Company, allowing messages to be sent at the speed of light at the unprecedented distance of more than . Using shortwave radio, messages could be sent by telegraph between the two locations. Saturday, April 9, 1927 Li Dazhao, co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party, was arrested in Beijing after Chinese troops invaded the embassy of the Soviet Union. Li was charged with espionage and convicted and executed less than three weeks later. Sacco and Vanzetti case: Ferdinando Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were sentenced to death by Judge Webster Thayer after a controversial conviction for murder. The two men were executed on August 23. Led by Nat Holman, the Brooklyn Celtics won the U.S. professional basketball championship, defeating the Cleveland Rosenblums, 35–32, for a three-game sweep of the American Basketball League series. The SS Carl D. Bradley was launched onto Lake Erie at Lorain, Ohio. At , she was the largest vessel to sail on the U.S. Great Lakes at that time in history. The ship would sink in Lake Michigan on November 18, 1958. All but two of her crew of 35, most of whom were from the tiny northern Michigan town of Rogers City, would perish. Sunday, April 10, 1927 Ballet Mécanique, composed by George Antheil, was given its American premiere at Carnegie Hall, and booed and hissed by the crowd. Combining classical music with the sounds of machinery (including factory whistles, elevated trains, canning machinery, and airplanes), but no dancers, the ballet had debuted in Paris on June 19, 1926, and was not performed again for more than sixty years. Born: Marshall Warren Nirenberg, American geneticist and 1968 Nobel Prize laureate; in New York City (d. 2010) Monday, April 11, 1927 The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland officially ceased to exist at the end of the day, as the Royal and Parliamentary Titles Act 1927 took effect at midnight. In an acknowledgment of the separate Irish Free State, the nation was renamed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Tuesday, April 12, 1927 The Shanghai Massacre that would ultimately claim the lives of 4,000 leftists, began a few weeks after Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang Army had taken control of Shanghai with the aid of Communist workers in the city. Chiang turned against his allies and gave the order for the massacre of members of party and its sympathizers. At 3:00 in the morning, gangleader Du