This Year in History:
1930
Discover what happened in this year with HISTORY’s summaries of major events, anniversaries, famous births and notable deaths.
Pluto, once believed to be the ninth planet, is discovered at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, by astronomer Clyde W. Tombaugh. The existence of an unknown ninth planet was first proposed by Percival Lowell, who theorized that wobbles in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune were caused by the gravitational pull of an unknown […]
On March 12, 1930, Indian independence leader Mohandas Gandhi begins a defiant march to the sea in protest of the British monopoly on salt, his boldest act of civil disobedience yet against British rule in India. Britain’s Salt Acts prohibited Indians from collecting or selling salt, a staple in the Indian diet. Citizens were forced […]
A fire at an Ohio prison kills 320 inmates, some of whom burn to death when they are not unlocked from their cells. It is one of the worst prison disasters in American history. The Ohio State Penitentiary was built in Columbus in 1834. Throughout its history, it had a poor reputation. A cholera epidemic […]
Best known to his many fans for one of his most memorable screen incarnations—San Francisco Police Inspector “Dirty” Harry Callahan—the actor and Oscar-winning filmmaker Clint Eastwood is born on May 31, 1930, in San Francisco, California. With his father, Eastwood wandered the West Coast as a boy during the Depression. Then, after four years in […]
On July 7, 1930, construction of the Hoover Dam begins. Over the next five years, a total of 21,000 men would work ceaselessly to produce what would be the largest dam of its time, as well as one of the largest manmade structures in the world. Although the dam would take only five years to […]
On July 13, 1930, France defeats Mexico 4-1 and the United States defeats Belgium 3-0 in the first-ever World Cup football matches, played simultaneously in host city Montevideo, Uruguay. The World Cup has since become the world’s most watched sporting event. After football (soccer, to Americans) was dropped from the program for the 1932 Olympics […]
On August 6, 1930, New York Supreme Court judge Joseph Force Crater vanished on the streets of Manhattan near Times Square. The dapper 41-year-old’s disappearance launched a massive investigation that captivated the nation, earning Crater the title of “the missingest man in New York.” Born to Irish immigrants in 1889, Crater grew up in Pennsylvania and […]
On October 5, 1930, a British dirigible crashes in Beauvais, France, killing all but seven people onboard. The airship, which was Great Britain’s biggest, had first been launched about a year earlier. In the 1920s, the major European nations competed with each other to build larger and larger airships in order to gain control over […]
