next turn year 1915
events
January[edit]
Main article: January 1915
January – Joseph Larmor published his work on The Influence of Local Atmospheric Cooling on Astronomical Refraction.
January 1
WWI: The Royal Navy battleship HMS Formidable is sunk off Lyme Regis, Dorset, England, by an Imperial German Navy U-boat, with the loss of 547 crew.
Battle of Broken Hill: A train ambush near Broken Hill, New South Wales, Australia, is carried out by two men (claiming to be in support of the Ottoman Empire) who are killed, together with 4 civilians.
Harry Houdini performs a straitjacket escape performance.[1][2]
January 5 – Joseph E. Carberry sets an altitude record of 11,690 feet (3,560 m), carrying Capt. Benjamin Delahauf Foulois as a passenger, in a fixed-wing aircraft.
January 12
The United States House of Representatives rejects a proposal to give women the right to vote.
A Fool There Was premières in the United States, starring Theda Bara as a femme fatale; she quickly becomes one of early cinema's most sensational stars.
January 13 – The 6.7 Mw Avezzano earthquake shakes the Province of L'Aquila in Italy, with a maximum Mercalli intensity of XI (Extreme). Various agencies estimate the number of people killed to be 29,978–32,610.
January 19
Georges Claude patents the neon discharge tube for use in advertising.
WWI: German Zeppelins bomb the coastal towns of Great Yarmouth and King's Lynn in England for the first time, killing more than 20.
January 21 – Kiwanis is founded in Detroit, Michigan, as The Supreme Lodge Benevolent Order Brothers.
January 23 – Chilembwe uprising: Baptist minister John Chilembwe initiates an ultimately unsuccessful uprising against British colonial rule in Nyasaland (modern-day Malawi).
January 24 – WWI: Battle of Dogger Bank: The British Grand Fleet defeats the German High Seas Fleet, sinking the armoured cruiser SMS Blücher.[3]
January 25
The first United States coast-to-coast long-distance telephone call is facilitated by a newly invented vacuum tube amplifier, ceremonially inaugurated by Alexander Graham Bell in New York City and his former assistant Thomas A. Watson, in San Francisco, California.
Emory College is rechartered as Emory University, and plans to move its main campus from Oxford, Georgia to Atlanta.
January 26
The Rocky Mountain National Park is established by an act of the United States Congress.
January 27 – WWI: Military casualties begin arriving at the Hôpital Temporaire d'Arc-en-Barrois, established earlier in the month.
January 28 – An act of the United States Congress designates the United States Coast Guard, began in 1790, as a military branch.
January 28: United States Coast Guard military branch
February[edit]
Main article: February 1915
February – While working as a cook at New York's Sloane Hospital for Women under an assumed name, "Typhoid Mary" (an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever) infects 25 people, and is placed in quarantine for life on March 27.
February 4 – The Maritz Rebellion of disaffected Boers, against the government of the Union of South Africa, ends with the surrender of the remaining rebels.
February 8 – The controversial film, The Birth of a Nation, directed by D. W. Griffith, premieres in Los Angeles. It will be the highest-grossing film for around 25 years.
February 18 – WWI: Germany regards the waters around the British Isles to be a war zone from this date, as part of its U-boat campaign.
February 20 – In San Francisco, the Panama–Pacific International Exposition is opened.
March[edit]
Main article: March 1915
March – The 1915 Palestine locust infestation breaks out in Palestine; it continues until October.
March 3 – The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the predecessor of NASA, is founded in the United States.
March 11 – WWI: British armed merchantman HMS Bayano (1913) is sunk in the North Channel off the coast of Scotland by Imperial German Navy U-boat SM U-27. Around 200 crew are lost, a number of bodies being washed up on the Isle of Man, with only 26 saved.[5]
March 14 – WWI:
Battle of Más a Tierra: Off the coast of Chile, the British Royal Navy forces the Imperial German Navy light cruiser SMS Dresden (last survivor of the German East Asia Squadron) to scuttle.
March 18
WWI: A British attack on the Dardanelles fails.
British Royal Navy battleship HMS Dreadnought (1906) sinks German submarine U-29 with all hands, in the Pentland Firth off the coast of Scotland, by ramming her, the only time this tactic is known to have been successfully used by a battleship.
March 19 – Pluto is photographed for the first time, but is not classified as a planet.
March 25 – The U.S. submarine F-4 sinks off Hawaii; 21 are killed.
March 26 – The Vancouver Millionaires win the Stanley Cup in ice hockey over the Ottawa Senators, 3 games to 0.
March 28 – The first Roman Catholic liturgy is celebrated by Archbishop John Ireland at the newly consecrated Cathedral of Saint Paul, in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
March 14: WWI: SMS Dresden, forced to scuttle by the Royal Navy.
April[edit]
Main article: April 1915
April 5 – Boxer Jess Willard, the latest "Great White Hope", defeats Jack Johnson with a 26th-round knockout in sweltering heat, at Havana, Cuba. Willard becomes very popular among white Americans, for "bringing back the championship to the white race".
April 11 – Charlie Chaplin's film The Tramp is released.
April 22 – WWI – Start of Second Battle of Ypres: Germany makes its first large scale use of poison gas on the Western Front.
April 24 – The Armenian Genocide begins, with the deportation of Armenian notables from Istanbul.
May 7: WWI: RMS Lusitania, sunk by a German U-boat.
May[edit]
Main article: May 1915
May 1 – WWI: General Louis Botha, Prime Minister of South Africa, leads the army in the occupation of German South West Africa.
May 3 – Canadian soldier John McCrae writes the poem "In Flanders Fields".
May 6 – Baseball player Babe Ruth hits his first career home run (off Jack Warhop), for the Boston Red Sox.
May 7 – WWI: Sinking of the RMS Lusitania: RMS Titanic's main rival, the British ocean liner RMS Lusitania, is sunk by Imperial German Navy U-boat U-20 off the south-west coast of Ireland, killing 1,198 civilians en route from New York City to Liverpool.
May 9 – WWI – Second Battle of Artois: German and French forces fight to a standstill; German forces defeat the British at the Battle of Aubers Ridge.
May 17 – The last purely Liberal government in the United Kingdom ends, when the prime minister H. H. Asquith forms an all-party coalition government, the Asquith coalition ministry, effective May 25.
May 19 – WWI: The third attack on Anzac Cove by Ottoman forces is repelled, by the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps.
May 22
Quintinshill rail disaster in Scotland: The collision and fire kill 226, mostly troops, the largest number of fatalities in a rail accident in the United Kingdom.
Lassen Peak, one of the Cascade Volcanoes in California, erupts, sending an ash plume 30,000 feet in the air, and devastating the nearby area with pyroclastic flows and lahars. It is the only volcano to erupt in the contiguous United States this century, until the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens.
May 25 – China agrees to the Twenty-One Demands of the Japanese.
May 28 – International Congress of Women meet at the Hague as a major peace initiative.[6]
May 29 – Teófilo Braga becomes president of Portugal.
June[edit]
Main article: June 1915
June 3 – Mexican Revolution: Troops of Álvaro Obregón and Pancho Villa clash at León; Obregón loses his right arm in a grenade attack, but Villa is decisively defeated.
June 5 – Women's suffrage in national elections is introduced in Denmark.
June 9 – U.S. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan resigns over a disagreement regarding his nation's handling of the sinking of the RMS Lusitania.
June 11 – Friar Leonard Melki and hundreds of other Christians are driven out of Mardin and massacred by Ottoman troops.[7]
June 16 – Women's Institutes are established in Britain.
June 19 – In Iceland, at this time a dependency of Denmark:
Women's suffrage is granted to those over 40.[8]
The modern civil flag of Iceland is adopted officially