1925 - The Year The Universe Got So Mind-Bogglingly Big
1 January - Edwin Hubble's Curiously Large Announcement
While working at the Mount Wilson Observatory's with the brand-new 100-inch Hooker Telescope (at that point the largest in the world), Edwin Hubble discovered that some of the "nebulae" charted by astronomers using less powerful telescopes were, in fact, nothing of the sort. By identifying the characteristic properties of Cepheid variable stars in what we now know as M31(Andromeda Galaxy), M33(Triangulum Galaxy), and NGC 6822(Barnard's Galaxy), Hubble arrived at the conclusion that these "nebulae" actually lay beyond the Milky Way, and were galaxies in their own right.
He correctly intuited that Adriaan Van Maanen's calculations of the objects' velocities (which, applied to Hubble's data, would have implied that the Cepheids were rotating faster than the speed of light) were, as was the case, incorrect. This represented a pretty major increase in the scale of the known universe, and Hubble took the opportunity of the New Year to make his announcement.
3 January - Mussolini Tries To Top That
January also saw Benito Mussolini seizing power in Italy, after the assassination of Giacomo Matteotti, who had insisted that the 1924 elections be annulled because of the highly irregular tactics employed by the fascist "listone" (violence and intimidation being the order of the day). Mussolini promptly installed himself as dictator, suppressed civil liberties, and brought the government completely under the control of the Fascist Party.
13 June - Charles Francis Jenkins Accidentally Creates A Monster
It was in this year that Charles Francis Jenkins first demonstrated his technique for wirelessly transmitting both moving pictures and an accompanying soundtrack synchronized to it, thus giving birth to the television. He was granted a patent in the US on the 30th of June (US patent #1544156: Transmitting Pictures over Wireless). John Logie Baird also produced public demonstrations in London in October, and Vladimir Zworykin sometime late in the year. It is worth noting that Jenkins' and Baird's techniques were more mechanical than Zworykin's electronic approach.
18 July - Nobody Cares About Poor Adolf
1925 was also the year in which Adolf Hitler published the first volume of Mein Kampf, named Eine Abrechnung ("An Account"). It didn't sell particularly well until Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, despite Nazi claims of its popularity. Ironically, if it had been more widely read, the rhetoric might have provided enough of an advance warning of Hitler's mentality to stave off, or at least shorten, World War II.
26 December - Sphinxes Don't Like Going To The Beach For This Exact Reason
The Great Sphinx at Giza was finally completely recovered from the sands of the desert in which it had been buried. Efforts to dig it out extended back at least as far as the 1400s, when Tutmosis IV dreamt, in the prescence of the statue, that he would receive the throne if he could successfully uncover it; a swiftly-assembled team eventually managed to unearth the front paws, an achievement which Tutmosis commemorated by carving and placing the Dream Stela there.
Other Points Of Interest
A Few People Of Note Born This Year
Nobel Prizes
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