The AK-47
A wounded tank sergeant designs the most widespread gun ever
Tank commander Mikhail Kalashnikov, wounded near Bryansk in 1941, conceived his rifle in hospital, and in 1947 it went to military trials. There are now about 100 million Kalashnikovs in the world, and the AK's outline appears on the flag and emblem of Mozambique.
Wikipedia (Russian) · Wikipedia (English) · 20th century
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1939–1945 World War II — 8 years earlier
- 1945 Founding of the United Nations — 2 years earlier
- 1947–1991 Cold War — same year
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 1 year later
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 2 years later
Europe
- 1928 Discovery of penicillin — 19 years earlier
- 1933 Hitler comes to power — 14 years earlier
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 11 years earlier
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 6 years earlier
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 6 years later
Middle East
- 1941 Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran — 6 years earlier
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 1 year later
- 1948–1949 1948 Arab–Israeli War and the Nakba — 1 year later
- 1953 Iranian coup against Mosaddegh — 6 years later
- 1958 14 July Revolution in Iraq — 11 years later
Africa
- 1935–1937 Italy invades Ethiopia — 12 years earlier
- 1948 Apartheid begins in South Africa — 1 year later
- 1952 Egyptian revolution of 1952 — 5 years later
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 9 years later
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — 11 years later
Asia
- 1945 Atomic bombing of Hiroshima — 2 years earlier
- 1945 Indonesia proclaims independence — 2 years earlier
- 1947 Independence and Partition of India — same year
- 1953 First ascent of Everest — 6 years later
- 1966–1976 Cultural Revolution in China — 19 years later
Americas
- 1929 Wall Street Crash — 18 years earlier
- 1945 ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer — 2 years earlier
- 1947 Invention of the transistor — same year
- 1969 Moon landing — 22 years later
- c. 1970 Mass deforestation of the Amazon begins — 23 years later
Oceania
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 11 years earlier
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 6 years earlier
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 5 years earlier
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 7 years later
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 12 years later
Alive at the time
- Mahatma Gandhi (aged 78)
- Winston Churchill (aged 73)
- Joseph Stalin (aged 69)
- Albert Einstein (aged 68)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 66)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 58)
- Mao Zedong (aged 54)
- Georgy Zhukov (aged 51)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 29)
- Martin Luther King Jr. (aged 18)