The Kon-Tiki expedition
Six men cross the Pacific on a balsa raft in 101 days
Thor Heyerdahl wanted to show that South Americans could have sailed to Polynesia. In April 1947 he and five companions left Peru on a balsa-log raft and covered 6,900 km in 101 days before smashing onto the reef of Raroia. All survived, and the film of the voyage won an Oscar.
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
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1936–1938 Great Purge — 11 years earlier
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — 6 years earlier
- 1942–1943 Battle of Stalingrad — 5 years earlier
- 1945 German surrender and Victory Day — 2 years earlier
- 1957 Sputnik 1, the first satellite — 10 years later
Middle East
- 1923 Treaty of Lausanne — 24 years earlier
- 1932 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia proclaimed — 15 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
Africa
- 1935–1937 Italy invades Ethiopia — 12 years earlier
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 9 years later
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — 11 years later
- 1960 Year of Africa — 13 years later
- 1963 The Organisation of African Unity is founded — 16 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 and the Great Depression — 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
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)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 29)
- Martin Luther King Jr. (aged 18)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 17)