1927 TIMELINE

Unsorted 1927 Events [Bottom]

January

Metropolis Poster

01 - |U.S.| Massachusetts is the first state to require auto insurance
05 - |USA ?| New York, Fox Studios introduces Movietone, which synchronizes motion and sound films
07 - First transatlantic commercial telephone service opens, offering connection between New York and London.
10 - German master film director Fritz Lang + premieres his big-scaled, deco-style futuristic Metropolis, a vision of technology gone awry.
25 - The "Daddy and Peaches +" separation trial begins in New York.
31 - Allied military control in Germany ends. It is handed over to the League of Nations.

February

05 - Buster Keaton's film comedy classic, The General, premieres.
17 - |COLORADO| Seven-mile-long (11.26 km.), $12 million Moffat Tunnel, carved through James Peak opens.
24 - U.S. Customs official decides that Bird in Space and other abstract works on display in New York City by modernist Romanian master sculptor Constantin Brancusi are "not art" and are therefore subject to customs duties. A later ruling reverses the decision.
26 - New distance record, 7,287 miles (11,723 km.), established for radio telephone conversation, with successful communication between San Francisco and London.
28 - |Teapot Dome Scandel +| After years of court wrangling, the U.S. Supreme Court declares oil contracts and leases granted to Edward Doheny by Interior Secretary Albert Fall in 1921 as illegal and fraudulent.

March

01 - U.S. government oversight of radio ?+ begins. President Coolidge appoints first Federal Board of Radio Control.
02 - Publisher Walter Lippincott dies.
07 - U.S. Supreme Court declares unconstitutional Texas law barring blacks from voting in the state's primary election.
19 - The Snyder-Gray ?+ murder saga begins
24 - |China ?+| American consulate in Nanking is ransacked by Chinese troops.
29 - Major H.O.D. Segrave sets world land speed record (auto) at 203.79 mph in the Golden Arrow.
31 - Kang Youwei, chinese reformer, dies [b.mar 19 1858].

April

Mae West 1927

07 - Television's first successful long-distance broadcast is publicly demonstrated. On a mechanical television developed by Herbert E. Ives at the A.T. &T. labs, an image of U.S. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover speaking on the telephone at the Bell Telephone Co. experimental TV station in Whippany, N.J., is seen in New York.
07 - |Film ?+| French film director Abel Gance's epic masterpiece Napoleon premieres in both France and the U.S. The film was made and projected in three contiguous film strips, making it the first significant widescreen film.
09 - Comedienne Mae West ?¢ is found guilty of obscenity by a New York City court and sentenced to 10 days in jail for material and suggestive ad libs in her popular Broadway show Sex. Charges were brought as the result of complaints by The Society for the Suppression of Vice.
16 - The worst Mississippi River flooding [s.1937] occurs, eventually covering 4.4 million acres and causing $300 million in damage.

May

00 - Boyish styles for women come into fashion in Paris
11 - Pioneer of cubism, the Spanish painter Juan Gris, dies.
13 - The German stock market collapses on "Black Friday."
20-21 - Charles Lindbergh, "Lucky Lindy," makes first one-person, nonstop transatlantic airplane flight, from New York to Paris, in his "Spirit of St. Louis" monoplane in a bit more than 33 hours and becomes national hero. Transatlantic flights had occurred before, first in 1919, but with crews of at least two men.
22 - |China ?+| An 8.3 magnitude earthquake kills 200,000 in Nan-Shan
22 - The Iron Lung, to help polio victims breathe, is invented by Philip Drinker and Louis Shaw.

AUGUST

01-02 - |BRISTOL, TENN.] R.C.A. records The Carter Family. These sides, as well as ones made two days later with "The Singing Brakeman", ex-railroad worker Jimmie Rodgers, are the first country music records.
03 - Governor Fuller of Massachusetts refuses to grant clemency to Sacco & Vanzetti +. On aug 19 their final appeal to the state's Supreme Court is rejected.
12 - Paramount's aviation epic Wings, starring the "It" girl Clara Bow, premieres. The film was a smashing success, earning $3.8 million, and later winning the first Academy Award for best picture (then called the award for "Most Outstanding Production").
23 - After a seemingly endless string of appeals and special commissions, Sacco and Vanzetti are finally executed in the electric chair at Massachusetts' Charlestown Prison [cleared by proclamation in 1977] despite the nov 18, 1925 confession to the crime by Celestino Madeiros, who was also executed.

SEPTEMBER

22 - Dempsey fails in rematch against Tunney for heavyweight crown
30 - Ruth hits 60 home runs in a season, breaking his own six-year-old record of 59.

OCTOBER

06 - Al Jolson stars in The Jazz Singer, first talking film.
27 - Fox Movietone News first sound news film in New York

NOVEMBER

22 - New York, Gershwin's Funny Face premiers
30 - Helen Hayes stars in Cowuette on Broadway

DECEMBER

00 - Laurel and Hardy gain popularity
02 - Ford offers Model A, gets 50,000 orders
04 - Duke Ellington's band broadcasts from the Cotton Club

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