As WWI ended in 1918, Czechoslovakia emerged from the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a newly created sovereign state in the heart of Europe. Its democratically elected President Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, who took his American wife’s last name Garrigue, led its people into a prosperous and progressive era. Czechoslovakia even granted women’s suffrage before the United States! The 1920s was known as being the “machine age” and this modern mechanical progress was reflected in Czechoslovakia, which was one of the world's ten most industrialized states in the interwar period.