A new French law allowed pregnant women eight weeks leave (1910)

British shopworkers win the fight for a 60-hour week (1911)

Amundsen beat Scott to the South Pole (1911)

100,000 died when the Yangtse River flooded in China (1911)

First issue of revolutionary Russian paper Pravda (1912)

Opening of the Panama Canal (1914)

Shaw's Pygmalion staged in London (1914)

The invention of the zip made dressing (and undressing) easier (1914)

Max Planck awarded Nobel Prize for Physics for quantum theory (1918)

United Artists founded in Hollywood by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith (1919)