1 December 1913 The American Ford launches the production system based on Assembly line, reducing the assembly time of an automobile chassis to 2 hours and 40 minutes (from the 12 hours and 30 minutes that was needed up to that point)
1 December 1958 RAI inaugurates the piped music to listen to Italian radio programmes telephone cable; the actual broadcasts will begin on January 4th
1 December 1988 The is established World AIDS day to raise awareness of the worldwide epidemic due to the spread of the HIV virus
2 December 1915 Physicist Albert Einstein publishes field equations, at the heart of his theory of general relativity
3 December 1967 South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard performs the first heart transplant at Groote Schuur hospital in Cape Town
5 December 1952 London gets hit by “big smog”, the worst air pollution event in UK history, following which a thick blanket of smog enveloped the city causing (according to the most recent estimates) around 12.000 deaths in the following weeks and months
6 December 1768 The first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica is published in Edinburgh, Scotland.Encyclopædia Britannica, or, A dictionary of Arts and Sciences, Compiled upon a New Plan
7 December 2007 In Copenhagen, Denmark, the UN conference on climate change
8 December 1972 The TGV 001, a French-built prototype train, sets the top speed record for non-electric trains reaching 318 km/h
9 December 1979 The World Health Organization (WHO) announces the disappearance of smallpox: the result was obtained thanks to the mass vaccination undertaken by many countries in the XNUMXs
10 December 1963 The Italian chemical engineer Giulio Natta, known as the "father" of plastics, receives the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the discovery of stereospecific polymerization, a process that opened a new era in the chemistry of materials
11 December 1910 The French chemical engineer Georges Claude exhibits the first neon lamp installing "tubes" at the Paris Motor Show
11 December 1997 Within the framework of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Kyoto Protocol, which envisaged a reduction of 2012% of greenhouse gas emissions by 5,2 compared to 1990. Subsequently, with the Doha agreement, the extension of the Protocol was extended to 2020
12 December 1901 Guglielmo Marconi successfully carries out the first transatlantic transmission of radio signals from Cornwall to Canada
12 December 2015 is subscribed toParis Agreement with the long-term goal of containing the increase in global average temperature to reduce the risks and effects of climate change
14 December 1911 The expedition led by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen is the first to reach the South Pole
16 December 1631 begins aeruption of Vesuvius which will last 19 days, causing at least 4.000 victims. To date, the eruption has been classified with an Explosivity Index (VEI) of 5 on a scale of 0 to 8
16 December 1857 Un earthquake with an estimated magnitude of 7.1 hits the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, especially Basilicata, devastating a good part of the Val d'Agri
17 December 1903 For the first time the Wright brothers manage to fly for 12 seconds in the airplane of their invention, covering a distance of 36 meters
21 December 1913 The New York World's Sunday “Fun” supplement publishes a new game called “word-cross puzzle”: it's the first crossword invented by the British puzzler Arthur Wynne
23 December 1947 John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley invent the transistor, a semiconductor device widely used in both analog and digital electronics
26 December 2004 Un 9.1 magnitude earthquake strikes Indian Ocean off the northwest coast of the island of Sumatra, Indonesia. The earthquake caused a tidal wave with waves up to 15 meters high which hit the coasts of 14 countries and caused over 230.000 victims
27 December 1612 Galileo Galilei notes the first known observation of the planet Neptune: the astronomer, however, did not distinguish it from the fixed stars and did not realize that he had observed a hitherto unknown planet
28 December 1908 Una 7.2 magnitude quake hits the Strait of Messina, causing a tidal wave and killing half the population of Messina and a third of that of Reggio Calabria. The earthquake is still remembered today as one of the most catastrophic in the history of the country
28 December 2005 is put into orbit Galileo's first satellite, the European civil satellite navigation and positioning system, "alternative" to the US GPS
30 December 1953 It is being sold first color TV for home use: it's a 15” and costs $1.175
30 December 2002 In the course of aStromboli eruption which began on December 28, two landslides detached from the side of the volcano causing two tsunami waves that hit the hamlets of Stromboli and Ginostra, reaching as far as Milazzo, in Sicily
31 December 1879 Thomas Edison inaugurates in Menlo Park, California, the lighting a incandescent lamp set up in the previous month of October