Timeline April 1909

Events in April 1909 4

• 1909 Peary claims the North Pole Still disputed Robert Peary announces that he reached the pole with Matthew Henson and four Inuit companions — Ootah, Egingwah, Seegloo and Ooqueah. Frederick Cook claims to have got there a year earlier, and the resulting public row damages both men. Peary's navigation records and the speeds he reported over the final march have never fully satisfied later analysts, and the first undisputed surface journey is Ralph Plaisted's in 1968. Henson, who was Black and spoke Inuktitut better than Peary, was not publicly honoured for another forty-five years.
• 1909 Ottoman countercoup and deposition of Abdulhamid II Conservative uprising crushed, sultan removed from power On 13 April 1909 conservative soldiers and religious students revolted in Istanbul against the Young Turk government, an episode known as the 31 March Incident. Loyalist troops from Salonica suppressed the rising, and on 27 April 1909 the parliament deposed Sultan Abdulhamid II, replacing him with his brother Mehmed V. The event cemented the Committee of Union and Progress's control over the Ottoman Empire.
• 1909 Adana massacre Mass killing of Armenians in Ottoman Cilicia Beginning on 14 April 1909, mobs and irregular troops killed an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Armenians and Assyrians in and around Adana in the Ottoman Empire. The violence erupted amid political instability following the Young Turk countercoup and continued for roughly two weeks. It is regarded as a major precursor to the Armenian Genocide of 1915.
• 1909 – 2012 Rita Levi-Montalcini Nobel Neurologist Awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for her discovery of nerve growth factor.