This year is notable for the sinking of the Titanic, which occurred on April 15 and the outbreak of the First Balkan War in October.
In Albania, this leap year runs with only 353 days as the country achieved switching from the Julian to Gregorian Calendar by skipping 13 days. Friday, 30 November (Julian Calendar) immediately turned Saturday, 14 December 1912 (in the Gregorian Calendar).
Events January
January 1 – The Republic of China is established. January 5 – The Prague Conference (6th All-Russian Conference of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party) opens. January 6 German geophysicist Alfred Wegener first presents his theory of continental drift. New Mexico becomes the 47th U.S. state. January 8 – The African National Congress is founded as the South African Native National Congress in Bloemfontein, to promote improved rights for black South Africans, with John Langalibalele Dube as its first president. January 12 – In the 1912 German federal election the Social Democrats for the first time becomes the party with the most seats. January 14 – Raymond Poincaré forms a coalition government in France, beginning his first term of office as Prime Minister on 21 January. January 17 – British polar explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott and a team of four become the second expeditionary group to reach the South Pole. January 18 (Old Style January 5) – Prague Conference: Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik Party break away from the rest of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. January 22 – The Overseas Railroad officially opens on the Florida Keys. January 23 – The First International Opium Convention is signed at The Hague to restrict exports.
February
February 12 – The Manchu Qing dynasty of China comes to an end after 268 years with the abdication of the Xuantong Emperor Puyi and the establishment of the Republic of China. February 14 – Arizona is admitted as the 48th state of the United States, the last contiguous state to be admitted into the Union. February 24 – Battle of Beirut: Italy makes a surprise attack on the Ottoman port of Beirut, when the cruiser Giuseppe Garibaldi and the gunboat Volturno bombard the harbour, killing 97 sailors and civilians. February 29 – Serbia and Bulgaria secretly sign a treaty of alliance for a term of eight years, with each pledging to come to the defence of the other during war. The treaty would eventually be dishonored in World War I.
March
March 1 – Albert Berry is reported to have made the first parachute jump from a flying airplane. March 6 – Italian forces become the first to use airships in war as two dirigibles drop bombs on Turkish troops encamped at Janzur, from an altitude of 6,000 feet."Dirigibles in Tripoli War", The New York Times, March 8, 1912 March 7 – Roald Amundsen, in Hobart, Tasmania, announces his success in reaching the South Pole the previous December.
March 12 – The Girl Scouts of the USA is founded by Juliette Gordon Low, in Savannah, Georgia. March 16 – Lawrence Oates, dying member of Scott's South Pole expedition, leaves the tent saying, "I am just going outside and may be some time." March 29 (probable date) – Robert Falcon Scott and the remaining members of his South Pole expedition die. March 30 – The French Third Republic establishes the French protectorate in Morocco by the Treaty of Fes with Sultan Abd al-Hafid of Morocco.
April
April 1 – A partial lunar eclipse takes place, the first of two lunar eclipses this year. It is the 61st lunar eclipse of the 111th Saros cycle, which started with a penumbral lunar eclipse on June 10, 830 AD and will conclude with another penumbral lunar eclipse on July 19, 2092. April 10 – White Star liner departs from Southampton, England, with more than 2,200 passengers and crew on her maiden voyage, bound for New York. April 11 – makes her last call, at Queenstown in Ireland. April 14–15 – Sinking of the RMS Titanic: strikes an iceberg in the northern Atlantic Ocean and sinks with the loss of more than 1,500 lives. April 14 – Santos FC, a Brazilian association football club, is founded in State of Sao Paulo. April 16 – Harriet Quimby becomes the first woman to fly across the English Channel. April 17 Lena massacre: Russian troops kill or wound 500 striking gold miners in Siberia. A hybrid solar eclipse is the 30th solar eclipse of Solar Saros 137. April 18 – Cunard Line vessel arrives in New York with the 705 survivors. April 20 – Fenway Park in Boston, Massachusetts opens. April 30 – Carl Laemmle founds Universal Studios as the Universal Film and Manufacturing Company in the United States.
May
May 5 – The 1912 Summer Olympics open in Stockholm, Sweden. Modern Pentathlon is contested for the first time in these games. May 11 – Alaska becomes a territory of the United States. May 13 – In the United Kingdom, the Royal Flying Corps (forerunner of the Royal Air Force) is established. May 23 – The Hamburg America Line's is launched in Hamburg and is the world's largest ship. May 30 – Pioneer aviator Wilbur Wright (of the Wright brothers) dies of typhoid fever in Dayton, Ohio.
June
June 6 – The Novarupta volcano is formed in Alaska by a VEI 6 eruption, the world's largest (in terms of matter emitted) in the 20th century. June 26 – Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 9 is premiered posthumously by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Bruno Walter. June 30 – Regina Cyclone: Canada's deadliest tornado strikes Regina, Saskatchewan, killing 28 people.
July
July 1 – Harriet Quimby, who set the record as the first woman to fly the English Channel two months previously, dies in Squantum, Massachusetts, after her brand-new two-seat Bleriot monoplane crashes, killing both Quimby and her passenger. July 12 – The United States release of Sarah Bernhardt's film Les Amours de la reine Élisabeth is influential in the development of the movie feature. Adolph Zukor, who incorporates Paramount Pictures on May 8, 1914, launches his company as the distributor. July 30 – Emperor Meiji of Japan dies; he is succeeded by his son Yoshihito, who becomes Emperor Taishō. In the history of Japan, the event marks the end of the Meiji period and the beginning of the Taishō period.
August
August 1 – The Jungfrau Railway is inaugurated with the opening of the subterranean Jungfraujoch railway station in the Bernese Oberland of Switzerland, Europe's highest at above sea level. August 4 – United States occupation of Nicaragua: U.S. Marines land from the USS Annapolis in Nicaragua, to support the conservative government at its request. August 12 – Sultan Abd al-Hafid of Morocco abdicates. August 29 – A typhoon strikes China, killing at least 50,000 people.
September
September 4 – The government of the Ottoman Empire agrees to the demands put forward in the Albanian Revolt of 1912. September 28 – W. C. Handy publishes "The Memphis Blues" in the United States.
October
October 8 – The First Balkan War begins: Montenegro declares war against the Ottoman Empire. October 14 – John Flammang Schrank attempts to assassinate Theodore Roosevelt in Milwaukee. October 16 – Bulgarian pilots Radul Minkov and Prodan Toprakchiev perform the second bombing with an airplane in history, at the railway station of Karaagac near Edirne, against Turkey. October 17 – Krupp engineers Benno Strauss and Eduard Maurer patent austenitic stainless steel. October 18 – Italy and the Ottoman Empire sign a treaty in Ouchy near Lausanne, ending the Italo-Turkish War. October 18–21 – First Balkan War: The Greek navy captures the island of Lemnos for use as a forward base against the Dardanelles. October 24 – First Balkan War: Battle of Kumanovo – Serbian forces defeat the Ottoman army in Vardar Macedonia. October Edgar Rice Burroughs' character Tarzan first appears in Tarzan of the Apes, in American pulp magazine The All-Story. Sax Rohmer's character Fu Manchu first appears in the first story of The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu in English pulp magazine The Story-Teller.
November
November 5 – 1912 United States presidential election: New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson beats former president Theodore Roosevelt and incumbent president William Howard Taft. November 11 – William Lawrence Bragg presents his derivation of Bragg's law for the angles for coherent and incoherent scattering from a crystal lattice, creating the field of x-ray crystallography, and making possible the eventual imaging of the double helix of DNA.To the Cambridge Philosophical Society. November 28 – Albania declares independence from the Ottoman Empire.
December
December 3 – Bulgaria, Montenegro, and Serbia (the Balkan League, but not Greece) sign an armistice with the Ottoman Empire at Çatalca, temporarily halting the First Balkan War after 2 months. (The armistice will expire on February 3, 1913, and hostilities will resume.) December 18 – Piltdown Man, thought to be the fossilized skull of a hitherto unknown form of early human, is presented to the Geological Society of London (it is revealed to be a hoax in 1953). December 24 – Merck files patent applications in Germany for synthesis of the entactogenic drug MDMA (Ecstasy), developed by Anton Köllisch.
Date unknown
Casimir Funk identifies vitamins. The Scoville Unit (used to measure the heat of peppers) is devised and tested by Wilbur Scoville. Wilfrid Voynich discovers the eponymous manuscript in the Villa Mondragone. Ludwig von Mises publishes his foundational The Theory of Money and Credit. Articulated trams are invented and first used by the Boston Elevated Railway.
Births January
January 1 Kim Philby, British spy (d. 1988) Salah al-Din al-Bitar, Syrian politician, 2-time Prime Minister of Syria (d. 1980) Khertek Anchimaa-Toka, Soviet Tuvan politician, Chairwoman of Tuva (d. 2008) Abdul Salam Sabrah, 3-time Prime Minister of the Yemen Arab Republic (d. 2012) January 6 Jacques Ellul, French philosopher (d. 1994) Danny Thomas, American actor, comedian (d. 1991) January 7 Charles Addams, American cartoonist (d. 1988) Ivan Yakubovsky, Marshal of the Soviet Union (d. 1976) January 8 – José Ferrer, Puerto Rican actor (d. 1992) January 10 – Maria Mandl, Austrian concentration camp guard and war criminal (d. 1948) January 11 – Abdul Haq Akorwi, Pakistani Islamic scholar (d. 1988) January 15 – Michel Debré, 99th Prime Minister of France (d. 1996) January 19 – Leonid Kantorovich, Russian economist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1986) January 21 – Konrad Emil Bloch, German-born American biochemist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (d. 2000) January 27 – Arne Næss, Norwegian philosopher (d. 2009) January 28 – Jackson Pollock, American painter (d. 1956) January 30 Werner Hartmann, German physicist (d. 1988) Barbara W. Tuchman, American historian (d. 1989) Francis Schaeffer, American Evangelical theologian, philosopher, and Presbyterian pastor (d. 1984) January 31 – Camilo Ponce Enríquez, 30th President of Ecuador (d. 1976)
February
February 2 – Millvina Dean, youngest passenger and last survivor of the Sinking of the RMS Titanic (d. 2009) February 3 – Lynn Patrick, Canadian ice hockey player, executive (d. 1980) February 4 Erich Leinsdorf, Austrian conductor (d. 1993) Byron Nelson, American golfer (d. 2006) February 6 – Eva Braun, Adolf Hitler's wife (d. 1945) February 7 – Roberta McCain, American socialite and oil heiress; mother of U.S. Senator John McCain (d. 2020) February 14 – Juan Pujol García, Spanish double agent (d. 1988) February 20 – Pierre Boulle, French author (d. 1994) February 27 – Lawrence Durrell, British writer (d. 1990) February 28 – Prince Bertil, Duke of Halland, Swedish prince (d. 1997) February 29 – Kamil Tolon, Turkish industrialist and inventor (d. 1978)
March
March 1 – Boris Chertok, Polish-born Russian rocket designer (d. 2011) March 3 – Wally Cassell, Italian-born American actor (d. 2015) March 4