Timeline January 1939

Events in January 1939 10

• 1865 – 1939 W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) Died 28 January 1939, aged 73 Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist and a leading figure of the Irish Literary Revival. He co-founded the Abbey Theatre and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923. Many consider him the greatest English-language poet of the twentieth century.
• 1939 Australian Open 1939 Men: John Bromwich · Women: Emily Hood Westacott
• 1939 Billie Holiday opens at Cafe Society Integrated club A residency at New York's first integrated nightclub.
• 1939 Discovery of francium Marguerite Perey identifies element 87 Marguerite Perey of the Curie Institute in Paris found francium while studying the decay of actinium-227. It was the last element discovered in nature rather than made in a laboratory. She named it after France.
• 1939 First Hallucinations At the age of ten, began experiencing the vivid hallucinations that would define her art: flashing lights, fields of dots, and flowers that spoke to her. Patterns in fabric would come alive, multiply, and threaten to engulf her — a process she later called 'self-obliteration'. Her earliest known dotted artwork, a drawing of her mother's kimono covered in spots, dates from this year.
• 1939 Hewlett-Packard founded Two Stanford graduates form a partnership in a Palo Alto garage Bill Hewlett and David Packard formally set up their partnership. Their first product was an audio oscillator, and Walt Disney bought an early version. The garage where they started is often called the birthplace of Silicon Valley.
• 1939 – 1976 Sal Mineo (1939-1976) Died 12 February 1976, aged 37 Sal Mineo, the American actor twice nominated for an Academy Award, including for his role in Rebel Without a Cause, was stabbed to death outside his West Hollywood apartment. His killer, a pizza delivery driver who had robbed him, was not identified until 1978. The murder shocked Hollywood.
• 1939 Black Friday bushfires Wildfires sweep across Victoria Bushfires burned about two million hectares of Victoria, Australia, and killed 71 people. Several towns were destroyed. A Royal Commission afterwards changed Australian forest and fire management.
• 1939 Chillán earthquake Chile's deadliest recorded earthquake A magnitude 7.8 earthquake destroyed much of Chillán and nearby towns in south-central Chile. It remains the deadliest earthquake in Chile's recorded history. The disaster led to the creation of CORFO, the national development agency.
• 1939 Hitler's Reichstag prophecy speech Hitler threatens the annihilation of Europe's Jews On the sixth anniversary of taking power, Hitler told the Reichstag that another world war would lead to the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe. He returned to this prophecy often during the war. Historians treat the speech as a key statement of his intent.