Samuel Langhorne Clemens, conocido por el

seudónimo de Mark Twain (Florida, Estados Unidos, 30

de noviembre de 1835 – Redding, Estados Unidos, 21 de
abril de 1910), fue un popular humorista y escritor
estadounidense

The 20th century of the Common Era began on January 1, 1901 and ended on
December 31, 2000. According to the Gregorian calendar, 2000 was the first century
leap year since 1600.

The British, Russian, German, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian empires dissolved in the
first half of the century, with all but the British Empire collapsing during the course of
World War I. The inter-war years saw a Great Depression cause a massive disruption to
the world economy.

TECNOLOGY

• The first airplane was flown in 1903. With the engineering of the faster jet
engine in the 1940s, mass air travel became commercially viable.
• The assembly line made mass production of the automobile viable. By the
end of the century, billions of people had automobiles for personal
transportation. The combination of the automobile, motor boats and air
travel allowed for unprecedented personal mobility. In western nations,
motor vehicle accidents became the greatest cause of death for young
people. However, expansion of divided highways reduced the death rate.
• The triode tube (Audion), transistor and integrated circuit revolutionized
computers, leading to the proliferation of the personal computer in the
1980s and cell phones and the public-use Internet in the 1990s

SCIENCE

• Starting with invention of Turing machine, new fields of mathematics studying

computability and computation complexity were developed.
• Gödel's incompleteness theorems were formulated and proven.
• New areas of physics, like special relativity, general relativity, and quantum
mechanics, were developed during the first half of the century.
• While some pioneering experiments about internal structure of atoms had been
made at the end of XIX century, it is only in XX century the structure of atoms
was clearly understood, followed by discovery of elementary particles.

Wars and politics

• After decades of struggle by the women's suffrage movement, all western
countries gave women the right to vote.
• After gaining political rights in the United States and much of Europe in the first
part of the century, and with the advent of new birth control techniques, women
became more independent throughout the century.
• Rising nationalism and increasing national awareness were among the many
causes of World War I (1914–1918), the first of two wars to involve many major
world powers including Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Russia/USSR, the
United States and the British Empire. World War I led to the creation of many
new countries, especially in Eastern Europe. At the time it was said by many to
be the "war to end all wars".