100 Years of Positive Change

A lot has changed over the past 100 years, and though the world is far from perfect right now, here are some positive changes from the century, as well as some landmark dates and interesting discoveries!

Graphics / Margrét Aðalheiður Önnu Þorgeirsdóttir

1920: League of Nations founded. This was the world’s first intergovernmental organisation with the goal of achieving world peace. It was established after the First World War, and in 1946 was replaced with a new organisation, the United Nations, which still exists today.

1922: Tutankhamun’s tomb discovered.

1923: First velociraptor fossil discovered. These dinosaurs made famous by the 1993 film Jurassic Park but were first discovered in the Gobi Desert.

1927: The Jazz Singer (the first talkie movie) released in the USA.

1928: Penicillin discovered by Alexander Fleming.

1936: Birth of Pope Francis, who became Pope in 2013.

1945: End of the Second World War.

1946: UNESCO founded. UNESCO stands for United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation. After the Second World War, 44 countries came together to sign a constitution to work together to develop a culture of peace and education.

1952: Linear B deciphered. This is a syllabic Mycenaean script from c. 1400 BC; it is the only Bronze Age Aegean script to be deciphered so far.

1956: First Eurovision Song Contest held. The inaugural contest was hosted in Switzerland, and only seven countries took part. In 2020, 41 countries were supposed to take part, including Australia, which was officially allowed to participate for the first time in 2015.

1962: Universal suffrage in Australia.

1964: Civil Rights Act passed in the USA, which, along with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, ended de jure racial segregation in America.

1969: First man on the moon.

1974: Terracotta Army discovered in China.

1980: Vigdís Finnbogadóttir became the world’s first female democratically elected president! She served as president of Iceland from 1980-1996. This is also the year that smallpox was eradicated. Only two diseases have been declared eradicated by the World Health Organization – smallpox in 1980, and rinderpest (a disease affecting cattle) in 2011. On top of this, 1980 was the year that the hypothesis of a meteor causing the extinction of the dinosaurs was first put forward.

1985: The wreck of the Titanic discovered.

1989: Invention of the World Wide Web (this was followed by the launch of the code for the world’s first web browser in 1993). Wikipedia was then launched in 2001, and Facebook in 2004.

1990: Start of the human genome project. This project set out to sequence the entire human genome. The project was completed in 2003, two years ahead of schedule.

The Student Council celebrates in a Pride walk

2001: Same-sex marriage legalized in the Netherlands. This was the first same-sex marriage bill in the world. Iceland legalized same-sex marriage in 2010, altering the legal definition of marriage to make it gender-neutral.

2006: New Horizons space probe launched (the first of NASA’s New Frontier missions). The probe’s primary mission was a flyby study of Pluto.

2012: Experimental evidence for Higgs-Boson particle discovered.

2018: Saudia Arabia’s ban on female drivers lifted.

2019: First image of a black hole released by scientists.

2020: Populations of Tanzanian elephants, emperor penguins, and mountain gorillas increasing. Also, rhino poaching is decreasing in Kenya.