100 Years Ago This Month: March 2026

MARCH 1926

• After a six-day trial, Anthony Bimba wins an acquittal in a Brockton, Massachusetts, courtroom on March 1. Bimba is the last person in the United States to be charged with the crime of blasphemy.

• Assistant Secretary of War Hanford MacNider formally rejects New York watchmaker Oscar M. Lazarus’s offer to design and install a wristwatch on the Statue of Liberty on March 2.

• Zizi Lambrino files a lawsuit against Prince Carol of Romania on March 4. The lawsuit claims Lambrino, who is seeking 10 million francs, was still legally married to the Prince and entitled to financial support for herself and their son, Carol Lambrino.

• The government of French Prime Minister Aristide Briand falls after failing to pass a financial bill on March 6.

• The first wireless trans-Atlantic telephone call is made from New York to London on March 7, which also marks the fiftieth anniversary of the patenting of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell.

• Bertha Knight Landes becomes the first woman to be elected as mayor of a major American city on March 9. Landes defeats incumbent Edwin J. Brown to become the mayor of Seattle.

• The first issue of the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories hits newsstands on March 10.

• Éamon de Valera resigns as the leader of Sinn Féin on March 11. De Valera had proposed a motion for the party to have representation in the bicameral parliament of the Irish Free State and the Parliament of Northern Ireland, but ceded leadership when the measure failed.

• The Savoy Ballroom opens on the famed Lenox Avenue in Harlem on March 12.

• Aviator Alan Cobham completes the first voyage by air from the British colony of South Africa to Great Britain on March 13. Cobham lands at Croydon and is welcomed by King George V.

• The cartoon character “Reddy Kilowatt” is introduced in an advertisement for the Alabama Power Company on March 14.

• British driver Henry Segrave reaches a speed of 152.33 miles per hour in Southport, Lancashire, England, on March 16, breaking the record for the fastest speed for an automobile.

• Czechoslovakia Prime Minister Antonín Svehla and his cabinet resigned on March 17. The mass resignations followed Svehla’s inability to secure parliamentary approval to raise wages for government employees.

• On March 18, Second Lieutenant of the U.S. Army John Sewell Thompson became the first American military officer executed in peacetime. The 25-year-old was hanged at Fort McKinley in the Philippines after being convicted of murdering his teenage fiancée.

· The New York Police Department arrests seven members of the Whittemore Gang on March 19. The arrests mark an end to a string of bank and jewelry robberies committed by the gang.

· Kálmán Tihanyi of Hungary receives a patent for the charge-storage television tube on March 20.

· More than 100 people are killed when the Brazilian passenger ship Paes de Carvalho catches fire and sinks in the Amazon River on March 22.

· A manifesto drawn up by Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in April 1914 was published on March 28. Franz Ferdinand, who was assassinated in June 1914, had planned to transform the Austro-Hungarian Empire into a nation of self-governing states but was killed before ascending to the throne.

· The U.S. government granted permission to two breweries to make 3.76 percent alcohol “malt tonic” on March 29. The finished product could be sold at drug stores without prescriptions.

· Despite previous assertions that it would close down the colonial prison on Devil’s Island, the French government ships 340 convicts to the island on March 30.