Assassination of Franz Ferdinand
One wrong turn by a driver — and a world war a month later
On 28 June 1914 in Sarajevo, 19-year-old Gavrilo Princip shot the Austro-Hungarian heir Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie. A bomb attack that morning had failed, but later the driver took a wrong turn and stopped right in front of Princip; a month later the First World War began.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1914–1918 World War I — same year
- 1918–1920 Spanish flu pandemic — 4 years later
- 1920 League of Nations founded — 6 years later
- 1939–1945 World War II — 25 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1916 Brusilov offensive — 2 years later
- 1917 October Revolution — 3 years later
- 1917–1922 Russian Civil War — 3 years later
- 1929–1933 Collectivization in the Soviet Union — 15 years later
- 1936–1938 Great Purge — 22 years later
Middle East
- 1908 Oil struck at Masjed Soleyman — 6 years earlier
- 1915–1917 Armenian genocide — 1 year later
- 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement — 2 years later
- 1916–1918 The Arab Revolt — 2 years later
- 1917 Balfour Declaration — 3 years later
Africa
- 1897 The British sack Benin City — 17 years earlier
- 1898 Battle of Omdurman — 16 years earlier
- 1899–1902 Second Boer War — 15 years earlier
- 1904–1908 The Herero and Nama genocide — 10 years earlier
- 1922 Discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb — 8 years later
Asia
- 1905 Battle of Tsushima — 9 years earlier
- 1910 Japan annexes Korea — 4 years earlier
- 1911–1912 Xinhai Revolution — 3 years earlier
- 1919 Amritsar massacre — 5 years later
- 1923 Great Kantō earthquake — 9 years later
Americas
- 1910–1920 Mexican Revolution — 4 years earlier
- 1913 Ford's moving assembly line — 1 year earlier
- 1914 Opening of the Panama Canal — same year
- 1914 Death of Martha, the last passenger pigeon — same year
- 1929 Wall Street Crash — 15 years later
Oceania
- 1893 New Zealand women win the vote — 21 years earlier
- 1893 Overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom — 21 years earlier
- 1911 Amundsen reaches the South Pole — 3 years earlier
- 1912 The death of Scott's polar party — 2 years earlier
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 22 years later
Alive at the time
- Thomas Edison (aged 67)
- Nikola Tesla (aged 58)
- Marie Curie (aged 47)
- Mahatma Gandhi (aged 45)
- Vladimir Lenin (aged 44)
- Ernest Rutherford (aged 43)
- Winston Churchill (aged 40)
- Joseph Stalin (aged 36)
- Albert Einstein (aged 35)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 33)