In the year 1911...
- In a nearly bloodless coup, a coalition of revolutionary groups rallying around Sun Yat-Sen to overthrow the Qing Dynasty and establish the Republic of China.
- Flooding of China's Yangzi River kills more than 100,000 people.
- Italy launches Italo-Turkish War by invading Libya, which it will succeed in conquering from the Ottoman Empire the following year.
- The Mona Lisa is stolen by Louvre employee Vincenzo Peruggia (who simply walks out the door with the painting under his coat) at the behest of con man Eduardo de Valfierno, who hopes to make money selling forgeries of the painting as the stolen original.
- 145 people – mostly young women immigrants – are killed in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory in New York City, leading to the establishment of new fire and building codes across the nation.
- The US Supreme Court finds the Standard Oil Company in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act and orders its breakup into 34 new companies, including Exxon, Mobil, Amoco, Chevron, Arco, and Conoco.
- English physicist Ernest Rutherford deduces the existence of atomic nuclei from the deflection of particles in what is now known simply as the “Rutherford Experiment”.
- Dutch physicist Kamerlingh Onnes discovers superconductivity.
- Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen becomes the first to reach the South Pole.
- Yale historian Hiram Bingham rediscovers Machu Picchu.
- Ishi, the last Native American still living as a hunter-gatherer, wanders out of the forest near Oroville, California following the murder of his family by Indian Hunters.
- Monarch, the last remaining California Grizzly Bear, dies in captivity in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.
- Eugene Ely becomes the first man to land an airplane on a ship when he lands on a specially constructed platform on the armored cruiser USS Philadelphia.
- Glenn Curtiss invents the aileron, which helps him conduct the first successful flight of a seaplane.
- Ray Harroun wins the inaugural running of the Indianapolis 500 with an average speed of 74.59 mph.
- Irving Berlin pens “Alexander's Ragtime Band”.
These people were born in 1911:
These people died in 1911:
1910 - 1911 - 1912