around the middle of the 1920s there were three million radiosets but by the end of the 1930s this had more than quadrupled to over 13 million radios.  

Outside Britain, the BBC World Service radio started broadcasting in 1932 – then called the Empire Service – and by the end of the twentieth century had a daily audience of around 100 million. As testimony to the success of the BBC model global variations on the BBC model include the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) plus dozens more. The orginal American NBC, the National Broadcasting Corportion, amalgamated a dozen or so stations across America.  

Full list  |  Top Arthur Schlesinger, US writer, 1986: 'Television is more pitiless than the press because the moving image is more revealing than the printed word. In earlier times, as that old political stager Harold Macmillan has recalled, “the public character of any leading politician seldom bore any close relationship to his true nature. It was largely represented or distorted by party bias, by rumor, and above all by the Press.... The radio, and especially the television, allow the mass of the public to hear, see, and judge for themselves.' Robin Day, British broadcaster, 1989: 'Television thrives on unreason, and unreason thrives on television. It strikes at the emotions rather than the intellect.'

But commercialisation soon sorted out the shortcomings. Chief of the helpful inventions using Logie-Baird's ideas appeared in 1928 when the American company General Electric started selling a box-like and most unqeidly contraption. Imaginatively titled a telephonic-visual device it used cathode ray tubes. It was not easy to warm up, nor cheap, but by the Second World War the new televisions sold often enough. By then the cost was somewhere between US$200 and US$1,000 each. That was still expensive but increasingly affordable. 

By the end of war there were over a million television sets circulating in America. Televisions soon eclipsed radios in number in most industrialised countries. Indeed, by the 1950s there were more television viewers than radio listeners for the first time. When President Kennedy died in the early 1960s, not even four decades after Logie Baird's invention, 750 million watched his funeral. Curiously, fewer (around 600 million) watched the moon landings in 1969. 

Walt Disney's early film 'Steamboat Willie' appeared in 1928, the first Mickey Mouse black and white cartoon. Later Disney animated moves included Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Cinderella (1950) and Alice in Wonderland (1951) - plus a brace of others like Pinocchio, Dumbo, and Bambi. Film entertainment that arose from television led to the first Disnelyand amusement park, opened in 1955, and many others in the genre.

Full list  |  Top John Shelby Spong, American theologian: 'We thought if you got sick God was punishing you. Then we discovered germs and then we developed antibiotics to deal with germs. And then we discovered that it didn't make any difference if you were Hitler or Mother Teresa - penicillin works. It has nothing to do with your behavior.' Mahatma Ghandhi: 'It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver.'

BRITAIN, EUROPE. Among lists of twentieth century medical advances the discovery of Penicillin is almost certainly high up if not leading most lists. It created simply vast changes. Unlike new organ transplants or cosmetic surgeries that benefited relatively limited numbers of often rich people controlling this anti-bacterial substance saved and improved lives for hundreds of millions across scores of societies, both poor and rich, and throughout the inhabited continents, cold and warm.

The power and the comfort in the antibiotics which penicillin inspired lay especially in controlling life-threatening infections in respiratory tracts and threats from anthrax and other poisons. If that wasn't enough penicillin also controlled infections following surgery and other wounds where small infections could end up as deadly. It was the perfect wartime and peacetime asset. Also extinguished by penicillin was the range of inconvenient if not usually life-threatening infections like syphilis and gonorrhea.

Summarising one most impressive outcome of penicillin would be this: it ended the era of what might be called infection impotence, a time when once contamination got inside patients it reduced medics like Dr Fleming to hit-and-miss responses somewhere between a soothing bedside manner and amputation of entire limbs. Take a good gulp of hot whisky at bedtime, Dr Fleming used to advise the unfortunate, which was not very scientific but might help.

Fleming's discovery happened in St. Mary's Hospital in Paddington in central London and like several of the great scientific findings appeared accidentally. In this instance the coincidence emerged from the Scottish doctor's laboratory not always being scrupulously clean. Returning from holiday over a weekend the middle-aged researcher (he was 47 in 1928) found experimental culture dishes contaminated with fungus from mould spores. About to disinfect the unwashed petrie dishes he noticed a particularly fluffy white mass inhibiting some mould growth. It proved a critical sighting about which Fleming remarked later, thoughtfully and perhaps a little trickily, 'sometimes one finds what one is not looking for.'

Given the unintended discovery it's not unsurprising that for some years afterwards penicillin was not considered a breakthrough. Anyway in the 1920s there was awareness that some microbes inhibited other microbes. So a fluffy white mass with antiseptic qualities was not automatically a big deal. This strand of knowledge dated back to the likes of Joseph Lister in the 1870s, who accidentally noted urine contaminated with mould inhibited bacteria, and Louis Pasteur in the 1880s. Even in pre-industrial times it was known Australian aborigines healed wounds with mould from the shady side of trees. For this reason Dr Fleming was alerted by the discovery on the petrie dishes but not amazed. He briefly noted some findings in a journal, thinking it more of a small step forward in the field rather than a defining breakthrough, but raised doubts on its inability, in the known form anyway, to survive in the human body long enough to kill pathogenic bacteria. Whisky still seemed to have a role and for a time in the early 1930s Dr Fleming dropped the area altogether and went elsewhere in his research.

Others though did not drop the idea and here the story of discovering penicillin and who did what and when gets a little convoluted. While Fleming looked beyond pencillin in London, during the 1930s in Oxford, a short train ride from London, Dr Flemings discovery was developed by a team led by Australian researcher Howard Florey. Just as Fleming predicted penicillin was cumbersome to create. Insignificant and fragile piles of yellow powder created by Florey only appeared around 1940 - just as Nazi control seeped over Poland in the east and Belgium, France and the Netherlands in western Europe. As London endured the Blitz Florey and his Oxford team reported some early findings in August 1940 in The Lancet.

The journal article reignited Fleming's interest and returned to a topic he had not looked at for the best part of a decade. Penicillin, it seemed, was now advanced enough to inhibit infection in mice. Fleming visited Oxford soon after where Florey's team were cordial - and perhaps too cordial - and he returned again in 1942 to ask for a specimen to help an ill friend.

Meanwhile many critical events happened without Fleming's involvement. Florey visited America - where his children had been evacuated as a war-time precaution - in an attempt to scale up the intricate manufacture process. They had done it for mice but doing it for hundreds of thousands of troops or hundreds of millions of people was challenging. The scale of America was needed. From his trip Merck pharmaceuticals and others got involved and their financial and logistical help began to overcome the incredible rates of excretion. Penicillin in its early version was science pissed away, doctors noted in frustration at seeing the yellow liquid cleared ourt of the human system within a few hours of administration. So concentrated was some excretion that urine from treated patients could be recycled through reverse extraction apparatus.

After America Florey sensed a cusp moment and searched around for more opportunities to prove the theory. He visited North Africa to experiment on troops wounded in the desert war and delivered on film some notable successes. From his energy and that of his Oxford team, rather than Fleming in London, penicillin was emerging as the killer medical application from the war. By the end of hostilities vials were produced in billions and it was estimated to have saved the lives of 300,000 troops during the 1945 invasion of Europe. Where something like 1-in-5 of infected or injured troops died in earlier wars penicillin cut this to under 1-in-100.

Back in London, though, there were other battles in play. A letter from authorities at St Mary's appeared in The Times and applauded Fleming as penicillin's creator. Public interest rose sharply after that and the debate around where invention happened increasingly went Flemings way, helped in no small measure by Lord Beaverbrook, the press baron, who had connections with St Mary's hospital. His press got behind not only the Fleming claim for invention but later the campaign for a Nobel Prize. Florey and the team at Oxford privately fumed but stayed shy of a public fight.

After the war penicillin saved something in the order of 200 million people from death by septicemia and other infections. The numbr of lives saved might have been much higher if penicillin appeared before rather than after the virulent influenza from China that swept the world after the Great War and killed tens of millions. After the Second World War penicillin became the most issued antibiotic of the twentieth century with rejection rates at most around 1-in-10 and usually not even that. Poor as much as the rich were suddenly liberated from fear of fatal infections.

Penicillin played an especially central role in improving life expectancy. This nearly doubled between 1900 and 2000. In 1900, looked at globally, life expectancy was approximately three decades although there were healthier pockets in the industrialised world. By 2000 reaching three-score-years-and-ten was no longer the prerogative of the wealthy. Penicillin was so available and infections so rarely fatal that global life expectancy approached 65 years and in richer pockets living into the 80s was normal.

World population more than tripled during the twentieth century, rising from 1.7 billion in 1900 to 6 billion in 2000. Within this segments in the poorer countries. Europe’s relative population halved from 25% to 12%. Africa increased from 8% to 13%. Latin America increased from 5% to 9%. Asia where the bulk of humanity lived stayed the same from around 57% to 61%. 

Time will advise whether the same conclusion will hold endlessly. It would be good if it could. But by the end of the century penicillin looked increasingly powerless against some increasingly adaptive microbes. As one example from several around the world by the 1980s around half of tuberculosis sufferers in the United States had strains resistant to at least one antibiotic. Few things move as inexorably as bacterial resistance. Penicillin also proved impotent against other killers like HIV/AIDS, SARS, and H5N1 (burd flu), plus the perennial killer of cancer.

Dr Alexander Fleming was one of three recipients of the Nobel Prize just after the Second World War. A compromise, some said a fudge, was acknowledgement of '…the discovery (Flemings part) and clinical trials of penicillin' (the part of Florey and Chain and their team at Oxford). Yet it is most often the Fleming name that receives accolades. Sometimes Dr Fleming was careful to recall that he was only one part of a larger picure and sometimes he hinted that groups always depended on individual acts of genius. It was not always clear where he stood and perhaps he liked it that way. Nevertheless it is Dr Fleming who lies in St Paul's Cathedral in London (he died in 1955) while fellow Nobel prizewinners, the Australian Howard Florey and German Ernest Chain, have rather ebbed in the historical record. It is the Scotsman who witnessed first-hand the septic injuries in both the Boer War in Africa and the Great War in Europe and who went on holiday without cleaning his laboratory, that lies next to figures like Admiral Lord Nelson.