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HEADLINES
A daily history game

The 1910s

The 1910s in five headlines

Five real newspaper headlines about the 1910s, printed between 1910 and 1919, with their dates removed. Read each one and guess the year it was published. No multiple choice and no trivia questions, just the headline as it was printed.

There are 3 rounds of five in this topic, and a new one appears whenever the archive has enough for it.

Headline one

Mme Curie isolates pure radium in Paris laboratory in triumph of scientific endeavour

Le Figaro

Reveal the year

1910

Marie Curie successfully isolated pure radium metal for the first time in 1910, working at the Radium Institute in Paris. She had co-discovered radium with her husband Pierre in 1898, but isolating the pure element required years of further work. The achievement won her a second Nobel Prize — in Chemistry — in 1911, making her the first person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.

Headline two

Thorpe triumphs in Stockholm: American wins both pentathlon and decathlon at Olympic Games

The New York Times

Reveal the year

1912

Jim Thorpe, a Native American athlete from the Sac and Fox Nation, dominated the 1912 Stockholm Olympics by winning gold in both the pentathlon and decathlon. King Gustav V of Sweden reportedly told him 'You, sir, are the greatest athlete in the world.' His medals were later controversially stripped due to a prior semi-professional baseball stint, though they were restored posthumously in 1983.

Headline three

Einstein presents revolutionary theory of gravity and space-time that overturns Newton

Berliner Tageblatt

Reveal the year

1915

Albert Einstein presented his General Theory of Relativity to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in November 1915, describing gravity not as a force but as a curvature of space-time caused by mass. The theory predicted phenomena including the bending of light around massive objects, confirmed by observations during the 1919 solar eclipse. It fundamentally transformed physics and our understanding of the universe.

Headline four

Bolsheviks seize power in Petrograd: Tsar's government falls as revolution engulfs Russia

The Daily Telegraph

Reveal the year

1917

In October 1917, Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik party seized power from the Provisional Government in Petrograd in a coup that would become known as the October Revolution. The fall of Tsar Nicholas II's dynasty earlier that year had left a power vacuum that the Bolsheviks exploited with ruthless efficiency. The revolution led to the creation of the Soviet Union and reshaped global politics for the rest of the 20th century.

Headline five

Wall of molasses sweeps through Boston streets, killing dozens and trapping hundreds

The Boston Globe

Reveal the year

1919

On 15 January 1919, a massive storage tank in Boston's North End burst, releasing approximately 8.7 million litres of molasses through the streets at an estimated 56 kilometres per hour. The wave of molasses killed 21 people and injured 150 others, and cleanup took weeks. The disaster led to significant improvements in safety regulations for industrial storage tanks in the United States.

Answer the five above to see your score.

Scoring works as it does in the daily game. Each headline is worth up to 100 points, and you lose two points for every year you are out. Being a decade wrong still earns you 80. A perfect round is 500.

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