1876: Information and Much More from Answers.com
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Spain's Carlist civil war ends in February (see 1874). General Arsenio Martínez Campos has signed agreements protecting the lives of prisoners and of the wounded, offering humane terms to the insurgents; a new constitution written by the prime minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, 48, restores the Bourbon monarchy.
Russia annexes the Central Asian khanate of Kokand February 19 (see 1873). Troops under the command of General Konstantin P. Kaufmann occupied the khanate northeast of Bukhara last year with help from his brilliant aide Mikhail Dmitryevich Skobelev, now 32, and renames it province of Fergana, promoting Skobolev to major general and making him Fergana's first Russian governor general. But Britain fears encroachment on her interests in Afghanistan, London protests Russian expansion in Turkistan, Aleksandr II rejects Kaufmann's plans for further expansion, and the general turns his attention to land reform and other reforms as he devotes his efforts to becoming an able administrator.
A Bulgarian insurrection begins in May with encouragement from the Russian minister to Constantinople Nikolai, Graf Ignatiev. Turkish irregulars are sent in to quell the uprising. The Ottoman sultan Abdul Aziz dismisses his highly unpopular grand vizier Mahmud Nedim, whose policy has been heavily influenced by advice from Graf Ignatiev; to mollify public opinion, the sultan replaces Nedim with the former grand vizier Midhat, but is himself deposed May 29 at age 46 after a 15-year reign and dies at Constantinople 4 days later, probably by his own hand. His 35-year-old nephew has been imprisoned for 15 years but reigns for 3 months as Murad V before being declared insane. Murad's 33-year-old brother then becomes sultan and will reign until 1909 as Abdul Hamid II.
Russian anarchist Mikhail A. Bakunin dies at Bern, Switzerland, July 1 at age 62. An opponent of Karl Marx, he has maintained that the theoretical "withering away of the state" under communism was essential as a means toward the ultimate goal of anarchism.
Serbia declares war on the Ottoman Empire June 30, again with encouragement from Graf Ignatiev; Montenegro follows suit July 2, but the Serbs are completely defeated at Alexinatz September 1, and Turkish forces slaughter Bulgarians by the thousands to suppress their insurrection, which is ended in September. "The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East" by former British prime minister William E. Gladstone appears September 6; the pamphlet arouses Britons against the Turks as Russia prepares for war against the Serene Port (Constantinople) (see 1877).
A Turkish constitution proclaimed December 23 by the grand vizier Midhat, now 54, declares the indivisibility of the Ottoman Empire and provides for parliamentary government based on representation of all groups in society (but see 1877).
Japan recognizes Korean independence from China February 26 in the Treaty of Kanghwa, which opens three Korean ports to Japanese trade, permits Japan to have a resident at Seoul, and draws no protest from China (see 1874). A Japanese envoy has held protracted discussions with Korean officials at Pusan, and Japanese warships have exchanged gunfire with a Korean island fort in Kanghwa Bay, but Korea finally agrees to open herself to the West for the first time in her history, and foreign powers will soon vie for position in gaining dominance on the peninsula. Korea remains a Chinese vassal state, and although the Chinese insist that Korea is independent they try to increase their influence and open the country even further to the United States, efforts that run into xenophobic opposition from Koreans (see 1894; anti-Japanese demonstrations, 1882).
The new British viceroy for India arrives at Bombay (Mumbai) April 7. Robert Lytton, 45-year-old son of the late novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, is accompanied by his wife, Edith (née Liddell), 34, who is unsettled by the immorality she finds among colonial bureaucrats and their memsahibs (see 1877). The Royal Titles Bill passed by Parliament in April over the protests of former prime minister William E. Gladstone makes Queen Victoria Empress of India. The queen elevates Prime Minister Disraeli to the peerage in August, making him earl of Beaconsfield.
The Indian Association founded in Bengal pursues the cause of self-government. Calling the British Indian Association a reactionary tool of industrialists and landlords, founders Surendranath Banerjea and Ananda Mohan Bose attract a following among young professionals and intellectuals, and although their organization will spread beyond Bengal it will remain strongly Bengali in spirit.
Tasmania's four-foot-three Aborigine queen Trucanini dies at Hobart May 11 in her 60s. She saw white men stab her mother to death as a child, was raped by white convicts at age 16, and then sold herself for food at work camps until she met a white builder, who with her help recorded the customs of her tribe, whose members have now been almost entirely wiped out. Regarded by settlers as little more than pests who had to be killed or driven out, the Aborigines fought back in a low-grade guerrilla war, but their spears and other traditional weapons were no match for the settlers' guns and horses.
Japanese government official Issei Maebara leads dissident Choshu samurai against the new Meiji regime in October, announcing that he intends to "sweep traitors from the side of the emperor" (see 1874). Captured by government troops at his native Nagi in Nagato prefecture, he is executed December 3 at age 42.
Ethiopian forces defeat Egyptian troops at Gura, but the Egyptians gain a crushing victory in February as the war that began last year continues.
Spain dispatches General Arsenio Martínez Campos to crush the Cuban rebellion that began in 1868 (see 1874). The Cuban provisional government made General Tomás Estrada Palma, now 41, its president last year, but the Spaniards will capture him next year and Martínez Campos will employ humane means of ending the conflict (see 1878).
Former Mexican president Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna dies at Mexico City June 21 at age 82, blind and impoverished. General Porfirio Díaz, now 46, overthrows President Lerdo de Tejada and begins to restore order in a program that will stabilize the country. A former muleteer from the state of Oaxaca, Díaz will attract foreign capital, develop industry, build railways, promote public works, liberate Mexico City from its perennial floods, and increase commerce, albeit at the expense of poor farmers (campesinos), who will be subjected to brutal treatment. Lerdo de Tejada goes into exile.
The Dominican Republic's founding father Juan Pablo Duarte dies in exile at Caracas July 15 at age 63.
The chairman of a committee on expenditures in the U.S. War Department reports to the House of Representatives March 2 that he has found "unquestioned evidence of the malfeasance in office" of Secretary of War William W. Belknap, who resigns before the Senate votes unanimously to impeach him. Now 46, Belknap is a Newburgh, New York-born Princeton graduate who was practicing law at Keokuk, Iowa, when the Civil War began in 1861; he distinguished himself in combat, won promotion to brigadier general July 30, 1864, and was named secretary of war by President Grant in 1869. He is charged with having received $24,450 since 1870 for appointing one John S. Evans to the post-tradership at Fort Sill, 35 senators vote "guilty," 22 say Belknap's resignation removed him from the Senate's jurisdiction, and his defenders say his wife may have made the arrangement and received the money without his knowledge, but the scandal further blackens the reputation of the Grant administration.
Secretary of the Treasury John H. Bristow resigns June 3 after 2 years in office and retires from public life. A conference in May at New York's Fifth Avenue Hotel has regarded him favorably as presidential timber, and his adversaries in the old Whiskey Ring have persuaded President Grant that Bristow was using his office to wangle the nomination. His former Louisville law partner John H. Harlan nominates Bristow at the party's convention in June at Cincinnati, but the party selects Ohio governor Rutherford B. (Birchard) Hayes, 54, and Bristow will soon move to New York.
Colorado enters the Union August 1 as the 38th state.
Former Confederate Army general Braxton Bragg dies at Galveston, Texas, September 27 at age 59.
The U.S. presidential election in November ends in a dispute when neither New York governor Samuel J. (Jones) Tilden, 62, nor Rutherford B. Hayes wins the necessary 185 electoral votes: Democrat Tilden has won the popular vote by at least 200,000 votes, partly because Southern Democrats have used physical intimidation and outright bribery to discourage blacks from voting (they have heretofore given overwhelming support to Republicans because Lincoln freed the slaves), although fraud is widespread on both sides; two sets of returns leave 20 electoral votes from Florida, Louisiana, Oregon, and South Carolina in dispute, and there is no constitutional provision to cover the situation (see 1877).
Lawyer Reverdy Johnson wins acquittal in the landmark case of U.S. v. Cruikshank but dies at Annapolis, Maryland, February 10 at age 79. The decision establishes a narrow construction of an 1870 civil-rights enforcement act.
The Battle of the Little Big Horn June 25 ends in the massacre of a 264-man U.S. Seventh Cavalry force under Lieut. Col. George Armstrong Custer, 37, at the hands of Lakota Sioux chief Sitting Bull (Tatanka-Iyotanka), now 45, who has the help of tribesmen under the command of chieftains Gall and Crazy Horse (see Deadwood Gulch, 1875). The Sioux have been angered by the slaughter of buffalo (bison) in Montana Territory by the advancing whites in the Black Hills gold rush, although lack of forage, cattle-borne disease, and the Sioux themselves have also played major roles in the demise of the bison. Custer has engaged some Crow scouts and set out to defeat the Sioux, force any who survive onto the reservation, and take their sacred Black Hills in violation of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, but Sitting Bull escapes to Canada (see 1878). General Alfred H. Terry, now 48, rescues Custer's subordinates Marcus A. Reno and Frederick W. Benteen (see 1877; Wounded Knee, 1890).
Chiricahua Apache in Arizona Territory are moved to a reservation occupied earlier by western Apache; the Chiricahua leader Geronimo leads a band of his warriors into Mexico, beginning a 10-year reign of terror against white settlers in the Southwest (see Cochise, 1872). Now 47, Geronimo (Jerome) has been given his name by the Mexicans whom he raided in retaliation for the 1858 killing of his family; his real name is Goyathlay (see 1877).
A riot at Hamburg, South Carolina, July 8 results in a massacre of black militiamen and begins a race war. The militiamen have staged a 4th of July parade through the mostly black town; white supremacist Benjamin R. (Ryan) Tillman, 29, heads the red-shirted Sweetwater Sabre Club, a paramilitary unit in Edgefield County whose aim is to terrorize Republican officeholders and restore white rule in the state; he vows to teach the blacks a lesson, and he will boast about the incident for years as he uses it to gain the governorship (see "Pitchfork Ben," 1894).
The new Turkish constitution provides for freedom of conscience, liberty of the individual, equality of taxation, and freedom of the press and education, but the new sultan will let it lapse (see religion, 1856).
The Danish Red Cross is founded at Copenhagen.
The International Association for the Exploration and Civilization of Africa is founded under the auspices of the Belgian king Leopold II.
Explorer Johannes Rebmann dies at Korntal, near Stuttgart, October 4 at age 56, having paved the way for African explorations by Britons; former explorer-trapper-guide Joseph Reddeford Walker dies in California's Contra Costa County October 27 at age 77.
The Reichsbank that opens in January will play a major role in German economic development.
Deadwood Gulch in the Black Hills of Dakota Territory is divided in January according to established mining laws (see 1875). Prospectors stake claims 300 feet in length from rimrock to rimrock across the gulch along Deadwood Creek, and while placer miners average $10 per day two claims yield about $20,000 in less than 3 months. Homestake Mining Company is founded at Lead (pronounced Leed, meaning "lode") in the Black Hills. George Hearst and Kentucky-born San Francisco lawyer James Ben Ali Haggin, 48, have acquired the lode found in April by the Manuel brothers, and it will be the largest U.S. producer (see Hearst, 1859).
The Grange departs from its apolitical stance and begins to lobby for U.S. tax law revision, including an end to tax exemption for railroad properties (see agriculture, 1873). The Grange also demands lower interest rates, better schools, cheap textbooks, and cheaper bread, coal, and clothing.
The U.S. Centennial Exposition opened by President Grant at Philadelphia's Fairmount Park May 10 occupies 13 acres, is called officially the "International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures and Products of the Son and Mine," and runs for 6 months; 37 foreign nations and 26 states are represented along with innumerable private exhibitors.
Merchant A. T. Stewart dies at New York April 10 at age 72.
The Paris department store Au Bon Marché moves into a new building on the Left Bank with skylighted interior courts designed by architect Louis-Auguste Boileau and engineer Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel (see 1852; 1893).
All exhibits in Machinery Hall at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia are powered by a great 160-horsepower engine built by Corliss Steam Engine Company of Providence, Rhode Island, started in 1856 by inventor George H. Corliss of 1851 London Great Exhibition fame.
Russian electrical engineer Pavel N. (Nikolayevich) Yablochkov, 29, completes work at Paris late in the year on what will become known as the Yablochkov candle and be the first arc-lamp put into wide practical use for street lighting. It consists of two parallel carbon rods separated by a nonconducting clay partition that gradually vaporize as the carbons burn away (see Brush, 1879).
Parliament adopts a Merchant Shipping Act designed to prevent overloading of ships and use of unseaworthy vessels after a campaign by M. P. Samuel Plimsoll, 52. A retired London coal merchant, Plimsoll is known as "the Sailors' Friend" on the strength of his 1872 book Our Seamen, and his efforts in behalf of seamen will be commemorated in the Plimsoll line on ships' hulls.
Lawyer George Selden of Rochester attends the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia with a partner to demonstrate their patented machine for shaving and finishing barrel hoops (see 1873). Selden studies the Brayton engine, developed at Boston by an Englishman, and notes that while the other engines exhibited operate on illuminating gas the Brayton engine employs crude petroleum fuel. It weighs 1,160 pounds and develops only 1.4 horsepower, but Selden sees the possibility of a lighter, more efficiently designed engine (see 1879).
Nikolaus A. Otto invents a four-cycle gasoline engine far more advanced than his 1866 engine (see Clerk, 1881; Benz, 1885).
Bicycle pioneer James K. Starley at Coventry introduces a wheel with tangent-tension wire spokes that represents an improvement over the radial-laced wheel designed by Eugene Meyer in 1869 (see Starley, 1874). Starley's design reduces the sideways stress on the spokes, which connect to the hub at a tangent. This feature helps make Starley's Ariel bicycle the standard. He introduces the Coventry tricycle and will improve it next year with a chain drive that employs a differential gear (see Lawson, 1874; safety bicyle, 1885).
The Train Bleu makes its first run, connecting Calais and Rome by way of Nice three times per week with an all-sleeper train organized by the 4-year-old Compagnie International des Wagons-Lits et des Grands Express Européens. Founder Georges Nagelmackers has now signed up 21 nations, he owns 58 sleeping cars, and his new company issues stock to the public to raise capital of 4 million Belgian francs. But he must contend with the fact that most European railroads are operated by state monopolies and have customs tariffs at their borders. Pulled by a boiler engine, its cars lighted by oil lamps and heated by briquettes, his Train Bleu will connect Paris with the Riviera beginning in 1883, making the 700-mile run to Monte Carlo three times per week by way of Dijon, Lyons, Marseilles, and Toulon (see Orient Express, 1883).
The Southern Pacific reaches Los Angeles September 6 to give that city a route to the East and link it with San Francisco, but high freight rates and water shortages will retard development of Los Angeles, whose population will not exceed 10,000 for another few years. The Southern Pacific will extend eastward along the 32nd parallel to Shreveport, Louisiana, via El Paso, Texas.
The St. Louis and San Francisco (Frisco Line) founded September 11 takes over most of the Atlantic & Pacific Railroad lines through Indian Territory.
The first carload of California fruit reaches the Mississippi Valley, but the freight rate is too steep for most growers (see Columbian Exposition, 1893).
Canada's Intercolonial Railroad opens to link Ontario with the Maritime Provinces.
A train wreck December 29 kills 83 at Ashtabula, Ohio, as a 13-year-old bridge on Cornelius Vanderbilt's Lake Shore & Michigan Southern gives way during a storm off Lake Erie and 10 cars of the Pacific Express pulled by two locomotives plunge into a creek 150 feet below, bursting into flames. The road's president fired a subordinate engineer in 1863 when he protested construction of the Howe truss bridge built by the road's chief engineer.
The Winchester M1876 is more powerful than the M1873, which cannot bring down a bison with just one or two shots. The new lever-action repeater weapon retains the toggle joint of earlier Winchesters. It has a larger frame and larger capacity, but most plains hunters prefer guns that can fire longer .45-70-caliber cartridges.
Henry A. Sherwin, 34, of Cleveland's 6-year-old Sherwin-Williams Company pioneers prepared, ready-to-apply paint by developing a machine that grinds good-bodied pigments so finely and evenly that they will suspend in linseed oil. Sherwin-Williams will go on to make varnishes and then enamels (pigments suspended in varnish).
The stillson wrench is patented by Somerville, Massachusetts, inventor Daniel C. Stillson, who has whittled a wooden model of his pipe or screw wrench.
Inventor-manufacturer Joseph R. Brown dies at Isle of Shoals, New Hampshire, July 23 at age 66, having made significant advances in the areas of fine measurement and machine-tool production. His universal grinding machine will be patented next year and come into wide use, increasing accuracy and eliminating waste by enabling machinists to harden articles before grinding them.
"On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances" by New Haven-born Yale professor of mathematical physics J. (Josiah) Willard Gibbs, 37, extends understanding of thermodynamics (see Hess, 1840). Gibbs will follow up with another paper in 1878 as he lays the theoretical groundwork for the science of physical chemistry, but the importance of his work will not be recognized for years (see Le Chatelier, 1888).
Experimental physicist John Tyndall at London confirms Louis Pasteur's 1860 findings that refute the theory of spontaneous generation. He devises an apparatus that enables him to demonstrate that air can carry particulate matter, that when illuminated under special conditions such matter reflects light, and that when pure air is introduced into media capable of supporting the growth of microorganisms no such organisms are produced.
Embryologist Karl Ernst von Baer dies at Dorpat, Estonia, November 28 at age 84, having said in recent years that all new and truly important ideas must pass through three stages: first, dismissed as nonsense, then rejected as against religion, and finally acknowledged as true (with initial opponents claiming that they knew it all along).
On Cell Formation and Cell Division (Uber Zelbildung und Zellthelung) by Warsaw-born German plant cytologist Eduard A. (Adolf) Strasburger, 32, at the University of Jena sets forth the basic principles of what later will be called mitosis (nuclear division of cells) (see Virchow, Nägeli, 1858; Flemming, 1879)
Swiss surgeon Emil (Theodor) Kocher, 35, at the University of Berne excises the thyroid gland to treat a patient with goiter, becoming the first to do so. Adopting the principles of complete asepsis introduced by Joseph Lister, Kocher will perform the thyroid-removal procedure some 5,000 times in the next 36 years, reducing the mortality rate in such surgery from 18 percent to less than 0.5 percent.
The Function of the Brain by Aberdeen-born neurologist David Ferrier, 33, reports studies on dogs and primates that will provide the basis for modern cerebral surgery. Ferrier has accurately located the parts of the brain related to specific problems, such as deafness. He comes under attack from anti-vivisectionists, will be sued for violating a new Cruelty to Animals law adopted by Parliament, but will win acquittal on grounds that while he was not licensed under the law to perform surgery on his animal subjects the man who actually did the procedures was his assistant, who was so licensed.
Emigré German physician Emil Noeggerath angers the newly-formed American Gynecological Society by insisting that 90 percent of sterile women suffer from gonorrhea contracted from husbands who in many cases have been treated for the disease and been pronounced cured. Latent gonorrhea in men, he says, explains why so many healthy young women begin to suffer from "female complaints" shortly after marriage and why so many remain childless (see 1879).
A label for "Mrs. Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound" is patented by Lynn, Massachusetts, housewife Lydia Estes Pinkham, 57, whose husband, Isaac, lost all his money in the 1873 financial panic. Mrs. Pinkham has for more than a decade been buying unicorn root, life root, black cohosh, pleurisy root, and fenugreek seed from local suppliers, macerating them in her kitchen, and suspending them in 18 to 19 percent alcohol (although she and her children belong to the local temperance society) to create a medicine for "woman's weakness" and related ills. She insists that at the recommended dosage of three spoonfuls a day her vegetable compound is not an intoxicating beverage. Doctors who dose patients indiscriminately with "mineral" medicines such as calomel (a cathartic which contains mercury and sometimes produces mercury poisoning) have aroused distrust and made self-dosage with "botanical" folk remedies widely popular. Pinkham's bright blue paper label claims that her Vegetable Compound is a sure cure for "Prolapsis Uteri, or falling of the Womb, and all Female Weaknesses, including Leucorrhea, painful menstruation, inflammation and ulceration of the womb, irregularities, floodings, etc." She will continue to brew the nostrum in her own kitchen and write her own homely advertising until her death in 1883 (see 1879).
Obstetrician Walter Channing dies at Brookline, Massachsetts, July 27 at age 90.
A November 8 act of Parliament permits registration of women medical practitioners in Britain.
Seventh Day Adventist surgeon John Harvey Kellogg, 24, assumes management of the Western Health Reform Institute founded at Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1866. A champion of vegetarianism (which this year is embraced by Russian novelist Count Leo Tolstoy), Kellogg will ask audiences, "How can you eat anything that looks out of eyes?" and he will develop vegetarian foods including a form of peanut butter and scores of dried cereals (see food, 1877).
Papal secretary of state Giacomo Antonelli dies at Rome's Vatican City November 6 at age 70, having amassed a personal fortune and gained notoriety for rumored scandals in his personal life.
Bristol University (the University of Bristol) has its beginnings in University College, Bristol, and is the first British institution of higher learning to admit women as the same basis as men.
Fisk University dedicates its new campus at Nashville, Tennessee, in January (see 1867). A student choir organized in 1867 has toured the nation since 1871, raising $50,000 for construction of Jubilee Hall, and by the 1890s Fisk's curriculum will include liberal arts, theology, and teacher training as it becomes a major source of teachers for black schools (see McKenzie, 1915).
Educator-social reformer Samuel Gridley Howe dies at his native Boston January 9 at age 74, having founded what became the Perkins School for the Blind; kindergarten pioneer Margarethe Schurz dies in childbirth at Washington, D.C., March 15 at age 43.
Johns Hopkins University is founded at Baltimore with a bequest from the late Baltimore merchant Johns Hopkins, who died 3 years ago at age 78, leaving an estate of $7 million after using his own money and reputation to guarantee the stability of investments held by local business firms and thus save Baltimore single-handedly from the financial collapse that affected New York and other cities. The university engages former Yale professor Daniel Coit Gilman, 44, as president and Massachusetts-born historian Herbert Baxter Adams, 26, who has just received his Ph.D. summa cum laude at Heidelberg, as professor of American and institutional history (see hospital and medical school, 1893).
The U.S. Coast Guard Academy founded by act of Congress will establish a campus just north of New London, Conn.
The University of Texas is founded at Austin.
"Mr. Watson, come here. I want you," says Alexander Graham Bell March 10 (or so it will later be claimed; many will question the story) in the first complete sentence to be transmitted by voice over wire (see 1875). Bell has filed for a patent February 14 with blueprints supplied by Lewis Latimer and beaten his rival Elisha Gray by a few hours; he has improved his telephone, been granted a patent on his 29th birthday March 3 (Patent No. 174,465 for "improvements in telegraphy" will often be called the most valuable patent ever issued), and uses the instrument at 5 Exeter Place, Boston, to speak with his assistant Thomas A. Watson at what later will be computed as 2,000 "bits" per second (the telegraph of 1844 transmits five bits per second). Elisha Gray of the 4-year-old Western Electric Company will challenge the patent; his lawyers will insist that although Gray filed for a patent a few hours after Bell, his design worked whereas Bell's did not. Hundreds of others will dispute Bell's claim, but the courts will uphold it, and Western Electric will manufacture the Bell telephone (see 1879).
Alexander Graham Bell demonstrates his telephone at the U.S. Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia: the Brazilian emperor Pedro II jumps out of his seat June 25, saying, "I hear, I hear!" Bell's future father-in-law, Gardiner Green Hubbard, 51, promotes the new telephone, which works just as well with Portuguese, French, German, Japanese, or any other language as it does in English; a Boston lawyer whose daughter's deafness led him to help found the Clarke Institution for the Deaf in 1867, Hubbard borrows a telegraph line between Boston and the Cambridge Observatory, attaches a telephone at each end, and in mid-October speaks with Thomas Watson for more than 3 hours in the first sustained telephone conversation (see 1877).
Western Union president William Orton, 49, turns down Gardiner Hubbard's offer to sell the Bell telephone for $100,000, calling it a toy, a "scientific curiosity" that permits users to speak or listen but not both at once. Western Union retains Thomas A. Edison to improve on Bell's telephone; Edison builds a laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, with $40,000 earned from a patented stock ticker (it is the world's first research laboratory) and finds that carbon black makes a perfect transmitter. He develops a carbon transmitter that will make the telephone commercially practicable, and his invention of carbonization will soon find other applications.
Toshiba has its beginnings in Tanaka Seizo-sho (Tanaka Engineering Works) created in Tokyo's Shinbashi section as the first Japanese manufacturer of telegraphic equipment. Founder Hisashige Tanaka, 77, was known in his youth for inventions that included mechanical dolls and a perpetual clock, and after his death in 1881 his Shibaura Seisaku-sho (Shibaura Engineering Works) will become one of Japan's leading manufacturers of heavy electrical equipment (see energy [Hakunetsu-sha], 1890).
The Remington typewriter introduced at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia does not yet have a shift key (see 1874; 1878). Also exhibited are an envelope-making machine and the first stamped envelopes.
Stenotypy begins to facilitate courtroom reporting and make records of legal proceedings more accurate. Constantinopole-born New York teacher and inventor John Celivergos Zachos, 55, patents a "typewriter and phonotypic notation" device with type fixed on 18 shuttle bars, two or more of which may be placed in position simultaneously. The device has a plunger common to all the bars for making impressions, and it permits printing a legible text at a high reporting speed.
Il Corriere della Sera begins publication at Milan March 5. Founded by Neapolitan publicist Eugenio Torelli Viollier in a single room of the Galleria di Milano, it is the first reliable Italian newspaper. Its initial print run is 3,000 copies, it will be printing 100,000 by 1898, and by 1920 it will be printing 400,000 as it grows to be Italy's one national newspaper, but even 90 years after its founding only four Italians in 10 will read any daily paper.
McCall's magazine begins publication in April under the name The Queen. Scottish-born entrepreneur James McCall started McCall Pattern Company in 1870 with a small shop at 543 Broadway, New York, and uses the eight-page pattern and fashion periodical to promote his dress patterns, but it will grow to become a major magazine for women.
"A Classification and Subject Index for Cataloguing and Arranging the Books and Pamphlets of a Library" by Amherst College librarian Melvil Dewey, 25, originates the Dewey decimal system.
Nonfiction: History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century by Cornhill magazine editor Leslie Stephen, 43; Essays in Anglo-Saxon Law by Harvard historian Henry Brooks Adams, 38, who calls the Corliss "dynamo" exhibited at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia the symbol of the age; Robert's Rules of Order by U.S. Army Engineer Corps officer Henry Martyn Robert, 39, who originally wrote the book in his mid-20s when asked to preside over a meeting while supervising construction of Union defenses at Washington, D.C. He has been motivated by this and other experiences in civic and church groups to establish authoritative rules for smooth, democratic procedure in any self-governing organization. Robert will publish a revised and enlarged edition in 1915.
Author Orestes Brownson dies at Detroit April 17 at age 72 and is buried in the crypt of Notre Dame's Sacred Heart Basilica at South Bend, Indiana.
Fiction: Roderick Hudson by New York-born émigré author-critic Henry James, 35, who examines the moral and artistic disintegration of an American in Rome and begins a series of perceptive novels about European and American society; The Prime Minister by Anthony Trollope; Daniel Deronda by George Eliot, whose longtime companion George Henry Lewes will die at the couple's house near Regent's Park, London, at the end of November 1878. Her protagonist is a Jew, but Eliot has written that God is "inconceivable," immortality "impossible," and duty nevertheless "peremptory and absolute"; Marthe by French novelist Joris Karl Huysmans, 28.
Novelist George Sand dies on her estate at Nohant June 8 at age 71.
Poetry: The Afternoon of a Faun (L'Après midi d'un Faune) by poet-schoolteacher Stéphane Mallarmé.
Poet-novelist Louise Colet dies at Paris March 9 at age 65.
Juvenile: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, whose book has disappointing sales of fewer than 24,000 copies but will endure as his most popular work.
Hans Christian Andersen dies at Copenhagen August 4 at age 70. The last of his 168 stories were published 3 years ago.
The Albert Memorial unveiled by Queen Victoria in London's Hyde Park March 9 contains a gilt statue of the late prince consort by the late Dublin-born sculptor John Henry Foley, who died at Hampstead in August 1874 at age 56 before the statue's parts could be assembled. The 180-foot-tall memorial itself was designed in 1862 by architect Sir George Gilbert Scott, now 64, and opened to the public in 1872 with a frieze of 169 carved figures.
Painting: Flood at Port Marly by Alfred Sisley, who exhibits works at the second Impressionist show that opens at Paris March 30; Au Moulin de la Galette by Pierre-Auguste Renoir; Dans La Prairie by Claude Monet; Balaclava by Elizabeth Thompson; The Spirit of '76 by Ohio painter Archibald Willard, 40, who will produce 14 versions of the canvas that he has painted for the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia. The first will find a permanent home in Abbot Hall at Marblehead, Massachusetts, but the one that Willard will call his "best effort" will be a much larger canvas that will hang in the Cleveland City Hall; Breezing Up and The Cotton Pickers by Winslow Homer.
A building for Philadelphia's 71-year-old Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is completed to designs by Philadelphia-born architect Frank H. (Heyling) Furness, 37.
Theater: Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen 2/24 at Kristiania's (Oslo's) Kristiania Theater, with a "Peer Gynt Suite" by Edvard Grieg; Truth Is Good, but Happiness Is Better (Pravda—khorosho, a schastye luchshe) by Aleksandr Ostrovsky 11/18 at Moscow's Maly Theater; Penthesilea by the late Heinrich von Kleist 4/25 at Berlin's Königslichspielhaus (the one-act 3,000-line tragedy in blank verse has 24 scenes).
Opera: La Giocanda 4/8 at Milan's Teatro alla Scala, with a libretto from the Victor Hugo play Angelo, Le Tyran de Padoue, music by Italian composer Amilcare Ponchielli, 42, who wins acclaim for his "Dance of the Hours" ("Danze delle Ore"); Adelina Patti sings the title role in the first London performance of the 1871 Verdi opera Aïda 6/22 at Covent Garden; The Kiss (Hubicka) 11/7 at Prague, with music by Bedrich Smetana; The Golden Slippers (Vakula the Smith) 11/24 at St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Theater, with music by Petr Ilich Tchaikovsky, libretto from a Gogol story. Now 36, Tchaikovsky receives a letter from Nadezhda von Meck, 45, a rich widow who was married at age 16 and has borne 18 children (11 survive), offering him an annual stipend of 6,000 rubles. This patronage will continue for 14 years, enabling the composer to quit his teaching job at the Moscow Conservatory, which he despises.
The first complete performance of Richard Wagner's operatic Ring cycle opens the Festspielhaus that Wagner has built at Bayreuth. It has taken 26 years to write Der Ring des Nibelungen, the composer has designed the Festpielhaus himself; its acoustics are superb, and it pioneers ideas such as having all seats face the stage rather than in a horseshoe arrangement and lowering the lights before the start of a performance. Wagner's Bayreuth Festival begins August 13, and Siegfried is performed August 16, Die Götterdämmerung (The Twilight of the Gods) August 17. In the audience are the kaiser, his nephew Ludwig II of Bavaria, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and prominent composers.
The Goodspeed Opera House opens at East Haddam, Conn.
Ballet: From Siberia to Moscow (Fra Siberien til Moskow) 11/29 at Copenhagen's Royal Danish Theater, with choreography by August Bournonville, now 71 (his final work), music by C. C. Moller.
First performances: Symphony No. 1 in C minor by Johannes Brahms 11/4 at Karlsruhe; Marche Slav by Petr Ilich Tchaikovsky 11/17 at Moscow.
Popular songs: "I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen" by U.S. songwriter Thomas P. Westendorf, 28; "Grandfather's Clock" by Henry Clay Work: "But it stopped, short—never to go again—when the old man died."
Hymns: "What a Friend We Have in Jesus" by Pennsylvania-born evangelist and hymn writer Ira D. (David) Sankey, 36, who has been touring since 1870 with East Northfield, Massachusetts-born missionary-evangelist Dwight Lyman Moody, 39, lyrics by Horatius Bonar; "The Ninety and Nine" by Ira D. Sankey, lyrics by E. C. Clephane; "Trusting Jesus, That Is All" by Ira D. Sankey, lyrics by E. P. Stites.
A player piano demonstrated at St. Louis by Scottish-born inventor John McTammany, 31, produces music mechanically from perforated paper rolls. Musical instruments owned by England's Henry VIII at his death in 1547 included "an instrument that goethe with a whele without playing upon," but the player piano is different. McTammany got his idea while repairing a music box during convalescence from serious injuries sustained in the Civil War; he will obtain a patent in 1881 but will lose control of his player piano manufacturing company.
C. G. Conn & Company Ltd. has its beginnings in the Dupont-Conn Company established at Elkhart, Indiana by upstate New York-born cornetist Charles Gerard Conn, 32, who served in the Civil War, has been running a small grocery and bakery business while making rubber stamps and doing some silver plating on the side, suffered a split lip in a brawl 3 years ago that prevented him from playing in the town band, devised a rubber-rim mouthpiece to solve the problem, began turning them out on a lathe improvised from an old sewing machine, and has obtained U.S. and foreign patents. He has hired some local workmen to help him in his 20-foot-square shop and now brings over some French craftsmen to perform the more intricate tasks needed to make the first American-made cornet. He will buy an old three-story factory next year and by 1880 will have more than 80 employees producing a line of brass band instruments (see saxophone, 1888).
U.S. baseball's National League is founded February 2 (see Cincinnati, 1869; American League, 1901).
Chicago Nationals pitcher Albert G. (Goodwill) Spalding, 26, and his brother each put up $400 to start a sporting goods business that will grow to dominate the American sports scene. Spalding will be manager, then secretary, then president of the Chicago club until 1891; he will edit Spalding's Official Baseball Guide beginning in 1878 (and promote the myth that Abner Doubleday invented the game in 1839; see Hall of Fame, 1936); the Spalding brothers will take their banker brother-in-law William T. Brown into the business, and he will provide capital with which the company will expand in 1885 to become a leading producer of baseball gloves by acquiring A. J. Reach, started by another ballplayer (see 1892).
The first Canadian bid to gain the America's Cup in ocean yacht racing ends in failure as the Countess of Dufferin loses 2 to 0 to the U.S. defender Madeleine.
The London Rowing Club four loses to the Albany Beaverwycks at Philadelphia's Centennial Regatta. The Times of London complains that the Albany crew's amateurs are "working mechanics" and "handicraftsmen" rather than true amateurs who row purely for recreation in leisure hours.
England's 47-year-old Henley Regatta gets its first U.S. entry as Columbia University's four-oared shell competes with British shells. The regatta will continue to be an Anglo-American event and in some years will have more entries from U.S. colleges, prep schools, and clubs than from British.
The U.S. stallion Hambletonian dies at age 27 after having sired hundreds of offspring that will make trotting horses with Hambletonian blood the dominant force in U.S. harness racing for more than a century. Hambletonian was sired by Abdallah, who had been sired by Mambrino, whose sire was the English horse Messenger, brought to America in 1788 at age 8 (see Dan Patch, 1902).
Britons call rubber-soled canvas shoes "Plimsolls" after the Plimsoll line of ships. The gym shoes are costly and problematical.
B.V.D. underwear for men is introduced by Bradley, Voorhees, and Day of New York. Wags will call the one-piece B.V.D.s "Babies' Ventilated Diapers," but B.V.D. will become almost a generic term for underwear.
Jockey International has its beginnings in a hosiery mill opened at St. Joseph, Michigan, by retired minister Samuel T. (Thrall) Cooper, who has learned that lumberjacks in the Midwest wear misshapen socks made from shoddy wool. Starting with six sewing machines, Cooper produces quality socks for men; by the time of his death in 1892, Cooper's company will have a line of premium wool and cotton hosiery for men, boys, and women, which his sons Charles, Henry, and Willis will expand to include underwear as they move the firm to Kenosha, Wisconsin (see 1910).
The Bissell Grand Rapids carpet sweeper patented September 19 by Hartwick, New York-born Grand Rapids, Michigan, china shop proprietor Melville R. (Reuben) Bissell, 32, is the world's first such sweeper (see vacuum cleaner, 1901). Bissell suffers from allergic headaches caused by the dusty straw in which china is packed and has devised a sweeper with a knob that adjusts its brushes to variations in floor surface and with a box to contain the dust (see 1889).
Wild Bill Hickok is murdered August 2 at Deadwood in Dakota Territory at age 39. A one-time scout for the Union Army, James Butler Hickok has served as marshal at Fort Riley, Hays City, and Abilene, Kansas. He is shot from behind by Jack McCall in Deadwood's Saloon No. 10 while sitting at a poker table holding two pairs, aces and eights, that will become known as the "Dead Man's Hand."
Northfield, Minn., citizens foil an attempt by Frank and Jesse James and the Younger brothers to rob a local bank September 7 (see 1872). Two of the gang are killed in a hail of bullets and four are captured, including Cole Younger and his brothers James and Robert. The James brothers escape; the Younger brothers are tried, convicted, and sent to prison. Robert Younger will die in prison in 1889, his brothers will be paroled in July, 1901, James Younger will take his own life in 1902, Cole will be pardoned in 1903 and live until 1916 (see James, 1882).
Newport's Walter Sherman House is completed to designs by architect Henry Hobson Richardson.
A bentwood café chair introduced at Vienna by the 23-year-old firm Gebrüder Thonet will be standard furniture in world restaurants and saloons for nearly a century (see 1871; Le Corbusier, 1925).
New York's Central Park is completed after 17 years of work. The 840-acre park extends from 59th Street to 110th between Fifth and Eighth avenues.
"God's First Temples—How Shall We Preserve Our Forests" by John Muir appears in a San Francisco newspaper (see 1868). Muir has seen sheepmen "and their hoofed locusts" overgrazing the "gardens and meadows" of the Merced River Valley above Yosemite and has heard the lumbermill saws "booming and moaning like bad ghosts" (see Yosemite Park, 1890).
Palm Beach, Florida, has its beginnings as the Spanish ship Providencia runs aground and her cargo of 20,000 coconuts washes ashore. Palm trees seeded by the coconuts will proliferate in the area (see hotel, 1894).
A colony of passenger pigeons nesting in Michigan reportedly covers an area 28 miles long and three to four miles wide (see 1871; 1878).
The first successful U.S. sardine cannery opens under the direction of New York importer Julius Wolff, whose French sardine imports were interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 (see 1834). Sardine canneries will soon open at Eastport, Lubec, and other points along the Maine Coast.
Colorado cattleman Charles Goodnight settles one of the west's first sheepherder-cattlemen wars and heads back to Texas, where he discovers an enormous valley in the Palo Duro Canyon area where 10,000 bison are feeding near the Canadian River (see 1871). Having prospered as a Colorado Territory rancher, banker, and irrigation promoter, Goodnight was wiped out in the panic of 1873, but he has recovered with money made in cattle drives. Now 40, he and his cowboys drive out the buffalo (bison) and establish the Old Home Ranch, the first in the Panhandle. Financed by Irish-born investor John G. Adair of Denver, Goodnight will develop the million-acre JA Ranch and the Goodnight-Adair partnership will net more than $500,000 in 5 years.
W. Atlee Burpee Company is founded at Philadelphia by Canadian-born entrepreneur Washington Atlee Burpee, 18, who initially sells livestock by mail. He will enter the mail-order seed business in 1882 (see iceberg lettuce, 1894).
Grape phylloxerae destroy more than half the standing vineyards in France's department of the Gard (see 1867); they begin to spread throughout the country with inadvertent help from the nation's growing network of railroad lines (see 1878).
California's vineyards begin to regain their former productivity thanks to phylloxera-resistant roots on which not only all California wine grapes but also virtually all European wine grapes will now be grown (see 1868). Using cheap Chinese labor, California vintners clear land on steep slopes overlooking the Napa, Sonoma, and Santa Clara valleys, plant vines, dig cellars back into the hills, and build big, cool, thick-walled stone wineries. By 1890 there will be 100 such vineyards within 60 miles of San Francisco Bay, but most of the vintner names will have disappeared by 1930.
Argentina emerges as a grain-exporting nation. Antwerp grain merchant Ernest Bunge emigrates to Buenos Aires and changes his name to Ernesto, leaving his brother Edouard to serve as broker and royal business associate to Leopold II, king of the Belgians. Argentina's pampas are beginning to develop into a major wheat-producing area, and Ernesto aims to establish a trading monopoly in Argentine wheat; he has been accompanied by his brother-in-law Georges (Jorge) Born and will compete as Bunge y Born with the agents of Leopold Louis-Dreyfus.
English explorer Henry A. Wickham, 30, breaks Brazil's rubber monopoly, smuggling 70,000 seeds of the rubber tree Hevea Brasiliensis to the Royal Gardens at Kew whence they will be transplanted in Ceylon, India, Malaya, and the East Indies on efficient plantations that will wreck Brazil's wild rubber economy within 30 years.
A treaty negotiated by Hawaiian planter Henry Alpheus Pierce Carter, 39, places Hawaiian sugar on the free list for importation into the United States (see politics, 1891).
Famine will kill between 9 million and 13 million people in northern China and 5 million in India in the next 3 years as monsoons fail and drought withers wheat fields in China's Shanxi (Shansi) Province and on India's Deccan Plateau.
Canning becomes enormously more efficient with the introduction of the Howe "floater" that makes the tinsmith's soldering iron obsolete (see 1874). A long line of cans, complete with tops and bottoms, floats slowly through the solder bath in the Howe machine picking up enough melted solder to make tight joints and permitting two men and two helpers to turn out more than 1,000 cans per day, 100 times the number one man and a helper could make in the first half of the century. In another 10 years the same number of men will be able to produce 1,500 cans per day (see 1895; 1897).
The first all-roller flour mill to be seen in America goes on display at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia but is dismantled afterward (see Washburn, 1874; Pillsbury, 1878).
Philadelphia fairgoers see bread and rolls raised with compressed yeast right before their eyes at a model Viennese bakery set up by Gaff, Fleischmann and Company, which has invested all its resources in the display to spread word about Fleischmann's yeast (see 1870; 1919).
Heinz's Tomato Ketchup (initially "Catsup") is introduced by Pittsburgh's H. J. Heinz, who joins with his brother and a cousin to establish F. and J. Heinz, which sells the new "catsup" at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia (see 1869). Heinz packs pickles and other foods as well as the ketchup, which is highly sugared, and although other U.S. firms have been bottling tomato ketchup in small quantities commercially since the 1850s (see 1872) the Heinz brand will become far and away the industry leader (see 1880). Ketchup in Britain will continue to mean mushroom ketchups until well into the next century.
Bananas fetch 10¢ each at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia (see Baker, 1871). The foil-wrapped novelty gives most fairgoers their first taste of the tropical fruit (see Boston Fruit, 1885).
Studies in Beer by Louis Pasteur is published at Paris (see 1871). The higher the temperature in drying of barley to produce malt, the darker the beer will be: the standard will be set at 170 F. for light beer, 190 F. for dark beer, and 250 F. for bock.
Budweiser beer wins top honors in a competition at the Centennial Exhibition. The new beer has been developed by Adolphus Busch, whose E. Anheuser and Company produces 15 other brands of beer, many of them pasteurized, and introduces refrigerated railcars for all its beers (see 1873; Michelob, 1896).
Hires Rootbeer Household Extract is promoted at the Centennial Exposition with an exhibit displaying packages of dried roots, barks, and herbs (see 1875). Charles E. Hires has adopted the name "rootbeer" at the advice of his friend Russell Conwell, 33, who says that hard-drinking Pennsylvania coalminers will be more attracted to "rootbeer" than to "herb tea" (see 1886).
Moxie is introduced under the name Moxie Nerve Food by Maine-born Lowell, Massachusetts, physician Augustin Thompson, who has brewed up a mixture of gentian root extract (its chief ingredient), cinchona, sassafras, caramel, and other flavorings. He sells it as a medicine that can "recover brain and nervous exhaustion, loss of manhood, imbecility, and helplessness. It has recovered paralysis, softening of the brain, locomotor ataxia, and insanity." After Thompson adds sparkling water to his medicinal-tasting product and begins bottling it in 1884 it will become the first mass-marketed soft drink (see Coca-Cola, 1886).
The Centennial Exposition has 20 exhibitors of candy-making machines. Rotary and revolving pans have supplanted old copper cooking vessels and steam kettles, and candy making has become big business.
Lancaster, Pennsylvania, candy maker Milton Snaveley Hershey, 18, borrows $150 from a maternal aunt, travels to Philadelphia, and opens a small shop in Spring Garden Street to sell penny candy that he makes, but although he will remain at New York for 6 years his business will not prosper (see 1893).
The A&P grocery chain of Huntington Hartford opens its 67th store (see 1871; 1880).
Passengers on France's new Train Bleu dress for dinner and are served by footmen in blue-satin knee breeches, white silk stockings, and elaborately braided tailcoats as they dine at tables provided with silver, bone china, and Belgian crystal. The cuisine (caviar, champagne, foie gras, saumon fumée, boeuf à la gelée, sole Metternich, poulet en cocotte, dessert, cheese, and coffee) will match that of the best hotels in Paris, Georges Nagelmakers demanding the same standards from a restaurant-car chef as those that apply in fine hotel kitchens.
The first Fred Harvey restaurant opens in the Santa Fe Railroad depot at Topeka, Kansas. English-born restaurateur Frederick H. (Henry) Harvey, 41, has been in the United States since 1850, worked as a freight solicitor for J. F. Joy's Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad, and suffered dyspepsia from eating at railroad lunchrooms. Joy has turned down his proposal that clean, well-run restaurants would attract passengers, so Harvey has approached Charles F. Morse, general manager of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe, who has been receptive to the idea. Topeka's Harvey House restaurant opens with Morse's blessings and is soon followed by a more splendid establishment at Florence, Kansas, which employs the chef from Chicago's Palmer House Hotel at $5,000 per year (he pays $1.50 per dozen for prairie hens, 75¢ per dozen for quail, 10¢/lb. for fresh creamery butter). More Harvey Houses will open along the Santa Fe line and at other major rail depots and junctions, and Harvey will also operate hotels and a fleet of Santa Fe dining cars. By 1901 there will be 47 Fred Harvey restaurants, all serving good food on Irish linen, with Sheffield silverware, served by well-trained "Harvey Girls," plus 30 Fred Harvey dining cars (see 1888) and 15 Fred Harvey hotels.
Lorenzo Delmonico sells his Fifth Avenue restaurant at 14th Street and moves farther uptown (see 1867). His new establishment faces Madison Square at 26th Street and is even more elegant than any previous Delmonico's (see 1897)
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