TIMELINE OF
THE WORLD

1888 Jack the Ripper terrorizes London

1894 First commercial exhibition of film at Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope peep-show parlor.

1899 Martha M. Place becomes the first woman executed in the electric chair in Sing Sing Prison

1914 World War I begins

1924 Murderers Leopold and Loeb, the inspiration for Rope, attempt to commit the perfect crime.

1927 The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length talking picture, is released

1936 King Edward VIII of England abdicates the throne to marry Wallis Simpson

1945 US drops atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan

1952 Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap premieres in London

1957 Ed Gein, the inspiration for Psycho’s Norman Bates, is arrested for murder in Wisconsin

1958 NASA begins operations

1961 Flocks of birds mysteriously fall from the sky in Monterey, California

1973 Yom Kippur War begins in the Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights

1975 The Edmund Fitzgerald sinks in Lake Superior with twenty-nine crew members

1976 Apple Computer founded by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne

1977 Studio 54 opens as a nightclub in New York City

1980 The Pac-Man arcade game is released in Japan