August 1913


The following events occurred in August 1913:

August 1, 1913 (Friday)

August 2, 1913 (Saturday)

August 3, 1913 (Sunday)

August 4, 1913 (Monday)

  • U.S. President Woodrow Wilson asked Henry Lane Wilson to resign as List of [ambassadors of the United States to Mexico|U.S. Ambassador to Mexico], and sent former Minnesota Governor John Lind as his personal representative to attempt a settlement of the Mexican Revolution. However, President Victoriano Huerta said two days later that Lind would not be allowed to enter the country unless he brought an official recognition of the Huerta government. Lind arrived in Mexico City on August 11.
  • As the uprising of China's southern provinces collapsed, the Fujian province rescinded its July 20 declaration of independence, and rebel general Xu Chongzhi fled to Japan, returning control of the province to Governor Sun Daoren.
  • Joseph Knowles, a 44-year-old survivalist, began his experiment of living alone in "the uncharted forests of northeastern Maine," pledging to "live as Adam lived" for two months. Before a group of reporters, Knowles removed all of his clothes, and walked into the forest without clothing, food or tools. The American press followed his progress using written notes Knowles left at prearranged locations. Knowles would emerge from the forest on October 4, 1913, wearing a bearskin robe, deerskin moccasins, and a knife, bow and arrows that he had crafted himself. However, there were rumors that Knowles' story was a hoax.
  • The sports club Arromba was established in Americana, São Paulo, Brazil. It was renamed Rio Branco in 1961.
  • In fiction, August 4, 1913, marks the climax of the novel The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford.Born: Robert Hayden, American poet; 24th Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress and the first African American to hold that position; as Asa Bundy Sheffey, in Detroit, United States

August 5, 1913 (Tuesday)

August 6, 1913 (Wednesday)

August 7, 1913 (Thursday)

  • The Senate of France voted 245–37 to pass the Three Years Act, extending compulsory military service from two years to three years.
  • El Salvador and the United States signed a five-year treaty, pledging to submit all disputes between them "for investigation and report to an International Commission" composed of representatives from five nations. The proposed Commission would have one year to render its report, during which participating nations would withhold from going to war. The agreement was the first of the international peace treaties that Secretary Bryan had proposed in a "plan for world-wide peace.
  • Wild west showman and pioneer aviator Samuel Franklin Cody was killed along with English cricketer William Evans when an experimental Cody Floatplane crashed during a test flight near Mytchett, England.
  • The Wiri railway station opened to serve the Southern Line of Auckland. It closed in 2005.

August 8, 1913 (Friday)

August 9, 1913 (Saturday)

August 10, 1913 (Sunday)

August 11, 1913 (Monday)

August 12, 1913 (Tuesday)

August 13, 1913 (Wednesday)

August 14, 1913 (Thursday)

  • In the skies near Kiev, Russian aviator Pyotr Nesterov became the first person to execute a loop, flying his Nieuport airplane on an upward pitch until he was upside down, then bringing it back down.

August 15, 1913 (Friday)

August 16, 1913 (Saturday)

August 17, 1913 (Sunday)

August 18, 1913 (Monday)

  • Venezuelan government troops recaptured the town of Coro, Venezuela, located in the state of Falcón, from the rebels led by Cipriano Castro. Two of the rebel leaders, General Lazaro Gonzales and General Urbina, were killed in the battle, while Castro was able to flee.
  • At the roulette wheel at Le Grande Casino in Monte Carlo, Monaco, the color black came up 26 consecutive times. The probability of the occurrence was 1 in 136,823,184. The incident is cited as an illustration of the gambler's fallacy, because after the wheel stopped at black ten straight times, casino patrons began betting large sums of money on red, on the logic that black could not possibly come up again. The odds of red or black coming up on any individual spin were the same each time—18 out of 37; to no surprise of statisticians, "the casino made several million francs that night."

August 19, 1913 (Tuesday)

August 20, 1913 (Wednesday)

  • Mario Piacenza became the first person to climb Mount Numakum, a high Himalayan peak.
  • French state leader Émile Ollivier, who served as the 24th Prime Minister of France, died in Saint-Gervais-les-Bains in southeast France. Some obituaries were not kind, with The New York Times accusing him of "diplomacy... of the wildest and most unreasonable kind" with German Prussia. He was forced to resign after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, which saw the unification of Germany and the fall of Paris to German troops.
  • The combination of materials that would become known as "stainless steel" was cast for the first time, by British metallurgist Harry Brearley. On test number 1008, at a laboratory in Sheffield, Brearley created an alloy that consisted of 12.8% chromium, 0.44% manganese, 0.2% silicon, 0.24% carbon and 85.32% iron. Brearley would later recount that "When microscopic studies of this steel were being made, one of the first noticeable things was that the usual reagent used for etching the polished surface of a microsection would not etch, or etched very slowly... The significance of this is that etching is a form of corrosion, and the specimens behaved in vinegar and other food acids as they behaved with the etching reagents."Born: Roger Wolcott Sperry, American medical researcher, recipient of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work in split-brain research; in Hartford, Connecticut, United States

August 21, 1913 (Thursday)

August 22, 1913 (Friday)

August 23, 1913 (Saturday)

August 24, 1913 (Sunday)

August 25, 1913 (Monday)

August 26, 1913 (Tuesday)

August 27, 1913 (Wednesday)

  • Tobacco company Sampoerna began operating in Surabaya, East Java, Dutch East Indies.
  • British aviator Harry Hawker was two-thirds of the way done with his quest to become the first person to fly an airplane around the British Isles, and slightly less than from winning a £10,000 prize, when his plane crashed in an accident blamed on his footwear. Hawker escaped serious injury, but "His boots were rubber-soled, and at a critical moment his foot slipped off the rudder bar" of his seaplane, which went out of control and crashed into the Irish Sea, a few feet from the Irish coast at Loughshinny. Hawker escaped with only a broken arm. The sponsor of the prize, the British newspaper the Daily Mail, presented Hawker with a smaller £1,000 prize "in recognition of his skill and courage". The rubber-soled boots, which cost Hawker the equivalent of half a million dollars, were ruined by the seawater.
  • U.S. President Woodrow Wilson delivered a written message to Congress, proclaiming American neutrality in Mexico's civil war, and urged all Americans to leave that nation. Wilson stated that he would "see to it that neither side to the struggle now going on in Mexico receive any assistance from this side of the border" and that the U.S. could not "be the partisans of either party" nor "the virtual umpire between them."
  • A meteor crashed into the Sakonnet River, near Tiverton, Rhode Island. The explosion, which news reports said "sounded like the discharge of a twelve-inch gun," was heard within a radius and broke windows in nearby homes.Born: Nina Schenk Gräfin von Stauffenberg, Russian-German matriarch, wife of Claus von Stauffenberg, who was imprisoned after her husband attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944; in Kowno, Russian Empire, Lithuania

August 28, 1913 (Thursday)

August 29, 1913 (Friday)

August 30, 1913 (Saturday)

August 31, 1913 (Sunday)