It would be no exaggeration to say that the year 1912 will forever
be remembered by one of the greatest disasters in maritime history which
literally shook the world. On April 14th, the 46,000-ton White Star liner
Titanic struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage and sank with the loss of
1,513 lives about 95 miles south of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. The
great ship, at that time the largest and most luxurious afloat, had a double-bottomed
hull divided into 16 watertight compartments. Since four of these compartments
could be flooded without endangering the ship's buoyancy, she was considered
"unsinkable". Explanations for the tragedy vary, but it's highly
improbable that the collision was the result of an act of sabotage. The
crew took too long to notice the iceberg through the springtime mist and,
no matter how hard they tried to steer the giant ship clear of the ill-fated
berg, its underwater "tooth" ripped a 300-foot gash in the right
side of the liner. In 1985 a deep-sea robot located the sunken ship which
rested on the bottom of an underwater canyon about 4,000 below the sea
level. The ship was in fairly good shape thanks to the cold water environment.
Three months after the Titanic went down, they introduced the SOS distress
signal which helped save scores of ships and prevented innumerable human
tragedies at sea. The Save Our Souls signal was in use for 87 years until
the International Maritime Organization replaced it with a more sophisticated
signal beginning February 1st of this year. Ships in trouble are now sending
their distress signals to communication satellites and further on to one
of the rescue coordination centers on the ground. The location accuracy
of the new system is only 200 meters. The main political event of the year
was in China, struck by a revolution which dethroned the country's last
emperor and transferred the government to the people's representatives.
Provisional presidency fell into the hands of Sun Yat-sen - an outstanding
politician and the founder of the national Kuomintang party. Sun Yat-sen
takes much credit for rallying millions of fellow Chinese behind the idea
of national dignity and patriotism. Chiang Kai-shek followed in the footsteps
of Sun Yat-sen, but, after the death of his mentor on March 12th, 1925,
he failed to stand up to the communist onslaught led by Mao Zedong. In
the civil war that ensued, Chiang's forces were vanquished and he himself
was forced to settle down in Taiwan. Also in 1912 the African National
Congress was formed in South Africa to demand voting rights for all and
an end to racial discrimination. Since 1991 the ANC has been led by Nelson
Mandela who, as one of the ANC's founding fathers, has spent decades behind
bars as an unbending symbol of the anti-apartheid movement. Following the
ANC's victory in the 1994 elections, Mandela became President of the South
African Republic. And now a few words about the well-known people born
in 1912. We'll begin with the late North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung who
for almost fifty years was God Almighty to his people. Rising to power
riding the wave of Communist resurgence, he applied Marxism to the northern
half of his divided country. Thousands of monuments have since been erected
to Kim Il-Sung in North Korea and his body is resting in a giant mausoleum.
Neither facts have added to the wellbeing of the ordinary people, though,
who now live in a country which has essentially shut itself off from the
rest of the world trying desperately to single-handedly cope with its many
problems.
The prominent German engineer and space flight proponent Wernher
von Braun was born in the same year, the man on whose rockets Adolf Hitler
was staking so much calling them his Weapon of Retribution. Happily, the
tests dragged on and on and the feared rocket never flew, because if it
did, it could have changed the entire course of WW2... Wernher von Braun
spent the final years of his life working for NASA in the United States
of America.
Also in 1912 God presented the world with the birth of the outstanding
Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni, the founding father of neorealism.
On January 18th the English polar explorer Robert Scott reached the South
Pole shortly after his Norwegian colleague Roald Amundsen had discovered
the planet's southern tip a little more than a month before him... On their
way back, Scott and his companions died in a severe snowstorm just a few
miles away from their depot... On November 12th a search party found Scott's
records and diaries which were published the following year. In 1912 the
world's first caterpillar tractor built in the United States. The new machine's
all-terrain capability was a boon to farmers, builders and other men at
work...
THE 20th CENTURY:YEAR AFTER YEAR series of historical programs is
prepared by Vladimir Zhamkin.
BACK TO MAIN PAGE
