Moray, in 1913, brings home samples of several kinds of material from a Swedish hillside and tests these to determine whether any are suitable for a “valve” (transistor equivalent).

He discovers that silver wire used on stone serves as a rectifier.

The Second Balkan War, in which Bulgaria attacks Serbia and Greece, ends badly for Bulgaria.

In 1913, Ibn Saud, founder of the Saudi dynasty, wages a successful campaign to end Turkish rule in Nejd, capturing the Turkish province of Hasa in the balance.

Vladimir Tatlin’s Russian Constructivism, drawing from Synthetic Cubism, emphasizes mixed-media constructions of abstract forms.

Niels Bohr, using Planck’s quantum theory in 1913 to propose a model of the atom with quantized electronic states, lays the foundation for quantum mechanics.

German chemist Friedrich Bergius develops hydrogenation, a coal liquefaction process, in 1913.

(The process, which consists of combining coal with hydrogen in the presence of a catalyst and high pressure to yield motor fuels on an industrial scale, will not be impemented until many years later.)