March 1925


The following events occurred in March 1925:

March 1, 1925 (Sunday)

March 2, 1925 (Monday)

March 3, 1925 (Tuesday)

March 4, 1925 (Wednesday)

March 5, 1925 (Thursday)

March 6, 1925 (Friday)

March 7, 1925 (Saturday)

March 8, 1925 (Sunday)

  • In Egypt, Alan Rowe, the deputy director of George Reisner's Harvard-Boston Expedition, became the first person in 4,500 years to open the chamber of the tomb of Hetepheres I, the mother of the Pharaoh Cheops and the Queen consort of the Pharaoh Sneferu.
  • Dr. Herman N. Bundesen, Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health announced in an article in the Department's weekly bulletin that the ongoing crossword puzzle fad caused no ill health effects from headaches or eye strain, as had previously been feared, and was beneficial to health in general. In a feature titled "Cross-Worditis", Bundesen noted humorously that "The savage little cross-word microbe may be largely explained by the fact that part of our lives and much energy must be put into amusement, to satisfy the play instinct within us. Therefore any play or game that has a mental 'kick' in it, is quickly accepted and eagerly pursued."
  • Born: Dennis Lotis, South African-born British swing music and pop music singer; in Johannesburg
  • Died: Saint Manuel Míguez González, 93, Spanish Roman Catholic priest and founder of the Calasanzian Institute. Míguez González would be canonized as a Roman Catholic saint more than 90 years later, on October 15, 2017.

March 9, 1925 (Monday)

March 10, 1925 (Tuesday)

  • A young member of the Nazi Party, Otto Rothstock, entered the office of Austrian Jewish writer Hugo Bettauer in Vienna and shot him five times at point blank range. Rothstock was angered by Bettauer's novel Stadt ohne Juden which satirized antisemitism. Bettauer died of his wounds on March 27.
  • The nomination of Charles B. Warren for Attorney General of the United States, was rejected by the U.S. Senate after Democrats and some Republicans had concerns over whether Warren would enforce federal antitrust laws. U.S. President Calvin Coolidge had nominated Warren after his March 4 inauguration. On the first vote, the Senate was tied at 40 to 40. Coolidge's Vice President Charles G. Dawes would have broken the tie in favor of Warren, but Dawes did not arrive at the U.S. Capitol in time to resolve the tie. On the next vote, Warren's nomination failed, 39 to 41. Another vote was taken on March 16 before 47 of the 48 Senators, and Warren was rejected by a vote of 39 to 46.
  • The island of Cyprus, ceded from Turkey to the United Kingdom in 1923, became a Crown Colony of the British Empire, with Malcolm Stevenson as the first colonial Governor
  • Olympiacos F.C., as of 2024 the winner of 47 championships in Greece's top-level professional soccer football league, was founded in Piraeus.
  • Born: Ace Reid, American cartoonist who created the comic strip Cowpokes; in Lelia Lake, Texas
  • Died: Myer Prinstein, 46, Polish-born American track athlete and 1900 and 1904 Olympic gold medalist in the triple jump, died of a heart ailment.

March 11, 1925 (Wednesday)

March 12, 1925 (Thursday)

March 13, 1925 (Friday)

March 14, 1925 (Saturday)

  • France's Senate Finance Committee voted to keep its embassy at the Vatican, over the wishes of Prime Minister Édouard Herriot.
  • The Council of the League of Nations expressed hope that Germany would apply to join in September.
  • At Philadelphia, the two best teams in the Ivy League played against each other to conclude the season. The 16-5 Penn Quakers upset the 21-1 1924–25 [Princeton Tigers men's basketball team|Princeton Tigers] by a single point, 29 to 28. Despite the loss, Princeton would be retroactively selected by historians as the best team of the 1924-1925 season.
  • Born:
  • *William Clay Ford Sr., American businessman and billionaire who owned the Detroit Lions NFL team from 1964 until his death, and chaired the Ford Motor Company's Design Committee from 1957 to 1989; in Detroit
  • *Abdel Hadi Al Gazzar, Egyptian painter; in Alexandria
  • Died: Walter Camp, 65, American college football coach known as "The Father of American Football" for his remaking of the rules of the gridiron game, including the system of downs for gaining a specific amount of yardage from the location where first down started, and for creating the line of scrimmage for a specific place on the field

March 15, 1925 (Sunday)

March 16, 1925 (Monday)

March 17, 1925 (Tuesday)

  • Czechoslovak Foreign Minister Edvard Beneš proposed a "United States of Europe", divided into two groups of roughly equal power, to secure peace. England, France, Belgium, Germany and Spain could make up the western bloc, while Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Austria and others could make up the eastern bloc.
  • An explosion at a coal mine near Barrackville, West Virginia killed 33 miners.
  • Born: Gabriele Ferzetti, Italian film actor; in Rome

March 18, 1925 (Wednesday)

March 19, 1925 (Thursday)

  • The U.S. state of New Mexico adopted its distinctive yellow flag.
  • U.S. President Calvin Coolidge invited the nations of the world to participate in the Sesquicentennial Exposition to be held in Philadelphia in 1926.
  • American serial killer Martha Wise confessed to poisoning 17 members of her family, including her mother, her aunt and her uncle, whose illness and death were traced to arsenic. Mrs. Wise's admission came under questioning by the sheriff of Medina County, Ohio, Fred Roshon, who had connected her to the crime the day before when he discovered that she had purchased a large quantity of arsenic from a drug store the day before the family members had become ill. Convicted of murder, she would remain in prison until her death 46 years later.
  • The classic jazz tune "Sweet Georgia Brown" was first recorded by its author, bandleader Ben Bernie along with his Hotel Roosevelt Orchestra. The record was released the next day, and would spend five weeks as the number-one record on the U.S. charts.
  • The British government announced that it was proceeding with the development of a major naval base at Singapore, as W. E. Bridgeman, First Lord of the Admiralty, submitted a budget request for 60.5 million British pounds to the House of Commons for approval.
  • Died: Nariman Narimanov, 54, Azerbaijani novelist, playwright, Bolshevik revolutionary and Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Azerbaijani SSR in 1921 and 1922, died of a heart attack.

March 20, 1925 (Friday)

March 21, 1925 (Saturday)

  • In Spain, the Commonwealth of Catalonia , governed by a deliberative assembly of 96 councilors of the four Catalan provinces and presided over by Governor Alfonso Sala, was dissolved by Spanish Prime Minister Miguel Primo de Rivera. The Mancomunitat had been created in 1913 after King Alfonso XIII had signed a law granting all Spanish provinces the right to group themselves into associations or commonwealths.
  • Arturo Alessandri returned from exile to retake office as president of Chile, ending the January Junta led by Emilio Bello Codesido.
  • In the U.S. state of Tennessee, the Butler Act, prohibiting school teachers from denying the Biblical account of man's origin, took effect as it was signed by Governor Austin Peay. The Act, which provided that "it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the Story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals," had been passed by the state House of Representatives, 71 to 5 and by the Tennessee Senate, 24 to 6. The Act would remain on the books until its appeal on May 17, 1967.
  • The Board of Regents of the University of California, Los Angeles announced that they had selected a site at Westwood, adjacent to Beverly Hills as the site for a new campus. The property, which would still house the UCLA campus 100 years later, was purchased from the Janss Brothers for almost one million dollars. Construction would begin on May 7, 1928.
  • In Germany, Franz Xaver Schwarz became the Reichsschatzmeister of the Nazi Party, a position he held for more than 20 years until the conquest of Germany on May 8, 1945.
  • The first performance of the Maurice Ravel opera ballet L'enfant et les sortilèges'' was conducted in Monte Carlo.
  • Born: Peter Brook, British theatre director; in Chiswick

March 22, 1925 (Sunday)

  • The first radio broadcast in Japan was made, transmitted by the Tokyo Broadcasting Station. The first broadcast started with a performance by the Japanese Navy Band, a news program, and a recording of Beethoven's opera "Fidelio"."
  • Three high-ranking Soviet intelligence agency officials – Georgi Atarbekov, 34; Solomon Mogilevsky, 39, and Aleksandr Myasnikyan, 39, were killed in the explosion of a Junkers F 13 airplane, along with the pilot and the flight engineer. The aircraft caught fire shortly after departing from Tiflis in the Georgian SSR to Sukhumi, where they were to attend a Communist Party conference.
  • The soccer football national teams of Haiti and Jamaica made their international debut, playing each other in the a three-game series in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince. Jamaica won the opener, 2 to 1, and the other two games.
  • Women's tuxedos were reported as the newest fashion rage in Paris.
  • Born: Gerard Hoffnung, German-born British artist and musician; in Berlin

March 23, 1925 (Monday)

March 24, 1925 (Tuesday)

March 25, 1925 (Wednesday)

  • In a precursor to television, Scottish inventor John Logie Baird publicly demonstrated the transmission of moving silhouette pictures at the London department store Selfridges. A contemporary report in Nature magazine on three weeks of demonstrations noted that Baird had shown "an experimental apparatus of his own design for wireless 'television' " and that "we have seen the production in the receiver of a recognisable, if rather blurred, image of simple forms, such as letters painted in white on a black card, held up before the transmitter... the object, strongly illuminated, is placed opposite a revolving disc provided with a series of lenses, each a little nearer to the centre than the last, which project a series of moving images upon a selenium or other photo-electric cell, each a little displaced laterally from the last," and added "In the receiving section of Mr. Baird's television apparatus, the signals sent out from the transmitter are detected and amplified by very powerful valves until they are strong eneough to light up a neon tube when a signal is received."
  • Born:
  • *Flannery O'Connor, American novelist; in Savannah, Georgia
  • *K. S. Ashwath, Indian actor in Kannada cinema in 370 films, including Doorada Betta; in Holenarasipura, Kingdom of Mysore, British India .

March 26, 1925 (Thursday)

March 27, 1925 (Friday)

March 28, 1925 (Saturday)

March 29, 1925 (Sunday)

March 30, 1925 (Monday)

March 31, 1925 (Tuesday)

  • The collapse of a pontoon bridge in Germany killed 67 soldiers of the Reichswehr who drowned while crossing over the Weser river near Minden. Later reporting alleged that the casualties were over 200 and the German military was conducting experiments with a new river-crossing system.
  • The Kingdom of Iran adopted the Solar Hijri calendar that would be in use 100 years later, reviving the ancient Persian calendar names. The new calendar switched from the lunar calendar used in Islamic nations, though it kept the Islamic calendar system of dating the first year from the 662 AD, when Muhammad migrate from Mecca to Medina. The first day of each year on the Iranian calendar was March 21, and the year consisted of 365 days, with the first six months having 31 days, the next five having 30, and the twelfth having 29 days or 30 in leap years.
  • The Philadelphia Daily News began publication as a tabloid morning paper.
  • Sergei M. Eisenstein began filming of the classic Soviet film Battleship Potemkin on the streets of Leningrad.
  • Born: Leonard Andrews, American art collector known for preserving the works of Andrew Wyeth