The World in 1926 the year a screen first showed a face

Goddard's rocket burned for two and a half seconds and climbed about 41 feet, lower than a four storey building. The same idea carried people to the Moon 43 years later.

Life back then

You could order a whole house from a catalog. Sears Modern Homes shipped one to the nearest railway station in around 30,000 numbered pieces with a book of instructions, and plenty of families put it up themselves. Outside the cities the roads were mostly dirt and badly signed, so the numbered highway markers that went up in November made a real difference. Cars and washing machines were often bought on instalment plans, a few dollars a month, which older people thought reckless. Nobody owned a television, though a Scottish inventor showed a flickering one to a room of scientists in January.

The year in 8 events

• 📺Jan 26 John Logie Baird shows a working television to scientists in London.
• 🚀Mar 16 Robert Goddard launches the first liquid fuel rocket from a field in Massachusetts.
• 👑Apr 25 Reza Khan is crowned Shah of Iran. An army officer who took power by force, he starts the Pahlavi dynasty.
• ✊May 3 Britain's General Strike begins. More than a million workers stop work to back the coal miners, and buses and trains stand still for nine days.
• 🏊Aug 6 Gertrude Ederle swims the English Channel, the first woman to do it, and beats the men's record.
• 🕊️Sep 8 Germany joins the League of Nations, seven years after the peace treaty that blamed it for the war.
• 🎩Oct 31 The escape artist Harry Houdini dies in Detroit of an infection he had ignored for days.
• 🏯Dec 25 Emperor Taisho of Japan dies and his son Hirohito takes the throne. The new era is named Showa.

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