Dashed left edge = started before May 1946 ·
Dashed right edge = ongoing beyond May 1946
Events in May 1946 8
1946Speaks out at Lincoln UniversityRacism is a disease of white peopleEinstein travelled to the historically Black university in Pennsylvania to receive an honorary degree and lecture on relativity, calling segregation a disease he did not intend to be quiet about. He had joined the NAACP and corresponded with W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson. American newspapers barely covered the visit.
19461946 World Snooker ChampionshipPost-War ReturnThe final match of Joe Davis before his retirement from the WC. Winner: Joe Davis; Runner-up: Horace Lindrum. Score: 78–67.
1946Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo founded in a bombed-out department storeMasaru Ibuka, 38, and Akio Morita, 25, found Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo (Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation) on 7 May 1946 in a bombed-out department store in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, with 20 employees and 190,000 yen in capital. Japan is still under American occupation; the country is devastated. Their founding prospectus reads: 'We shall welcome technical difficulties and focus on highly sophisticated technical products.' The two men are a perfect partnership — Ibuka the brilliant engineer, Morita the visionary salesman.
1946 – 2026Birute Galdikas (1946-2026)Died 24 March 2026, aged 79Primatologist and conservationist whose study of Bornean orangutans is the longest continuous investigation of any wild mammal by a single researcher.
1946 – 2005George BestThe Fifth BeatleManchester United legend and 1968 Ballon d'Or winner; known for his immense dribbling skill.
1946 – 1951Chairs the atomic scientistsThe Emergency Committee and world governmentEinstein led the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, formed to warn the public that the bomb had changed everything except our ways of thinking. He argued for international control of nuclear weapons through a world authority. The campaign raised money and alarm but little policy.
1946 – presentUrsula HegiGerman-American NovelistGerman-born American novelist whose work explored silence, guilt and identity in Nazi-era and postwar Germany. Born in Dusseldorf just over a year after the war ended, she grew up surrounded by the physical evidence of destruction but in a society that refused to speak about what had happened. She immigrated to the United States at 18 and drew on her conflicted heritage to write novels including the bestselling Stones from the River, centred on Trudi Montag, a dwarf navigating life in a small German town during the rise of the Third Reich.
1946Ursula Hegi born in DusseldorfBorn Ursula Koch in Dusseldorf, in the British occupation zone of Germany, just over a year after the end of World War II. Her father Heinrich had served as a soldier on the Eastern Front.