Russia's Tsar Tank was tested in 1915, a year before the first British tanks went into battle on the Somme.
But the machine with its 9-metre wheels got stuck on its first trial and never saw combat.
The events
- Lebedenko's Tsar Tank1915 · near Dmitrov. Engineer Lebedenko won over Nicholas II with a wind-up model powered by a gramophone spring. The real machine had front wheels almost 9 m across, but in tests in August 1915 its small rear roller sank in soft ground. It rusted in the forest for six more years before being scrapped.
- World War I1914–1918 · Sarajevo. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914 drew the great powers into a war of the Entente against Germany and its allies. It killed millions and brought down the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires.
More amazing facts
- 1914 Passenger pigeons once numbered in the billions, but the last one, Martha, died on 1 September 1914 — a month after World War I began.
- 1914 · 1928 The cheapest toll in Panama Canal history was 36 cents, paid in 1928 by writer Richard Halliburton, who swam it. The fee was set by his weight: 140 pounds.
- 1914 Gavrilo Princip was not eating a sandwich when the archduke's car arrived; that detail was invented in 2001.
- 1914 On one stretch of the front, the Christmas truce of 1914 was struck for the sake of the post: Belgian soldiers asked the Germans to pass their letters on to families living in occupied Belgium.
- 1914 · 1915 Winnie-the-Pooh is named after a real bear brought to London by World War I. In August 1914 Harry Colebourn, a Canadian cavalry vet, bought a cub from a hunter and named her Winnipeg; from 1915 she lived at London Zoo.
- 1915 · 1916 The tank is called a tank for secrecy's sake.