🎈1900July 2: The first Zeppelin airship flew over Lake Constance in Germany.
🏅1901December 10: Stockholm hosted the first Nobel Prize ceremony, five years after Alfred Nobel died.
🇨🇺1902May 20: Cuba became an independent country, no longer governed by the United States.
✈️1903December 17: Orville Wright made the first powered, controlled airplane flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
🚇1904October 27: New York City opened the first underground line of its subway.
💡1905September 26: A physics journal published Albert Einstein's paper on special relativity, sent in on June 30.
🌉1906April 18: An earthquake and the fires that followed destroyed much of San Francisco.
📻1907October 17: Guglielmo Marconi opened a commercial radio service across the Atlantic.
☄️1908June 30: The Tunguska event, probably the air burst of a meteoroid or comet fragment, shook Siberia.
🛩️1909July 25: Louis Blériot became the first person to fly an airplane across the English Channel.
☄️1910Around May 19: Earth passed through the tail of Halley's Comet.
🧭1911December 14: Roald Amundsen's Norwegian expedition became the first to reach the South Pole.
Show all 126 years (114 more)
1900 to 1919, continued
🚢1912April 15: The Titanic sank in the North Atlantic after striking an iceberg, with more than 1,500 lives lost.
🩰1913May 29: Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring premiered in Paris and caused an uproar in the theater.
⚔️1914July 28: Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, the official start of World War I.
🚢1915May 7: A German submarine sank the liner Lusitania off the coast of Ireland, killing nearly 1,200 people.
🏞️1916August 25: The US National Park Service was created when President Woodrow Wilson signed the law setting it up.
🚩1917November 7: Bolsheviks led by Lenin seized power in Petrograd in Russia's October Revolution.
🕊️1918November 11: Germany signed an armistice with the Allies, and the fighting of World War I stopped at 11 a.m.
🛩️1919June 15: John Alcock and Arthur Brown landed in Ireland after the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic.
1920 to 1939 20
🗳️1920August 26: The Nineteenth Amendment on women's voting rights was certified, days after Tennessee ratified it.
💉1921July 27: Insulin, the hormone, was isolated at the University of Toronto by a team under Frederick Banting.
🏺1922November 4: Howard Carter's team found the entrance to Tutankhamun's tomb in the Valley of the Kings.
🇹🇷1923October 29: With the Ottoman Empire gone, Turkey was declared a republic.
⛷️1924January 25: The first Winter Olympic Games opened in Chamonix, France.
📖1925April 10: The Great Gatsby, a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, came out in New York.
🚀1926March 16: In Auburn, Massachusetts, Robert Goddard sent up the first rocket to run on liquid fuel.
🛩️1927May 21: Charles Lindbergh landed in Paris after the first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic.
🧫1928September: Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin by accident at St Mary's Hospital in London.
📉1929October 29: Black Tuesday. Share prices collapsed on Wall Street, and the Great Depression followed.
🔭1930February 18: Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto while studying photographs taken in January.
🏙️1931May 1: In New York City, the Empire State Building was opened.
🛩️1932May 21: Amelia Earhart landed in Northern Ireland, the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic.
🍺1933December 5: Prohibition ended in the United States when the Twenty-first Amendment was ratified.
🥾1934October 16: Chinese Communist forces set out on the Long March.
📜1935August 14: The Social Security Act became United States law with President Franklin D. Roosevelt's signature.
🏃1936August 3: Jesse Owens won the 100 meters at the Berlin Olympics, the first of his four gold medals.
🌉1937May 27: The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco opened, to pedestrians first.
🐟1938December 23: A catch off the South African coast included a coelacanth, a kind of fish believed to be extinct.
⚔️1939September 1: Germany invaded Poland, and World War II began in Europe.
1940 to 1959 20
🎨1940September 12: A group of young Frenchmen discovered the 17,000-year-old cave paintings at Lascaux.
⚔️1941December 7: Japanese aircraft attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, bringing the United States into World War II.
⚛️1942December 2: Enrico Fermi's team in Chicago started the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.
⚔️1943February 2: The German 6th Army's surrender brought the Battle of Stalingrad to an end.
⚔️1944June 6: D-Day. More than 150,000 Allied troops landed on the beaches of Normandy, France.
🕊️1945September 2: Japan signed the surrender aboard USS Missouri, and World War II ended.
🖥️1946February 14: The University of Pennsylvania unveiled ENIAC, an early electronic computer.
🇮🇳1947August 15: India gained independence from Britain, and Jawaharlal Nehru became its first prime minister.
🕊️1948December 10: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations.
🤝1949April 4: NATO began as an alliance with the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty in Washington.
⚔️1950June 25: North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel into South Korea, and the Korean War began.
🤝1951April 18: The European Coal and Steel Community was set up by the Treaty of Paris, signed on this day.
👑1952February 6: Elizabeth II became queen on the death of her father, George VI, while she was visiting Kenya.
🏔️1953May 29: Mount Everest was climbed for the first time on record, when Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary of John Hunt's British expedition reached the top.
🏃1954May 6: Roger Bannister ran the first mile in under four minutes, in Oxford, England.
🚌1955December 1: Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama, and was arrested.
🚢1956July 26: The Suez Canal was nationalized by Gamal Abdel Nasser, the president of Egypt.
🛰️1957October 4: Sputnik 1, launched by the Soviet Union, became the first artificial satellite in orbit around Earth.
🔌1958September 12: Jack Kilby demonstrated the first integrated circuit.
🌺1959August 21: Hawaii was admitted as the 50th US state.
1960 to 1979 20
🔦1960May 16: Theodore Maiman operated the first laser, at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California.
🚀1961April 12: Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, orbiting Earth once in Vostok 1.
☢️1962October 22: President Kennedy announced on television that Soviet missiles had been found in Cuba.
🎤1963August 28: Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.
🏅1964October 10: Tokyo opened the Summer Olympics, the first time a country in Asia hosted them.
👨🚀1965March 18: Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov made the first spacewalk, spending 12 minutes outside Voskhod 2.
⚽1966July 30: England beat West Germany 4-2 after extra time at Wembley to win the World Cup.
🫀1967December 3: In Cape Town, South Africa, the first transplant of a human heart was performed by Christiaan Barnard.
🌕1968December 24: The crew of Apollo 8, the first people to orbit the Moon, read aloud from the Book of Genesis.
🌕1969July 20: Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface more than six hours later, by then July 21 in most of the world.
🎸1970April 10: Paul McCartney announced that he had left the Beatles.
💷1971February 15: Decimal currency replaced the old money in the United Kingdom and Ireland, a changeover known as Decimal Day.
🤝1972February 21: Richard Nixon arrived in China, the first visit by a US president, and met Mao Zedong.
📱1973April 3: In New York City, Martin Cooper placed the first call from a handheld mobile phone.
🏺1974March 29: Near Xi'an in China, the Terracotta Army of the first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, was found.
🕊️1975April 30: North Vietnamese forces captured Saigon, and the Vietnam War ended.
🤸1976July 18: Nadia Comăneci, aged 14, scored the first perfect 10 in Olympic gymnastics, in Montreal.
🛰️1977September 5: NASA launched the Voyager 1 space probe.
👶1978July 25: The first baby conceived by in vitro fertilization was born in Oldham, England.
🏛️1979May 4: Margaret Thatcher became the United Kingdom's first woman prime minister, a day after the election.
1980 to 1999 20
💉1980May 8: The World Health Organization certified that smallpox had been eradicated worldwide.
🚀1981April 12: Space Shuttle Columbia lifted off on STS-1, the first shuttle mission.
🙂1982September 19: Scott Fahlman posted the first emoticons, :-) and :-(, on a university message board.
🌐1983January 1: The ARPANET completed its move to TCP/IP, often counted as the start of the Internet.
👨🚀1984February 7: Astronauts Bruce McCandless and Robert Stewart made the first untethered spacewalks.
🎸1985July 13: Live Aid, twin concerts in London and Philadelphia, raised money for famine relief in Ethiopia.
☢️1986April 26: A reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Soviet Ukraine exploded during a safety test.
👥1987July 11: The world's population reached five billion, by the United Nations' estimate.
🐛1988November 2: The Morris worm was released, the first computer worm spread over the Internet.
🧱1989November 9: East Germany opened the checkpoints in the Berlin Wall, and crowds crossed freely.
✊1990February 11: South Africa freed Nelson Mandela, who had spent 27 years in prison.
🌐1991August 6: The World Wide Web project was announced on an Internet newsgroup by Tim Berners-Lee.
🇪🇺1992February 7: The treaty that founded the European Union was signed in Maastricht.
🤝1993September 13: Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shook hands in Washington after the Oslo I Accord was signed.
🚆1994May 6: The Channel Tunnel between England and France officially opened.
🪐1995October 6: Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz announced the first planet found orbiting a Sun-like star.
🐑1996July 5: In Scotland, a sheep named Dolly was born, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell.
🇭🇰1997July 1: Hong Kong passed from the United Kingdom to China in a handover of sovereignty.
🕊️1998April 10: The Good Friday Agreement was signed in Belfast by the British and Irish governments.
💶1999January 1: The euro came into being as a currency, and full powers passed to the European Central Bank.
2000 to 2025 26
🛰️2000November 2: The first resident crew arrived at the International Space Station to begin Expedition 1.
🕯️2001September 11: Hijackers crashed four airliners in the United States, killing nearly 3,000 people.
🇹🇱2002May 20: East Timor became independent as Timor-Leste after a period of United Nations administration.
🧬2003April 14: The Human Genome Project was declared complete.
🇪🇺2004May 1: Ten countries, from Estonia to Malta, joined the European Union.
🌡️2005February 16: The Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions came into force.
🪐2006August 24: The International Astronomical Union defined "planet" and reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet.
📱2007January 9: Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone on stage in San Francisco.
⚛️2008September 10: The first proton beam circled the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, near Geneva.
🛬2009January 15: An airliner landed on the Hudson River in New York, and all 155 people aboard were rescued.
🏙️2010January 4: The Burj Khalifa in Dubai opened as the tallest structure ever built.
🇸🇸2011July 9: South Sudan became independent from Sudan after a referendum in January.
⚛️2012July 4: CERN said its experiments had found a new particle, one that fit what was expected of the Higgs boson.
⛪2013March 13: Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina was elected Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas.
☄️2014November 12: The Philae probe from the Rosetta spacecraft made the first landing on a comet.
🪐2015July 14: NASA's New Horizons flew past Pluto, the first spacecraft to visit it.
🚄2016June 1: The Gotthard Base Tunnel opened in Switzerland, the world's longest railway tunnel at 57 km.
🌑2017August 21: For the first time since 1918, a total solar eclipse ran coast to coast across the United States, from Oregon to South Carolina.
🤿2018July 10: The last of twelve boys and their soccer coach were rescued from a flooded cave in Thailand.
🕳️2019April 10: The first image of a black hole, one in the galaxy M87, was released by the Event Horizon Telescope team.
🦠2020March 11: COVID-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization.
🚁2021April 19: NASA's Ingenuity helicopter made the first powered flight on another planet, on Mars.
👥2022November 15: By a United Nations estimate, the number of people on Earth reached 8 billion.
🌕2023August 23: India's Chandrayaan-3 became the first spacecraft to land near the Moon's south pole.
🏅2024July 26: The Summer Olympics opened in Paris with a ceremony along the River Seine.
⛪2025May 8: Robert Prevost was elected Pope Leo XIV, the first pope from North America.
How this list was compiled: One event for each year from 1900 to 2025, 126 lines, each checked on 2026-09-18 against two sources that had to agree on the event and on the date. The choice of events and the wording are ours: on 2026-09-19, 32 lines that still followed the Wikipedia sentence closely were rebuilt with a different structure and the same facts, and a word-sequence comparison of every line with its Wikipedia article now finds none at 0.7 or more. First source: that year's Wikipedia article, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1969. Second source: On This Day. The link goes to the month page where the entry sits, such as https://www.onthisday.com/events/date/1969/july, because the bare year page shows only the first months; the month pages for 1928, 1969 and 1994 were opened on 2026-09-19 and show the entries. Both were read whole, every page of each year, and every matched line was read in full. Six events are missing from On This Day or are dated differently there, so a third source, read on 2026-09-18, stands in its place: the US National Archives for 1920 (https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/19th-amendment), history.com for 1978 and 1996, Scott Fahlman's own page at Carnegie Mellon for 1982 (https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm), the United Nations for 1987 (https://www.un.org/en/observances/world-population-day/background) and NASA for 2015 (https://science.nasa.gov/mission/new-horizons/). Where the two sources describe different moments of one event the line names both (1905, 1920, 1979), where they disagree on the day the line gives only the month (1928) or says 'around' (1910), and where they disagree on a count the line uses a figure both support (1915, 1944). An event that only one source carried was replaced by one that both carry. The 1969 line gives July 20 for the landing (20:17 UTC) and says the first step came more than six hours later (02:56 UTC on July 21), so the walk was on July 20 only in the Americas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1969 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11, checked 2026-09-19. The 2022 line says 'by a United Nations estimate' because the United Nations chose November 15, 2022 as the approximate day from its own projections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_Eight_Billion, checked 2026-09-19. No line is given for 2026 because the year is not over, and none before 1900. Changed on 2026-09-20: the 1953 and 2017 lines still followed the Wikipedia sentence closely, so both were rebuilt from the articles on the events themselves, read on 2026-09-20: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_British_Mount_Everest_expedition (summit reached on 29 May 1953 by Hillary and Tenzing, the first confirmed ascent, on the expedition led by John Hunt; hence 'for the first time on record') and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_eclipse_of_August_21,_2017 (totality first touched land on the Oregon coast and left it in South Carolina, the first coast-to-coast path since 1918). The 1921, 1985 and 1991 lines were turned round with the same facts and no new ones. OVERLAP WITH THE SITE'S OTHER HISTORY LIST: about 31 of these 126 events (the Wright flight, the Titanic, Apollo 11, the Berlin Wall and so on) are also items of data/random-historical-event-generator.json, which belongs to another family. They stay, because a list of one best-known event a year cannot leave out the best-known events; every line here was written separately (no sentence is shared), each opens with its day and month, and the other list is drawn by era and theme with no year set by the visitor. The share is about a quarter of this list. Licence: own work: our selection and our wording of dated public facts
How it works
This random year generator draws a year between 1900 and 2026, each with the same chance. The card adds its century, Roman numerals, a leap year check and one dated event. From year and To year take any span from 1 to 9999.
Read the full guide
Pick a random year from any span
Press Pick a year. Under 1969 the card reads: Not a leap year, 20th century, MCMLXIX, 1 of 127 possible years. Then comes that year's event: July 20, Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. All 126 events, 1900 to 2025, are listed under the tool. Type 1066 and 1485 into From year and To year for a medieval setting, or tap The 1980s for a character's birth year.
Build a timeline for a class or a story
To generate a random year for each of five tables, set How many to 5 and Order to Earliest first. With No repeats ticked you get five different years in date order, each with its century and its event. Hand them out and ask what else happened then.
1900 was no leap year but 2000 was: a century year counts only if 400 divides it. 1900 to 2026 holds 31 leap years.
The card puts 1900 in the 19th century and 2000 in the 20th: by the strict count, a century ends on its 00 year.
1988 is MCMLXXXVIII in Roman numerals: eleven letters, the longest from 1900 to 2026.
Questions and answers
Is there a random year generator wheel?
A random year wheel with 127 slices would be too thin to read, so this year randomizer draws from a range. For a wheel, draw ten years with How many at 10, press Copy and paste them into pick for me, which spins any list.
Can you give me a random year before 1900?
Yes. Type any two years from 1 to 9999 into From year and To year. There is no year 0 and no BC, and Roman numerals stop at 3999. The leap year check uses today's rule throughout, though it only began in October 1582.
Does it work as a random future year generator?
Yes. Tap Future, 2027 to 2100 under Quick ranges, or type any later span up to 9999. A future year gets its century, leap year check and Roman numerals, but no event: the list stops at 2025.
How do I pick a random year for each person in a group?
Set How many to the size of the group, up to 100, and leave No repeats ticked. The random year picker then deals years like cards, so no two people share one. Ask the 1980s for 11 years and you get 10, with a note.