50 Fun Facts About 1920s and 1930s

Which everyday food first went on sale in Chillicothe, Missouri, in July 1928?

Sliced bread caught on so fast that by 1933 around 80% of the bread sold in the US came pre-sliced. An earlier prototype of Otto Rohwedder's slicing machine had been destroyed in a fire.

Which Chicago gang boss, nicknamed Scarface, was convicted of tax evasion in 1931?

Al Capone was convicted on five counts and sentenced to eleven years in federal prison. He loathed his nickname, which came from a knife attack that slashed his face three times.

Which cartoon character made his official debut in the 1928 sound short Steamboat Willie?

Mickey Mouse had in fact been seen months earlier, in a test screening of Plane Crazy. Steamboat Willie was the first of his cartoons to be officially distributed.

Which pharaoh's tomb did Howard Carter's team discover in 1922, backed by the Earl of Carnarvon?

Tutankhamun was buried with over 5,000 artifacts, and the worldwide press coverage renewed public interest in ancient Egypt. He had died at about the age of 19.

Which antibiotic did physician Alexander Fleming discover in 1928, in an extract of a mould?

Penicillin was not purified until 1940, by an Oxford team led by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain. The two shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Fleming.

Which pilot flew the Spirit of St. Louis alone from New York to Paris in May 1927?

Charles Lindbergh was in the air for over 33 hours and won the $25,000 Orteig Prize. He navigated by dead reckoning, having rejected radio gear as heavy and unreliable.

Which world, found by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930, got its name from an eleven-year-old Oxford schoolgirl?

Pluto was the idea of Venetia Burney, a girl with a keen interest in classical mythology. Tombaugh was just 23 when the observatory handed him the search for a ninth planet.

Which song, with words by Francis Scott Key, only became the official US national anthem in March 1931?

The Star-Spangled Banner sets an 1814 poem to the tune of a song written for a London gentlemen's club. Key wrote the words after watching the Royal Navy bombard Fort McHenry.

Which German passenger airship caught fire while docking at Lakehurst, New Jersey, in May 1937?

Hindenburg was filled with hydrogen, and 35 of the 97 people on board died, along with one person on the ground. The publicity brought the age of the giant passenger airship to an abrupt end.

Which New York skyscraper opened in May 1931 after just thirteen and a half months of construction?

The Empire State Building stayed the world's tallest building until the World Trade Center's North Tower was topped out in 1970. Two rival Manhattan towers were already going up when work on it began.

What were the illegal bars of Prohibition America, which largely vanished after 1933, commonly called?

Speakeasies got the name because customers spoke quietly about them in public, so as not to alert the police or neighbors. The word was in use in America by the 1880s.

What name was given to the young women of the 1920s who bobbed their hair and wore knee-length skirts?

Flappers flaunted their disdain for the era's codes of decent behavior. A skirt that reached the knee was considered short at the time.

Which 1925 F. Scott Fitzgerald novel follows a Long Island millionaire obsessed with Daisy Buchanan?

The Great Gatsby was a commercial disappointment, selling fewer than 20,000 copies by that October. Fitzgerald drew on riotous parties he had attended on Long Island's North Shore.

Which New York Yankees slugger, sold by the Boston Red Sox, hit a record 60 home runs in 1927?

Babe Ruth began his major league career as a star left-handed pitcher before turning slugger. His 60 homers beat his own single-season record by one.

Which American aviator became the first woman to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic in 1932?

Amelia Earhart had first crossed the Atlantic in 1928 as a passenger. She vanished over the Pacific in 1937 while trying to become the first female pilot to circle the world.

Which American sprinter and long jumper won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics?

Jesse Owens won the 100 meters, the 200 meters, the long jump and the sprint relay. The long jump world record he had set a year earlier stood until 1960.

What name was given to the drought-hit Great Plains of the 1930s, swept by storms called black blizzards?

The Dust Bowl was named by an Associated Press editor rewriting a report on the storms of April 14, 1935, known as Black Sunday. Many farm families left for California.

Which US president explained his policies to Americans in evening radio talks known as fireside chats?

Franklin Roosevelt gave the fireside chats between 1933 and 1944, using radio to quell rumors and answer hostile newspapers. They are preserved in the National Recording Registry.

Which US president, in office when the Depression began, had its shanty towns named after him?

Herbert Hoover was widely blamed for the slump, so the camps built by the homeless became known as Hoovervilles. He lost the 1932 election in a landslide.

Which hormone did Frederick Banting and Charles Best first isolate at the University of Toronto in 1921?

Insulin was first isolated from the pancreas of a dog. The 1923 Nobel Prize went to Banting and lab chief John Macleod, and Banting shared his prize money with Best.

Which 1927 Al Jolson film, the first feature with synchronized speech, signalled the end of silent cinema?

The Jazz Singer was mostly silent, with synchronized singing and speech in only a few isolated sequences. Its star performs six songs.

Which subject was Tennessee teacher John T. Scopes put on trial for teaching in July 1925?

Evolution could not legally be taught in Tennessee's public schools under a state law called the Butler Act. Scopes was fined $100, but the verdict was overturned on a technicality.

Which British king gave up the throne in December 1936 to marry American divorcée Wallis Simpson?

Edward VIII was succeeded by his brother Albert, who reigned as George VI. Edward became Duke of Windsor and married Wallis the following year.

Whose 1938 radio version of The War of the Worlds convinced some listeners that Martians were invading?

Orson Welles directed and narrated the broadcast as a Halloween episode of The Mercury Theatre on the Air. It was adapted from the novel by H. G. Wells and went out live on CBS.

Which Indian leader walked 240 miles to the sea in 1930 to protest the British tax on salt?

Mahatma Gandhi set out from Sabarmati Ashram and reached the coastal village of Dandi after 24 days. The march was a campaign of tax resistance and nonviolent protest.

Which British author introduced the detective Hercule Poirot in her first novel, published in 1920?

Agatha Christie wrote The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1916, in the middle of the First World War. It came out in the United States before it appeared in Britain.

Which 1936 novel about Scarlett O'Hara was the only one Margaret Mitchell published in her lifetime?

Gone with the Wind won Mitchell the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937. Its heroine is the spoiled eldest daughter of a plantation owner, left to claw her way out of poverty.

Which New Orleans-born trumpeter and vocalist, nicknamed Satchmo, rose to fame in the 1920s?

Louis Armstrong shifted the focus of jazz from collective improvisation to the solo performer. He first made his name on the cornet as well as the trumpet.

Which Yankee, known as the Iron Horse, played 2,130 straight games before illness stopped him in 1939?

Lou Gehrig took himself out of the lineup on May 2, 1939, with what proved to be the incurable illness ALS. His record stood for 56 years, until Cal Ripken Jr. passed it in 1995.

Which South Dakota monument did sculptor Gutzon Borglum begin carving into the Black Hills in 1927?

Mount Rushmore was chosen partly because it faces southeast and catches the most sunlight. Borglum named the work the Shrine of Democracy and ran it until 1941 with the help of his son.

Which design style of the 1920s and 1930s took its name from a 1925 international exhibition in Paris?

Art Deco is short for Arts Décoratifs, from the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts. The name only came into use after the show.

Which European microstate was created in 1929 by the Lateran Treaty between Italy and the Holy See?

Vatican City owes its statehood to a treaty named after the Lateran Palace, where it was signed on 11 February 1929. The pacts settled the long-standing Roman question.

Which physicist won the 1921 Nobel Prize for explaining the photoelectric effect, not for relativity?

Albert Einstein was honoured for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for the law of the photoelectric effect. The 1921 prize was not actually awarded to him until 1922.

Which Spanish artist painted Guernica in Paris in 1937 after the bombing of a Basque town?

Pablo Picasso was urged to make the bombing his subject by the poet Juan Larrea, who called at his home as soon as the reports came in. The raid was the work of Nazi Germany's Condor Legion and fascist Italy.

Which Fascist leader was made prime minister of Italy after the March on Rome in October 1922?

Benito Mussolini took power without armed conflict, because King Victor Emmanuel III overruled a plan to declare a state of siege. The king appointed him on 30 October 1922.

Which US highway, established in 1926, ran 2,448 miles from Chicago to Santa Monica, California?

Route 66 became known as the Mother Road, a name popularized by a John Steinbeck novel of 1939. Its own promoters called it the Main Street of America.

Which escape artist died of peritonitis on Halloween 1926, soon after taking punches to the abdomen?

Harry Houdini was 52, and when he finally saw a doctor he had a fever and acute appendicitis. Whether the punches played any part in his death has never been settled.

Which English author published the children's fantasy The Hobbit in 1937, to wide critical acclaim?

J. R. R. Tolkien saw the book nominated for the Carnegie Medal, and it went on to sell over 100 million copies. It also won a New York Herald Tribune prize for best juvenile fiction.

Which synthetic fibre from DuPont was first used commercially in 1938, as the bristles of a toothbrush?

Nylon found fame in women's stockings, which were shown at the 1939 New York World's Fair. They sold 64 million pairs in their first year on the market.

Which body of water did American Gertrude Ederle become the first woman to swim across in August 1926?

The English Channel had been swum by only five men before her, and she beat the fastest of them by well over an hour despite stormy seas.

Which 1920s scandal saw cabinet member Albert Fall take bribes to lease Navy oil reserves in Wyoming?

Teapot Dome was the Wyoming oil field at the centre of the affair, which stained the administration of President Warren G. Harding. Fall became the first cabinet member to go to prison.

Which French Alpine resort hosted the first Winter Olympic Games in early 1924?

Chamonix staged the events as an International Winter Sports Week, and the IOC only granted them Olympic status in 1926. American speed skater Charles Jewtraw won the first gold medal.

Which silent film star, dubbed the Latin Lover, died in 1926 aged 31, triggering mass public mourning?

Rudolph Valentino began as a taxi dancer and broke through in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which popularized the Argentine tango in America. He died after surgery for appendicitis and ulcers.

Which African country, whose emperor Haile Selassie fled into exile, did Italy invade in October 1935?

Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa, fell on 5 May 1936, three days after the emperor fled. The League of Nations' failure to prevent the invasion discredited it internationally.

Which piece of street furniture was installed for the first time anywhere in Oklahoma City in July 1935?

The parking meter was developed at the request of Carl C. Magee, an Oklahoma City lawyer and newspaper publisher. He received a patent for the device in 1938.

Which American composer played the piano at the 1924 New York premiere of his own Rhapsody in Blue?

George Gershwin wrote the piece for bandleader Paul Whiteman, whose band premiered it at a concert titled An Experiment in Modern Music.

Which undersized racehorse beat Triple Crown winner War Admiral in a two-horse race at Pimlico in 1938?

Seabiscuit won by four lengths and was voted American Horse of the Year for 1938. He had won only a quarter of his first 40 races.

Which South American country hosted and won the first FIFA World Cup in July 1930?

Uruguay beat Argentina 4–2 in the final in front of 68,346 people. FIFA had picked the country as host partly because it was marking the centenary of its first constitution.

Which 1932 Aldous Huxley novel imagines a future society whose citizens are engineered into a hierarchy?

Brave New World anticipates sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and advances in reproductive technology. Its seemingly utopian order is challenged by an outsider, John the Savage.

Which Depression-era gangster was shot dead by federal agents as he left the Biograph Theater in 1934?

John Dillinger tried to flee as the agents moved in to arrest him. His gang was accused of robbing twenty-four banks and four police stations, and he twice escaped after being imprisoned.