April 1927

April 1, 1927 (Friday)

• The Bureau of Prohibition was founded as part of the United States Department of the Treasury.
• Born: Ferenc Puskás, Hungarian footballer with 85 caps for the Hungary national team and 4 caps for the Spain national team; as Ferenc Purczeld in Budapest

  April 2, 1927 (Saturday)

• The United Kingdom announced that it was increasing its troop strength in China, from 17,000 to 22,000 men.
• A "fire following a storm of great intensity" destroyed the town of Körösmezö, Czechoslovakia
• Born:
• *Ferenc Puskás, soccer football star who played in Hungary 1943–1956 and for Real Madrid 1958–1966, and scored 84 goals in international matches; in Budapest
• *Kenneth Tynan, English theatre critic; in Birmingham

  April 3, 1927 (Sunday)

• Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, champion of the Dalit or "untouchable caste", founded the weekly newspaper Bahiskrit Bharat.
• Born: Wesley A. Brown, who in 1949 would become the first African-American to graduate from the U.S. Naval Academy; in Baltimore

  April 4, 1927 (Monday)

• Colonial Air Transport inaugurated the first regularly scheduled airline service in America, carrying six passengers on a flight that departed Boston at 6:15 pm and landed near New York City, at 9:00 pm. The first ticket was sold to Mrs. Gardiner Fiske for 25 dollars.
• The Urdu language daily newspaper, Inqilab, described as a periodical that "changed the course of Muslim politics... of the entire Indo-Pakistan subcontinent" was founded by Ghulam Rasul Mehr and Abdul Majid Salik. The paper, which lasted until 1949, two years after Pakistan attained independence.
• The Victor Talking Machine Company introduced "the automatic orthophonic Victrola", the first phonograph that could be loaded with multiple records and then play them in sequence.
• Born: Joe Orlando, Italian-born American comic book artist; in Bari
• Died: Vincent Drucci, 27, American gangster nicknamed "the Schemer", and leader of the North Side Gang. Drucci was shot while trying to wrest a gun from Chicago police detective Dan Healy. His funeral was attended by 1,000 mourners.

  April 5, 1927 (Tuesday)

• The Columbia Phonograph Company merged with United Independent Broadcasters to form Columbia Phonographic Broadcasting System. The merger gave UIB $163,000 in working capital from which it was able to survive and to build a nationwide radio network now known as CBS.
• The Royal Dutch Shell Company began a department for the research and development of chemical products.
• Benito Mussolini and Count Istavan Bethlen, on behalf of Italy and Hungary respectively, signed a Pact of Amity, Conciliation and Arbitration.

  April 6, 1927 (Wednesday)

• On the tenth anniversary of America's entry into World War I, a proposal for an international treaty "to outlaw war" was made by Aristide Briand, the Foreign Minister of France. The Kellogg–Briand Pact would be signed on August 27, 1928, by Briand and U.S. Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg.
• U.S. President Calvin Coolidge vetoed a resolution, passed by the Philippine territorial legislature, calling for a plebiscite on whether the Philippines should become independent of the United States.
• An explosion at the refinery of Producers & Refiners Oil Company killed 13 employees and broke almost all of the windows in the company town of Parco, Wyoming.
• Webber College was founded by Roger and Grace Babson in Babson Park, Florida. One of the nation's first schools of business for women, it was the first private, not-for-profit college chartered under Florida's then new educational and charitable laws.
• Born: Gerry Mulligan, American jazz musician, baritone sax player; in Queens, New York City

  April 7, 1927 (Thursday)

• At 3:25 in the afternoon, the Bell Telephone Company made the first successful demonstration of long distance mechanical television transmission, transmitting a 30 line image at the rate of 10 images per second with the aid of a system using the rotating Nipkow disc. Herbert Hoover appeared before a camera in Washington, and as he spoke over a loudspeaker by telephone to AT & T President Walter S. Gifford, Hoover could be observed on a 2 by television screen by an audience in New York. Hoover told the group, "Human genius has now destroyed the impediment of distance, in a new respect, and in a manner hitherto unknown." The breakthrough in the invention of a completely electronic television system would take place five months later on September 7. Hoover's speech was followed by the first American television entertainment, a performance by vaudeville comedian "A. Dolan", who appeared as an Irishman and then donned blackface for a minstrel show act.
• The epic French film Napoléon directed by Abel Gance and starring Albert Dieudonné premiered at the Palais Garnier in Paris.

  April 8, 1927 (Friday)

• The beam wireless service was inaugurated between Sydney and London by Amalgamated Wireless Company, allowing messages to be sent at the speed of light at the unprecedented distance of more than. Using shortwave radio, messages could be sent by telegraph between the two locations.

  April 9, 1927 (Saturday)

• Li Dazhao, co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party, was arrested in Beijing after Chinese troops invaded the embassy of the Soviet Union. Li was charged with espionage and convicted and executed less than three weeks later.
• Sacco and Vanzetti case: Ferdinando Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were sentenced to death by Judge Webster Thayer after a controversial conviction for murder. The two men were executed on August 23.
• Led by Nat Holman, the Brooklyn Celtics won the U.S. professional basketball championship, defeating the Cleveland Rosenblums, 35–32, for a three-game sweep of the American Basketball League series.
• The SS Carl D. Bradley was launched onto Lake Erie at Lorain, Ohio. At, she was the largest vessel to sail on the U.S. Great Lakes at that time in history. The ship would sink in Lake Michigan on November 18, 1958. All but two of her crew of 35, most of whom were from the tiny northern Michigan town of Rogers City, would perish.

  April 10, 1927 (Sunday)

• Ballet Mécanique, composed by George Antheil, was given its American premiere at Carnegie Hall, and booed and hissed by the crowd. Combining classical music with the sounds of machinery, but no dancers, the ballet had debuted in Paris on June 19, 1926, and would not be performed again for more than sixty years.
• Born: Marshall Warren Nirenberg, American geneticist and 1968 Nobel Prize laureate; in New York City

  April 11, 1927 (Monday)

• The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland officially ceased to exist at the end of the day, as the Royal and Parliamentary Titles Act 1927 took effect at midnight. In an acknowledgment of the separate Irish Free State, the nation was renamed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

  April 12, 1927 (Tuesday)

• The Shanghai Massacre that would ultimately claim the lives of 4,000 leftists, began a few weeks after Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang Army had taken control of Shanghai with the aid of Communist workers in the city. Chiang turned against his allies and gave the order for the massacre of members of party and its sympathizers. At 3:00 in the morning, gangleader Du Yuesheng began attacks at the Zhabei District. More than 4,000 leftists were killed in Shanghai, and hundreds more elsewhere. Communist leader Zhou Enlai, who would later become the Prime Minister of the People's Republic of China when Chiang's forces were driven out in 1949, was able to escape from the city.
• The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland came into being with the renaming of the Kingdom.
• At 8:30 in the evening, a tornado destroyed the town of Rocksprings, Texas.

  April 13, 1927 (Wednesday)

• The Ottawa Senators beat the Boston Bruins, 3–1, to win ice hockey's Stanley Cup.

  April 14, 1927 (Thursday)

• The first Volvo automobile, the 4-cylinder Volvo ÖV 4 "Jakob", was produced at a factory in Gothenburg in Sweden.
• A 7.4 magnitude earthquake at Argentina's Mendoza Province killed more than 25 people.
• Born: Alan MacDiarmid, New Zealand chemist and 2000 Nobel Prize laureate; in Masterton

  April 15, 1927 (Friday)

• The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 had begun weeks earlier but this day saw the largest recorded rainfall in American history spreading over a vast area, tremendously increasing what had already been the greatest flood in recorded history. In New Orleans, a record was set with of rain in 18 hours.
• Thomas Townsend Brown applied for a patent for "A Method of Producing Force or Motion", that used high voltage in capacitors to produce a propulsive force that he thought was anti-gravity. British patent #300,311 was issued in 1928. Brown would later name this force the Biefeld-Brown effect.
• Born:
• *Robert Mills, American quantum physicist and co-creator of the Yang–Mills theory; in Englewood, New Jersey
• *Albert Goldman, American author of controversial biographies of Elvis Presley and John Lennon; in Dormont, Pennsylvania
• Died: Gaston Leroux, 58, French novelist and mystery writer best known for his 1910 novel ''The Phantom of the Opera''

  April 16, 1927 (Saturday)

• The first break in the flood controlling levee system along the Mississippi River took place at Dorena, Missouri, and other levees soon followed. Eventually, of land in seven states would be underwater, 130,000 homes would be destroyed, and a minimum of 246 people— some estimates place the death toll at well over 1,000— would be dead.
• Four well-known aviators were injured in a crash, during the first test-flight, of Admiral Byrd's plane America, which they had intended to use in the first non-stop airplane flight between New York and Paris. The Orteig Prize would be won the following month by Charles Lindbergh.
• Born:
• *Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, was born at 8:30 am in Marktl, Germany, on the day before Easter. The future pontiff was baptized four hours later.
• *Edie Adams, American actress; as Edith Enke in Kingston, Pennsylvania