The World in 1911 the year a famous smile went missing

Ray Harroun won the first Indianapolis 500 at an average of about 75 miles an hour, roughly three times what a city street allowed. Even so, the race took nearly seven hours.

Life back then

Every telephone call went through a person. You lifted the receiver, an operator asked for the number, and she pushed a cord into a socket to join the two lines. Operators were nearly all young women, sat shoulder to shoulder in long rows, and stayed polite no matter how rude the caller got. They knew who was ill and which shop had closed early, so people rang just to ask. In a small town one woman worked the whole exchange, and if she stepped out the town went quiet.

The year in 8 events

• ✈️Jan 18 Eugene Ely lands a plane on a platform built over a warship in San Francisco Bay.
• 🕯️Mar 25 A fire tears through the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York, killing about 146 workers, most of them young women.
• ⚖️May 15 The Supreme Court orders Standard Oil broken into dozens of smaller firms.
• 👑Jun 22 George V is crowned king at Westminster Abbey in London.
• 🖼️Aug 21 A workman walks out of the Louvre in Paris with the Mona Lisa under his coat. Nobody notices until the next day.
• ⚔️Sep 29 Italy declares war on the Ottoman Empire and sends troops to Libya. Planes are used in war for the first time.
• 🏛️Oct 10 An uprising at Wuchang begins the revolution that ends imperial rule in China.
• 🧭Dec 14 Roald Amundsen and four companions reach the South Pole, the first people to stand there.

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