1888: Information and Much More from Answers.com
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"We Germans fear God, and nothing else in the world," says Prince von Bismarck February 6 in a speech to the Reichstag at Berlin. He has allowed terms of last year's Triple Alliance renewal to leak out as a discouragement to Russian and French ambitions.
Germany's Wilhelm I dies at Berlin March 9, less than 2 weeks before his 91st birthday, after a 27-year reign that has seen the unification of Germany under Bismarck. Wilhelm is succeeded by his son Friedrich Wilhelm, 57, but the new emperor is terminally ill with throat cancer and can communicate only by notes; he dies June 15 and is succeeded in turn by his 29-year-old son, whose left arm was shriveled by a difficult birth. He will reign until 1919 as Wilhelm II, the last German monarch.
France relieves General Boulanger of his command after he has twice come to Paris without leave (see 1886). He is removed from the army list on the recommendation of a council of inquiry composed of five other generals, but although wounded in an embarrassing duel with the anti-Boulangist Charles Thomas Floquet, 60, the popular "Man on Horseback" revanchist hero Boulanger is elected to the Chamber for the Nord (see 1889). Former French military leader Achille Bazaine dies in poverty at Madrid September 28 at age 77, having lived in exile since his escape from prison in 1874.
Crimean War veteran George Charles Bingham, 3rd earl of Lucan, dies at his native London November 10 at age 88, having been promoted last year to the rank of field marshal.
Britain establishes a protectorate over Sarawak March 17 and over North Borneo May 12, but the North Borneo Company continues to hold and administer North Borneo, as it has since 1881, and Sir Charles Brooke (knighted this year) continues to rule Sarawak, as he has since 1868 (see 1917).
Bugandans depose their kabaka (ruler) Mwanga after a 4-year reign in which he has driven out Christian missionaries and their supporters, who had gained influence among his tribal chiefs (but see 1890).
The Matebele king Lobengula, 55, accepts a British protectorate and signs a treaty October 30 giving the Cecil Rhodes interests exclusive mining rights in Matabeleland and Mashonaland.
Former Argentine president Domingo Sarmiento dies at Asunción, Paraguay, September 11 at age 77.
U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite dies at Washington, D.C., March 23 at age 71 after 14 years as head of the high court and is succeeded by Maine-born jurist Melville W. (Weston) Fuller, 55, who will preside until his death in 1910; Congress promotes Philip H. Sheridan to major general June 1 but he dies at Nonquitt, Massachusetts, August 5 at age 57.
U.S. voters elect Indiana Republican Benjamin Harrison, 55, in the November presidential election, although President Cleveland actually receives a 100,000-vote plurality in the popular vote. A grandson of the ninth president, Harrison is a machine politician whose position as governor offsets the fact that Cleveland's vice president is a Hoosier. He wins his home state (Cleveland carried it 4 years ago), and he receives 233 electoral votes to Cleveland's 168. Cleveland has refused to campaign, New York helps make the difference as it did in 1884, and again it is the Irish vote that swings the state, this time in reaction to a statement by the British minister to Washington that Cleveland would be friendlier to Britain than Harrison, a remark the Republicans use to support their contention that Cleveland's tariff position would favor British industrial interests. (Tammany Hall does not support Cleveland because he is perceived as an opponent of political patronage.) (see 1889).
The encyclical In plurimus issued May 5 by Pope Leo XIII is addressed to the Brazilian hierarchy. Brazil's remaining 750,000 slaves go free May 13 after 370 years of back-breaking labor without compensation in the canefields and coffee plantations. The Rio Branco law of 1871 freed the children of slaves, an 1885 law freed all slaves over 60, and the new "Golden Law" completes emancipation without recompense to sugar planters and other slaveowners. It has been put through by a Liberal ministry under the emperor Pedro II, who has ruled since 1840, and is signed in his absence by his daughter, the Princess-Regent Isabel; indentured workers instead of slaves will work the fields of Brazilian landowners, and coffee production will expand more than threefold by 1901.
New anti-Chinese riots break out in Seattle (see 1886).
Congress creates a U.S. Department of Labor, restructuring the 4-year-old Bureau of Labor, but the new department will not have cabinet status until 1903.
Irish-born labor leader Terence V. (Vincent) Powderly, 39, General Master Workman of the Knights of Labor, speaks out in support of women workers, but the Knights of Labor is in decline, its Women's Department will be disbanded in 1890, and the rising American Federation of Labor is far less concerned with female employees.
Women workers at Britain's Bryant and May match factory go on strike July 17, demanding higher pay and better working conditions.
Philadelphia Smelting and Refining is organized by Meyer Guggenheim, who last year took a venture in copper stock and did so well that he gives up the lace business that he started in 1872 and goes into partnership with his four oldest sons (see 1881). Helped by all seven sons, Guggenheim will establish a second smelter in Mexico in 1891 and a third in 1894 (see ASARCO, 1899).
Andrew Carnegie gains majority ownership in the Homestead Steel Works outside Pittsburgh (see 1881). Determined to be the lowest-cost producer, he will fight unionization of the plant (see 1892).
Industrialist Carl Zeiss dies at Jena December 3 at age 72.
New York's R. H. Macy & Company takes in as partners German-born merchant Isidor Straus, 43, and his brother Nathan, 40, who will become owner of the store in 1896 (see 1874). Isidor came to New York at age 9, started a crockery firm with his father, Lazarus, at age 20, and 9 years later took over Macy's crockery and glassware department (see 1902; Titanic, 1912).
May Company merchant David May buys a bankrupt Denver store for $31,000, hires a brass band to attract crowds, and within a week has sold out the store's old stock at bargain prices, remodeled the place, and restocked it to open the May Shoe & Clothing Company, "Goods retailed at wholesale prices" (see 1879; St. Louis, 1892).
National Cash Register Company founder John H. Patterson builds his first factory on the family farm south of Dayton, Ohio (see 1884). Patterson has built an organization of 1,000 employees and travels frequently by train to call on his sales agents at Cleveland, Buffalo, Elmira, Pittsburgh, Scranton, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, Wilmington, Trenton, and New York (see Watson, 1903).
Steam engine inventor George H. Corliss dies at Providence, Rhode Island, February 21 at age 70.
An alternating-current (ac) electric motor developed by Croatian-born U.S. inventor Nikola Tesla, 31, applies a variation of the rotary magnetic field principle discovered 3 years ago by the Italian Galileo Ferraris to a practical induction motor that will largely supplant direct-current (dc) motors for most uses (see Stanley and Westinghouse, 1885). A former Edison Company employee at West Orange, New Jersey, Tesla will make possible the production and distribution of alternating current with his induction, synchronous, and split-phase motors (he will also develop systems for polyphase transmission of power over long distances and pioneer the invention of radio), but the Tesla Electric Company that he organized last year is unsuccessful, and he will never derive much material success from his inventions (see 1893).
Thomson-Houston Electric of Lynn, Massachusetts, acquires patents for an electric railway issued 5 years ago to C. J. Van Depoele and hires Van Depoele as an electrician. He receives a patent for a carbon commutator brush (see 1874; General Electric, 1892).
Oil baron John D. Rockefeller receives a telegram October 13 advising him that his Cleveland engineers have "by experimenting with the Frasch process . . . succeeded in producing a merchantable oil." Unlike Pennsylvania crude oil, which has a parrafin base, so-called Lima oil found on the Indiana-Ohio border has a high sulfur content, yields less kerosene, and emits such a nasty odor that it fetches only a fraction of the price brought by Pennsylvania crude. Standard Oil salesmen have sold it as fuel oil to railroads and other industrial buyers, but the big money is in kerosene, and Rockefeller 2 years ago hired German-born chemist Herman Frasch, now 37, to work on the problem. Frasch came to America after the Civil War, Rockefeller brought him to Cleveland in the mid-1870s, Frasch has patented a process for eliminating sulfur from oil in the Ontario fields across Lake Erie, and he has had some earlier success with Lima crude, using copper oxides to remove the sulfur (see Frasch, 1891). Rockefeller will own more than half the reserves in the Lima field by 1891 and control one-fourth of all U.S. crude oil production.
The first successful electric trolley cars go into service February 2 at Richmond, Virginia, where Milford, Connecticut-born engineer-inventor Frank (Julian) Sprague, 31, has laid 12 miles of track between Church Hill and New Reservoir Park (see Daft, 1885). An Annapolis graduate who worked for a year as an assistant to Thomas Edison, Sprague quit 4 years ago to start the Sprague Electric Railway and Motor; he rashly contracted with Richmond's Union Passenger Railway Co. last year to equip its 40 four-wheeled cars in 90 days or forfeit his $110,000 fee. He has had to build a power house and surmount formidable difficulties. But although his trolley line's route encompasses steep grades and many curves its 40 cars can travel at 15 miles per hour, they are lighted with incandescent bulbs, his success wins him contracts for more than 100 other such lines in America and abroad, and within 2 years some 200 U.S. cities will be served by electric trolley-car lines (see energy [General Electric], 1892).
The Florida Special leaves Jersey City in January on Henry M. Flagler's Florida East Coast Railway (see 1885). Flagler has contracted with George M. Pullman to build the fully-vestibuled, electrically-lighted train, and its 70 passengers include Pullman himself (see hotel, 1888).
The Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) established under terms of last year's Interstate Commerce Act begins making efforts to protect farmers from discriminatory freight rates (but see California Fruit Growers Exchange, 1895; Elkins Act, 1903).
A Southern Pacific (SP) track gang sets out on a weekend to lay rails across part of the Irvine Ranch in southern California (see 1874; Southern Pacific, 1887), but while many communities actually pay railroads to build through their lands the Irvine family has refused access to the SP. Ranch hands carrying firearms halt the work, the Irvines obtain a court order on Monday to block any resumption (the tracks laid over the weekend will remain in place until 1910), and the family strikes a deal with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, which next year will cross part of the huge ranch to open a new line linking Los Angeles to San Diego (see 1887). James Irvine died in 1886, his 19-year-old son James Harvey Irvine will not come into full possession of the property until he turns 25 in 1893, but the Irvines receive $4,500 plus rights to build roads over the tracks at their discretion, so while the Southern Pacific will eventually reach San Diego it will go by way of a winding route through Colton, Beaumont, and Yuma, Arizona. The Santa Fe completes a second line into Los Angeles from San Bernardino through Riverside and Orange counties, and it gains access to Chicago's Dearborn Station through acquisitions and new rail lines that give it routes from Chicago to points west.
Railroad builder-financer Charles Crocker dies at Monterey, California, August 14 at age 65, leaving an estate of some $40 million. He was badly injured in a fall from his carriage at New York last year and never recovered.
The first Chinese railway opens between Tangshan and Tianjin (Tientsin). The 80-mile line will be extended to Shanhaiguan (Shanhaikuan) in 1894 and to Fengtai outside Beijing (Peking) in 1896.
A railroad line between Budapest and Constantinople opens August 12 (see 1889).
German financiers project a Berlin-to-Baghdad railway; they obtain a concession October 6 to construct a line to Angora.
The Canadian Pacific Railway receives a British government mail subsidy to the Orient and begins to acquire ships for a Pacific mail route (see 1887; 1891).
A Suez Canal Convention signed at Constantinople October 29 declares the canal to be free and open to all merchant ships and warships in war and peace (see 1875). The canal is not to be blockaded, but the sultan and the khedive are to be free to take such measures as they may "find necessary for securing by their own forces the defense of Egypt and the maintenance of public order."
The Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interocéanique goes bankrupt December 11, having spent the equivalent of $287 million in 5 years and lost some 20,000 Frenchmen plus Chinese, Irish, and West Indian laborers in a vain effort to build a Panama Canal (see 1883). The French call the Isthmus of Panama "de Lesseps's graveyard," and thousands lose their life savings in the canal company's collapse (see 1907; Nicaragua company, 1889; human rights, 1893).
The Raleigh bicycle is introduced by English industrialist Frank Bowden, 59, who acquires a financial interest in a small cycle shop started 2 years ago in Raleigh Street, Nottinghamshire, and renames it the Raleigh Cycle Company. Told by his physician last year that he had only months to live if he did not get exercise, Bowden went cycling in the southern Pyrenees and then visited the shop, where he found 12 men producing three high-wheelers per week. He will found the Patented Butted Tube Company next year to implement a process patented last by Alfred M. (Milward) Reynolds. He will sell a controlling interest in Raleigh to stockbroker Terah Hooley in 1895, and by 1896 Raleigh will have the world's largest bicycle factory, occupying 7½ acres with about 850 employees turning out 30,000 bikes per year (see Sturmey-Archer gear, 1902).
The first patent for a pneumatic bicycle tire is awarded October 31 to Scottish veterinary surgeon John B. (Boyd) Dunlop, 47, at Belfast, Ireland, who has worn rubber gloves in his practice. Advised by a physician to have his sickly son ride a tricycle, Dunlop has devised the tires to cushion the boy's ride on Belfast's cobblestone streets, using rubber sheeting and strips of linen from an old dress of his wife's. Dunlop Rubber has its beginnings in a firm established by Dunlop with entrepreneur W. H. Ducros, but he will sell the patent rights to Ducros and derive only a small profit from his invention (see Michelin, 1891).
Benz motor carriages are advertised for the first time at Mannheim by Karl Benz, who organizes Firma Benz & Cie. (see 1887; Viktoria, 1892; Mercedes-Benz, 1926).
The Burroughs adding machine patented by St. Louis inventor William Seward Burroughs, 31, is the first successful key-set recording and adding machine (see Comptometer, 1887). It is not commercially practical, but Burroughs and three partners organize the American Arithmometer Company, sell $100,000 worth of stock, develop an improved model, and while the new model will not stand up to heavy use, Burroughs will obtain further capitalization and produce a model in 1891 that will print out each separate entry plus the final result of each computation. He will be granted patents in 1893 for the first practical adding machine, American Arithmometer will begin production of the machines, it will move to Detroit in 1905, and it will become Burroughs Corp.
Steelmaking pioneer William Kelly dies at Louisville, Kentucky, February 11 at age 76, having derived less than one-twentieth of the royalties received by Henry Bessemer for the Kelly-Bessemer steelmaking process.
Nickel steel is invented in France, giving impetus to Samuel J. Ritchie's 3-year-old Canadian Copper Company with its rich nickel ore deposits and to other nickel companies (see manganese steel, 1882).
Austrian chemist Karl Joseph Bayer receives a patent for what will be called the Bayer process for industrial production of the alumina used in the Hall-Heroult process for making aluminum (see 1886). Bauxite contains only 40 to 60 percent alumina. Bayer's process employs a hot solution of sodium hydroxide (NaOH) to remove the iron oxide, silica, and titanium oxide impurities in the ore, and when the hydroxide solution cools aluminum hydroxide dissolved in it precipitates out as a white, fluffy solid.
The Pittsburgh Reduction Company founded with help from Alfred E. Hunt produces the world's first commercial aluminum Thanksgiving Day, dropping the price of the metal from $15 per pound to $1—a level that makes its use practical (see 1886). Sharon, Massachusetts-born Amherst graduate Arthur Vining Davis, 21, has joined the firm, whose cofounder Alfred Hunt is a friend of Davis's Congregationalist minister father and has worked 12-hour days in overalls in a plant at Kensington, Pennsylvania, to help inventor Charles Martin Hall develop his low-cost way to produce the metal at the rate of 50 pounds per day; Davis will soon be made general manager of the fledgling company, and Hall will receive his patent April 2 of next year (see Mellon, 1891).
Law of Stability of Chemical Equilibrium (Loi de stabilité de l'équilibre chimique) by French chemist Henry-Louis Le Chatelier, 38, establishes the principle that if one of the factors in any chemical equilibrium changes—be it pressure, temperature, or something else—the system readjusts itself to minimize the change. His conclusions have been anticipated to some extent by J. Willard Gibbs at Yale (see 1876).
Botanist Asa Gray dies at his Cambridge, Massachusetts, home January 30 at age 77; chemist Ascanio Sobrero at Turin May 26 at age 75; physicist Rudolf Clausius at Bonn August 24 at age 66.
German scientist Adolf Fick writes a paper suggesting that lenses that rest directly on the cornea can correct faulty vision (see 1827). A scientist named Kevin Tuohy has invented a soft plastic lens that covers only the cornea; by the end of the century two companies will be making bulky lenses out of blown or ground glass that cover not only the cornea but also the whites of the eyes (see 1971).
The Institut Pasteur is founded at Paris in November with private subscriptions. The contributors have been inspired by Louis Pasteur's rabies vaccine of 1885 and include Russia's Aleksandr III, Brazil's Pedro II, and the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II (see 1903; 1923).
French-born missionary Jean Baptiste Lamy dies at Santa Fe in New Mexico Territory February 13 at age 73. He retired as archbishop nearly 3 years ago after 34 years of apostolic work in the territory.
The encyclical "Liberty" ("Libertas") issued by Pope Leo XIII June 20 endeavors to affirm the positive values of liberalism, democracy, and freedom of conscience (see 1881; human rights, 1891).
Di Yiddishe Folkbibliothek begins publication at Kiev. The founder of the world's first Yiddish literary annual is Sholem Aleichim (Sholem Rabinovitch), 29, who will raise the standards of Yiddish and teach Russian Jews to laugh at their troubles (they have been hounded since the assassination of Aleksandr II in 1881).
Educator-social reformer Amos Bronson Alcott dies at Boston March 4 at age 88.
A Baptist convention at Chicago hears a paper delivered October 15 on "The Need for a Baptist University in Chicago, as Illustrated by a Study of Baptist College Education in the West." Author of the paper is Maine, New York-born Baptist minister Frederick T. Gates, 35; Ohio-born Yale and Vassar biblical scholar William Rainey Harper, now 32, met oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller last year and brings Gates's remarks to Rockefeller's attention 2 weeks later and wins a promise that Rockefeller will help to fund a Baptist college at Chicago (see 1889).
The Brazilian newspaper O Estado de São Paulo begins publication January 1 and will continue into the 21st century.
The Financial Times begins publication January 9 under the name London Financial Guide and renames itself February 13. James Sheridan has started the paper with his brother, and it will continue into the 21st century (see 1893).
Answers to Correspondents (later simply Answers) begins publication at London to compete with George Newnes's 7-year-old penny magazine Tit-Bits, to which he has been contributing. Dublin-born publisher Alfred (Charles William) Harmsworth, 23, began as a freelance journalist at age 17 and set up a publishing house at London with his brother Harold 5 years later (seeEvening News, 1894).
Toledo Blade owner-author "Petroleum V. Nasby" (David R. Locke) dies at Toledo, Ohio, February 15 at age 54 (his family will retain ownership of the paper until 1926); Baltimore Sun owner Arunah S. Abell dies at Baltimore April 19 at age 81.
Printers' Ink begins publication July 15 at New York under the direction of advertising agent George P. Rowell, now 50 (see 1869); his trade magazine will demand equitable rates for advertisers and publishers in opposition to the Post Office Department and campaign for honest advertising.
Once a Week magazine begins publication at New York under the direction of Irish-born New York publisher Peter F. (Fenelon) Collier, 42, who emigrated to America with his parents in 1862, came to New York in 1875, and with $300 in capital pioneered the subscription-book business, printing and selling bibles and Father Burke's Lectures from a basement store in Vandewater Street. The magazine is designed to promote Collier's book business (seeCollier's, 1895).
The National Geographic begins publication in October at Washington, D.C., where the National Geographic Society has been founded by a small group of eminent explorers and scientists who include Alexander Graham Bell's father-in-law, Gardiner Greene Hubbard, who founded the magazine Science with Bell 5 years ago. The society's stated purpose is "for the increase and diffusion of geographic knowledge." Members receive the new scientific quarterly. It will begin monthly publication in 1896, publish its first color plates in 1906, and in February 1910 adopt a yellow-and-white cover. (The Society will sponsor and co-sponsor expeditions along with other scientific projects and publish maps, atlases, and books as it grows to become the world's largest scientific and educational society, with upwards of 9 million members worldwide).
The 28-page pamphlet "Light-Line Phonography" by Irish-born inventor John R. (Robert) Gregg, 21, introduces a new shorthand system using a phonetic alphabet based on the regular cursive movements of ordinary longhand. The system of the Glasgow-published pamphlet will be adapted to 13 languages. Gregg will move to America in 1893, his book Gregg Shorthand (a revision of his pamphlet) will appear in 1902, and his system will largely supplant the Pitman system of 1837 in the United States (Pitman will remain the system of choice in Britain and her colonies).
Parker Pen Company is founded at Janesville, Wisconsin, by local telegraphy teacher George Safford Parker, 24, and will become the world's largest producer of fountain pens (see Waterman, 1884). Parker sells John Holland pens to his students at the Valentine School in order to supplement his meager income, the pens give trouble, and Parker becomes adept at fixing them; he acquires a small scroll saw, lathe, cutter, and other tools and develops a pen of his own invention with a superior feed (see 1904).
The typewriter stencil introduced at London by David Gestetner of 1881 Cyclostyle fame is the first of its kind. Typewriter impressions can penetrate the wax on the stencil but not its sturdy porous tissue. Chicago's A. B. Dick Company has been selling a mimeograph machine that competes with the cyclostyle (see 1887). Albert Dick sees the potential for producing thousands of copies from typewritten originals, he acquires U.S. rights to the new stencil, and his company will introduce its first typewriter stencils in 1890.
New York and New England telephone linemen work through the blizzard that strikes the Atlantic Coast in March to restore service on the new line that connects Boston with New York, but the storm disrupts communications; many communities are isolated for days.
Engineer Sir Charles Tilston Bright of 1858 Atlantic Cable fame dies outside London May 3 at age 55; former Western Union president Hiram Sibley at Rochester, New York, July 12 at age 81; poet and phonograph inventor Charles Cros at Paris August 9 at age 45, having seen Thomas Edison's machine gain popularity.
Nonfiction: The American Commonwealth by Oxford professor James Bryce, 50, who sees the United States sailing in "a summer sea" and setting a course of responsible liberty that will be a model for the world. America's institutions, says Lord Bryce, are the answer to mankind's longings, "towards which, as by a law of fate, the rest of civilized mankind are forced to move," but he warns that "perhaps no form of government needs great leaders so much as a democracy" and voices concern that "the ordinary American voter does not object to mediocrity"; The Wagner Case, Twilight of the Idols, and AntiChristian by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who has moved to Turin in April. He suffers from syphilis and next year will go insane; The Ethical Import of Darwinism by philosopher Jacob Gould Schurman; Travels in Arabia Deserta by English explorer-poet Charles M. (Montagu) Doughty, 45, who 12 years ago learned Arabic, disguised himself as a Bedouin, and made the pilgrimage to Mecca; Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail by Theodore Roosevelt, with illustrations by New York artist Frederic (Sackrider) Remington, 26, who has been selling drawings to Harper's Weekly after working as a cowboy and ranch cook.
Fiction: Looking Backward, 2000-1887 by Massachusetts-born socialist Edward Bellamy, 38, is a utopian novel that pictures a happy, peaceful United States of the year 2000 in which all industry has been nationalized and all wealth equitably distributed; Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling includes his story "The Man Who Would Be King," based on the adventures of the late soldier of fortune Josiah Harlan, who led an Afghan rebellion in 1827, remained for 17 years, and died at San Francisco in October 1871 at age 72; The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night by Orientalist Richard Burton, now 67, who anticipated Charles M. Doughty by visiting Mecca disguised as a Pathan in 1853 and has translated in its entirety the Arabian Nights stories known in the West until now only through expurgated stories such as "Aladdin and the Lamp." Sources of the stories are largely Persian, not Arabic, and are presented within the framework of a situation involving the Persian monarch Shahriyar and his wife Shahrazad (Scheherezade). Having had faithless wives in the past, Shahriyar has been taking a new one each night and having her put to death in the morning, but Scheherezade ends this practice by keeping the monarch fascinated with stories, many of them bawdy. Burton's 16-volume work enjoys great success (but see 1890); Robert Elsmere by Tasmanian-born English novelist-social worker Mrs. Humphry Ward (née Mary Augusta Arnold), 37, whose controversial story of a young Anglican clergyman promotes the idea of a Christianity based on social concern rather than theology. Ward is a niece of the late poet Matthew Arnold; her novel prompts former prime minister William Gladstone to issue a polemical reply under the title, "Robert Elsmere and the Battle of Belief" and it serves to increase readership of Ward's book, which will inspire philanthropist Passmore Edwards to found a settlement for the poor in London's Tavistock Square in 1897.
Poetry: A Book of Verses by Gloucestershire-born poet William Ernest Henley, now 39, who includes his 1875 poem "Invictus" written in an Edinburgh infirmary where his foot was amputated because it was tubercular: "Out of the night that covers me,/ Black as the pit from pole to pole,/ I thank whatever gods may be,/ For my unconqueraable soul"; "Casey at the Bat" appears June 3 in the San Francisco Examiner, whose editors pay 24-year-old Ernest Lawrence Thayer $5 for his contribution. The comic verse about baseball will be popularized by New York-born comedian-singer DeWolf Hopper, now 30, who will recite it thousands of times to enthusiastic audiences: "And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout;/ But there is no joy in Mudville—mighty Casey has struck out."
Poet-critic Matthew Arnold dies suddenly at Liverpool April 15 at age 65.
Juvenile: The Happy Prince and Other Tales by Oscar Wilde, who 4 years ago married the rich Constance Lloyd, became editor of Women's World last year, and has written the book of fairy tales for their 3-year-old son, Cyril, and 2-year-old son, Vyvyan; The Merrie Adventures of Robin Hood, of Great Renown in Nottinghamshire by Howard Pyle, whose books Otto of the Silver Hand and The Wonder Clocks; or, Four and Twenty Marvelous Tales are also published.
Louisa May Alcott dies at Concord, Massachusetts, March 6 at age 55.
Painting: The Vision of the Sermon (Jacob and the Angel) and Still Life with Fruit à mon ami Laval by former Paris stockbroker (Eugène Henri) Paul Gauguin, now 40, who has exhibited with the Impressionists, given up his job, left his wife and family, but had to return to Paris after running out of money on a visit last year to Martinique; Place Clichy by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, now 23; Madame Roulin and Baby, La Berceuse, Canal with Washerwoman, Fishing Boats on the Beach at Stes-Maries-de-la-Mer, Self-Portrait with Felt Hat, The Bedroom, The Sower, Sunflowers, Arena at Arles, Bridge at Arles (Pont de Langlois), and Café Terrace at Night by Vincent van Gogh, who has left Paris for the south of France in February after being told that the light there was much like that in Japan. Paul Gauguin receives a small subsidy from van Gogh's brother Theo and comes to stay with Vincent at Arles in October but they have a violent quarrel December 23; Sunday at Port-en-Bessin, Models, and La Parade (Invitation to the Side-Show) by Georges Seurat; Bather by Pierre Auguste Renoir; Ile Lacroix, Rouen—Effect of Fog by Camille Pissarro; The Entrance of Christ into Brussels by James Ensor, who uses macabre skeletons and masks with strident colors to rebel against the smugness and hypocrisy of the ruling class (the work will not be shown publicly until 1929); Carriage Parade, Geraniums, and April Showers, Champs-Elysées, Paris by Childe Hassam; A Morning Walk and Isabella Stewart Gardner by John Singer Sargent. Banker-art collector W. W. Corcoran of Corcoran Gallery fame dies at Washington, D.C., February 24 at age 89; lithographer Nathaniel Currier at New York November 20 at age 75. He retired in 1880, and his son Edward carries on the business with Merritt Ives, now 64.
Sculpture: The Thinker (Le penseur) by Auguste Rodin.
New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art opens its first addition and begins an expansion that will continue until the museum occupies 20 acres of Central Park (see 1880).
The Kodak camera ("You Press the Button, We Do the Rest") patented May 7 by George Eastman revolutionizes photography by making it possible for any amateur to take satisfactory "snapshots" (a term borrowed from hunters that means to shoot without aiming; see 1884). The small, light, $25 camera comes loaded with a roll of stripping paper long enough for 100 exposures; when the film has been entirely exposed, the entire camera is sent to Rochester, New York, where the exposed strip is developed and printed; a new strip is inserted for $10, and the camera is returned to its owner with the finished prints, which are round, mounted on cards, and tend to be blurry. Eastman will explain the name Kodak by saying, "I knew a trade name must be short, vigorous, incapable of being misspelled to an extent that will destroy its identity, and, in order to satisfy the trademark laws, it must mean nothing." But although 13,000 are sold within the year, and Eastman's plant develops and prints 6,000 pictures per day, the Kodak's price is far beyond the reach of most people at a time when laborers earn $1.50 per day; Eastman will introduce a $5 pocket version in 1895, making his profits from the film rather than the cameras (see transparent negative film, 1889).
Theater: The Power of Darkness (Vlast Tmy, ili "Kotak Uvayaz, Vsey Ptichke Propast") by Count Leo Tolstoy 2/2 at the Théâtre Libre, Paris; Sweet Lavender by Arthur Wing Pinero 3/21 at Terry's Theatre, London, with Edward Terry, Eleanore Leyskin, 684 performances. English actress Violet (Augusta Mary) Vanbrugh (originally Barnes), 21, and her 16-year-old sister Irene make their debuts at Margate as Ophelia and Phoebe, respectively, in the 1600 Shakespeare comedy As You Like It.
The Klaw & Erlanger theatrical-booking agency founded at New York by Paducah, Kentucky-born lawyer Marc Klaw, 30, and Buffalo-born booking agent Abraham Lincoln Erlanger, 28, will dominate the U.S. theater world for decades. Klaw has represented Charles and Daniel Frohman, he joins with Erlanger to take over New York's Taylor Theatrical Exchange, and within 7 years their connections with southern theater managers will make them the second-largest booking agency, controlling nearly 200 theaters, most of them in the South (see Theatrical Syndicate, 1896).
New York actor-playwright-theater manager Lester Wallack dies near Stamford, Connecticut, September 6 at age 68.
Opera: Le Roi d'Ys 5/7 at the Opéra-Comique, Paris, with music by Edouard Lalo, who achieves his first great success at age 65 (libretto by Edouard Blau); The Yeomen of the Guard (or The Merryman and His Maid) 10/3 at London's Savoy Theatre with Henry Alfred Lytton as Jack Point, London-born tenor Courtice Pounds, 26, as Colonel Fairfax, Gilbert and Sullivan arias that include "I Have a Song to Sing, O!", 423 performances. Shanghai-born U.S. soprano Emma Hayden Eames, 22, has made her debut 3/13 at the Paris Opéra singing the role of Juliette in the 1867 Gounod opera Roméo et Juliette; Adelina Patti sings the same role 10/28 at the Paris Opéra with Gounod himself conducting (she has sung it at Madrid, Lisbon, Buenos Aires, and Montivideo earlier in the year, receiving her usual fee of £1,000 per performance).
Vienna replaces its Burgtheater of 1776 with a larger Burgtheater opera house and concert hall. The policy of permitting no curtain calls continues.
"Kaiserwalzer" by Johann Strauss restores the composer to favor with the emperor Franz Josef, who stripped the waltz king of his honors 5 years ago for divorcing his second wife and marrying a young Jewish widow.
First performances: Requiem by Gabriel Fauré in January at the Church of the Madeleine, Paris, where Fauré has been assistant organist and choirmaster since 1877; Wallenstein Trilogy by Vincent d'Indy 2/28 at Paris; Psyche (Symphonic Poem for Orchestra and Chorus) by César Franck 3/10 at Paris; Concerto No. 1 for Piano and Orchestra by Edward MacDowell in April at Boston; Symphony No. 5 by Petr Ilich Tchaikovsky 11/17 at St. Petersburg.
"L'Internationale" is published with music by Belgian-born woodcarver Pierre Chrétien Degeyter, 40, lyrics by Parisian transport worker Eugène Edine Pettier, 72, who wrote them during the Commune uprising of 1871: "Arise, ye prisoners of starvation;/ Arise, ye wretched of the earth." It will become the communist anthem worldwide.
The newly-organized Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) of the United States holds its first championship boxing tournament (see Britain's ABA, 1880; Golden Gloves, 1927).
Ernest Renshaw, 27, (twin brother of William) wins in men's singles at Wimbledon, Lottie Dod in women's singles; Henry Slocum, 26, wins in U.S. men's singles, Bertha Townsend, 19, in women's singles.
The Oakhurst Club founded at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, is the first U.S. golf club. The St. Andrew's Club founded at Yonkers, New York, will survive as the oldest U.S. golf club (see Scotland's St. Andrew's, 1754; Chicago, 1893).
The National Council of Women is founded.
"There are only about four hundred people in New York Society," says social arbiter (and climber) Ward McAllister, now 60, in a New York Tribune interview (see 1872; social register, 1887). The ballroom of his patron Mrs. Astor's Fifth Avenue mansion can accommodate 400 people (but, please, no clergymen, physicians, Jews, blacks, musicians, or actors).
Mum antiperspirant is introduced by a Philadelphia physician who has mixed zinc with an oily cream, trademarks the world's first deodorant, and engages his nurse to distribute it, but the deodorant does not dry readily; most women continue to use perfume or cologne to mask armpit odors (see 1902).
Johnson's prepared wax products are introduced by the 2-year-old S. C. Johnson & Company, which buys its first national advertising. Racine, Wisconsin, entrepreneur Samuel Curtis Johnson purchased the parquet flooring business of the Racine Hardware Company to start the business in 1886; net profits for his first year totaled $268.27, but his company will become the world's leading producer of floor wax (see 1919).
Durham, North Carolina, tobacco merchant Washington B. Duke, 67, produces 744 million cigarettes at Durham; his son James's factory in New York's Rivington Street produces even more (see 1884). A Confederate army veteran, Duke has leased a cigarette-making machine invented by Virginian James Bonsack; W. Duke & Sons grosses $600,000, and by next year it will be producing cigarettes at the rate of 1 billion per annum (see American Tobacco Trust, 1890).
Richmond, Virginia, cigarette makers Allen & Ginter produce more than 700 million smokes (see 1875). The Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia in 1876 boosted the firm's sales.
Tobacco-chewer Thomas Edison refuses to hire cigarette smokers.
Woodbine's cigarettes are introduced at London.
Jack the Ripper makes headlines. London East End streetwalkers Mary Ann Nicholls, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, and their neighbors Catherine Eddowes and Mary Kelly die at the hands of one or more killers, who feed the women poisoned grapes and then disembowel them. Scotland Yard can find no solution to the mystery, and it will later be alleged that agents of Queen Victoria murdered the women to hush up a scandal involving the queen's grandson Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward, 24, duke of Clarence, who contracted syphilis at age 16 and has been going mad (see Cleveland Street scandal, 1889).
Cologne Cathedral is completed with two 330-foot spires. Construction resumed in 1842 after a 282-year hiatus.
The Washington Monument that will remain the world's tallest free-standing masonry structure is completed at Washington, D.C., after 40 years of on-again off-again construction. Designed to honor the nation's first president, the monument includes a cornerstone laid July 4, 1848. Workers placed the 3,300-pound marble capstone on the 50-story, 555-foot obelisk December 6, 1884, and it will be topped with a nine-inch pyramid of cast aluminum.
Washington's State, War, and Navy Department building is completed across the street from the White House by architect Alfred Bult Mullett, 54, who has given the building mansard roofs and dormer windows typical of structures built since the Civil War.
The New York State Capitol building nears completion on a 3.5-acre site looming hundreds of feet above downtown Albany after more than 20 years of construction to plans by the late H. H. Richardson and Leopold Elditz, but large chunks of brick begin to fall from the ceiling of the Assembly chamber.
Chicago's Tacoma building is completed with a steel skeleton that employs load-bearing metal throughout its structure and represents the first basic advance in building construction since the medieval Gothic arch and flying buttress. The steel skeleton method of construction for tall buildings initiated by LeBaron Jenney's Home Insurance building of 1885 is firmly established by Chicago architect William Holabird, 33, whose firm Holabird & Roche will be the major developer of Jenney's idea into modern office buildings in Chicago and will revolutionize the city's skyline with the Caxton building in 1890, Pontiac building in 1891, Marquette building in 1894, Tribune building in 1901, and numerous hotels and office buildings thereafter.
Upstate New York engineer Augustine Sackett invents plasterboard, a new building material that he will patent in 1894 and that will come into widespread use as a substitute for plaster in walls and partitions. Sackettboard has a thin gypsum (plaster of paris) core sandwiched between two layers of manila paper (see Sheetrock, 1916; plywood, 1905).
The Ponce de Leon Hotel opens January 10 at St. Augustine, Florida. Standard Oil cofounder Henry M. Flagler, now 58, is extending his Florida East Coast Railway south and has built the $1.25 million hotel. Each room boasts electric lights and $1,000 worth of furnishings (see Tampa Bay Hotel, 1891; Royal Poinciana, 1894).
The Hotel Del Coronado opens February 19 across the bay from San Diego, California, with 399 rooms and a main dining room measuring 156 feet by 61 feet whose arched ceiling is made of natural sugar pine fitted together entirely by wooden pegs. Inventor Thomas A. Edison personally supervises installation of the lighting system. Built by Indiana railroad magnate Elisha Babcock, the first Pacific Coast resort hotel is located on an island, purchased by Babcock with help from Evansville, Indiana, flour miller John Levi Igleheart, 25, for $110,000, and is reached via a 10-minute ferry ride from downtown. Babcock will be wiped out in a financial panic and the hotel will be acquired by sugar kings J. D. and Adolph Spreckels, sons of Claus, who will always make sure that terrapin bisque is on the hotel's menu.
The Banff Springs Hotel opens June 1 in the Canadian Banff National Park set aside in 1885. Designed in a mixture of French château and Scottish baronial styles by New York architect Bruce Price, the five-story H-shaped wooden structure accommodates 280 guests and has been built by the Canadian Pacific Railway, whose president W. C. Van Horne says, "Since we cannot export the scenery we'll import the sightseers." British aristocrats will come across the ocean and spend the summer season at Banff, bringing luggage that contains dinner jackets and evening gowns as well as sportswear.
The world's first revolving door (always open, always closed) is installed in a Philadelphia office lobby by local inventor Theophilus Van Kannel, 46.
The Nor'easter that strikes the U.S. Northeast in March comes on the heels of a warm spell that has opened buds on trees in New York's Central Park. New York's temperature drops to 10.7° F. March 12, it plunges to a March 13 record of 8° the next day, and winds off the Atlantic build up to 48 miles per hour, bringing unpredicted snow that continues off and on into the early morning of Wednesday, March 14. The 3-day accumulation totals 20.9 inches in the city, but snowdrifts 15 to 20 feet high bring traffic to a standstill. Parts of New England get up to 50 inches, and drifts as high as 40 feet bury houses and trains. Washington is isolated from the world for more than a day, 200 ships are lost or grounded from Chesapeake Bay north to Nantucket, at least 100 seamen die in the "Great White Hurricane," pedestrians and horses freeze to death in the streets, and at least 400 die, including former senator York Roscoe Conkling, who catches pneumonia and dies in mid-April at age 58.
A hailstorm at Moradabad, India, April 20 leaves 246 dead.
Singapore's botanic garden is created by English botanist Henry Nicholas Ridley, 32, who will establish the Malayan rubber industry, using seeds smuggled from Brazil (see 1876). Ridley will discover how to obtain latex without injuring the trees.
U.S. cattlemen go bankrupt and foreign investors liquidate their American holdings after a drastic decline in cattle herds following the 1886-1887 drought on the western plains (see 1884).
Congress enacts emergency legislation and puts Major John Wesley Powell in charge of an irrigation survey to select reservoir sites, determine irrigation product areas, and carry out part of his 1878 plan (see 1889).
Drought in the Midwest causes a major crop disaster, European wheat crops are also short, and although wheat prices on the Chicago Board of Trade rose moderately after a government crop report in May predicted a wheat shortage, the price rises from $1 per bushel to $2 in the week beginning September 22. Speculator B. P. "Old Hutch" Hutchinson has begun buying September futures in August, he has soon cornered a major part of all the wheat sold in Chicago or deliverable to the Board of Trade, and his wheat "corner" yields him profits of up to $1 per bushel on the wheat that he sells to millers or to speculators who have sold short (see Leiter, 1897).
Prospectors boring for natural gas in central Kansas discover a new salt field (see 1892).
H. J. Heinz reorganizes a food packing firm under his own name (see 1886; 1896).
Tetley Tea is introduced into U.S. markets by agents Wright and Graham, who merchandise Tetley's Indian and Ceylon teas through department stores such as New York's R. H. Macy, a radical innovation at a time when most Americans consume far more green and Formosan (Taiwanese) tea than black tea.
Coca-Cola formulator John S. Pemberton dies at Atlanta August 16 at age 57, having sold his remaining one-third interest in the product 4 months earlier (see 1886; 1891).
Foster's lager beer is introduced at Melbourne by Americans using refrigeration, pasteurization, bottom fermentation, and bottling to create a product that will help make beer Australia's national beverage (see Harrison, 1856). The brand will later be bottled at Toronto and elsewhere as it gains worldwide popularity.
A new Chinese Exclusion Act voted by Congress October 1 forbids Chinese workers who have left the United States to return (see 1882; 1884; 1894).
1881 1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889 1890
Archaeology
On December 18 Colorado rancher Richard Wetherill [b. 1858, d. 1910] discovers Cliff Palace, the largest of the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde, containing about 150 rooms and 23 kivas (round buildings used for religious ceremonies). See also 1874 Archaeology.
Astronomy
Hermann Vogel [b. Leipzig, Germany, April 3, 1841, d. Potsdam, Germany, August 13, 1907] makes the first systematic spectrographic measurements of the radial velocities of stars--the speeds at which stars are moving away from Earth--using Armand Fizeau's principle of the redshift (also known as the Doppler effect). See also 1868 Astronomy.
A New General Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars written by Johann Louis Emil Dreyer [b. Copenhagen, Denmark, February 13, 1852, d. Oxford, England, September 14, 1926] is published. The designation NGC for an astronomical object--for example, the galaxy NGC 6240--refers to this catalog, which contains 7840 "nebulae" (many actually galaxies) and star clusters. See also 1786 Astronomy.
Biology
Theodor Boveri [b. Bamberg, Germany, October 12, 1862, d. Würzburg, Germany, October 15, 1915] discovers and names the centrosome, the small body that appears during cell division and seems to control the process.
Anatomist Heinrich Wilhelm Gottfried (von) Waldeyer-Hartz [b. Braunschweig, Germany, October 6, 1836, d. Berlin, January 23, 1921] coins the word chromosome. See also 1887 Biology; 1892 Biology.
Chemistry
Austrian botanist Friedrich Reinitzer [b. 1857, d. 1927] discovers the first liquid crystal, cholesteryl benzoate. See also 1889 Chemistry.
Friedrich Ostwald discovers that catalysts affect only reaction speed and not reaction equilibrium. See also 1854 Chemistry; 1909 Chemistry.
Communication
Edison and his lab assistant William Kennedy Laurie (W.K.L.) Dickson [b. Minihic-sur-Ranse, France, 1860, d. Twickenham, Middlesex, England, 1935] make a sound "motion picture." A phonograph with the sound recording controls a cylinder with a series of photographs on it (called a Kinetoscope by Edison) for synchronization of sound and image. The photographs are viewed through a magnifying lens and, as in later cinema and television, persistence of vision gives the illusion of motion. A description is filed with the U.S. Patent Office on October 8. See also 1891 Communication.
In June George Eastman introduces the first commercial paper roll-film camera, a box camera that he names the Kodak. It costs $25 and takes 100 pictures; you return the entire camera with film inside for processing. This is a high price, and the original Kodak is something of a luxury item. See also 1884 Communication; 1889 Communication.
Mechanical engineer Oberlin Smith [b. 1840, d. 1926] describes in an American journal a magnetic sound recording system, a precursor of today's magnetic tape recorder. See also 1893 Communication.
Tanner John J. Loud patents a pen to mark leather with a rotating writing ball, a forerunner of the ballpoint pen. See also 1884 Communication; 1895 Communication.
German-American inventor Emile Berliner [b. Hanover, Germany, May 20, 1851, d. Washington, DC, August 3, 1929] invents the flat disk form of the phonograph record, an improvement over Edison's wax or Bell's shellac cylinder system that is quickly adopted by the record industry. Berliner adapts Bell's shellac process (entering a form of partnership with him) but also finds a way to etch the grooves chemically, making it possible to mass produce recordings. The new device is called the gram-o-phone (later spelled gramophone). See also 1877 Communication.
Computers
William S. Burroughs [b. Rochester, New York, January 28, 1855, d. Citronelle, Alabama, September 14, 1898] patents an adding machine. See also 1885 Computers; 1889 Computers.
Construction
On August 7 in Philadelphia Theophilus Van Kannel patents the revolving door.
Earth science
The first seismograph in the United States is installed at the Lick Observatory in California. See also 1880 Earth science.
Explorer Fridtjof Nansen [b. Store-Frøen, Norway, October 10, 1861, d. Lysaker, Norway, May 13, 1930] and his team of explorers become the first people to cross Greenland by land.
Energy
The first Parsons steam turbine driving an electric generator is installed at Forth Banks in England. See also 1884 Energy; 1895 Energy.
Carl Gustav de Laval invents the impulse turbine. See also 1887 Energy; 1890 Energy.
Charles Van Depoele [b. Lichtervelde, Belgium, April 27, 1846, d. Lynn, Massachusetts, March 18, 1892] introduces carbon contacts instead of metallic brushes to drain current from commutators, reducing sparking substantially. See also 1877 Energy.
Food & agriculture
Emile Christian Hansen [b. Ribe, Denmark, May 8, 1842, d. Copenhagen, August 27, 1909] isolates a pure culture of the yeast Saccharomyces carlsbergensis (named after the Carlsberg brewery) and introduces the practice of bottom fermentation with it, which will be adopted by breweries to produce lager beer. See also 1856 Biology.
Materials
Chemist George W. Kahlbaum [b. Berlin, April 8, 1853, d. Basel, Switzerland, August 28, 1905] fabricates plastic bottles from metacrylate, one of the first uses of plastics. See also 1975 Materials.
William J. Keep [b. Oberlin, Ohio, June 3, 1842, d. September 30, 1918] discovers that the various types of cast iron identified by workers in the industry are determined by the amount of silicon in the alloy. See also 1883 Materials.
Ernst Abbe and Otto Schott [b. Witten, Germany, December 17, 1851, d. Jena, Germany, August 27, 1935] develop barium glass, which has a very high refraction index and which allows the construction of achromatic lenses. See also 1884 Materials.
Mathematics
Marius Sophus Lie and Friederich Engel [b. Lugau, Germany, December 26, 1861, d. Giessen, Germany, September 29, 1941] begin publication of their three-volume Theorie der Transformationsgruppen ("theory of transformation groups"), which will be completed in 1893. The mathematical ideas are largely owed to Lie, but the expression of them in a clear fashion is a result of Engel's collaboration. See also 1873 Mathematics.
Sonya Kovalevsky receives the Prix Bourdin from the French Academy for her paper "On the Rotation of a Solid Body about a Fixed Point" (submitted anonymously because of concern about prejudice against women in mathematics). (See essay.)
Richard Dedekind's Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen ("the nature and meaning of numbers") introduces the definition of an infinite set as a set that can be put into one-to-one correspondence with a proper subset of itself; it remains the most common definition. See also 1877 Mathematics.
Medicine & health
Bacteriologist Pierre Paul Émile Roux [b. Charente, France, December 17, 1853, d. Paris, November 3, 1933] and Alexandre Yersin [b. Lavaux, Baud, Switzerland, September 22, 1863, d. Nha Trang, Vietnam, March 1, 1943] discover that diphtheria is not caused directly by a bacterium but by a toxin produced by the bacterium. See also 1884 Medicine & health.
James McKeen Cattell [b. Easton, Pennsylvania, May 25, 1860, d. Lancaster, Pennsylvania, January 20, 1944] is appointed professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, the first psychology professorship at any school. See also 1879 Medicine & health; 1890 Medicine & health.
Physics
Heinrich Hertz produces and detects radio waves for the first time; radio waves will be called Hertzian waves until renamed by Marconi, who calls them radiotelegraphy waves. See also 1883 Communication; 1894 Communication.
The release of negative electricity as a result of shining ultraviolet light on zinc, discovered by Wilhelm Hallwach [b. Darmstadt, Germany, July 9, 1859, d. Dresden, June 20, 1922], is the first confirmation of the photoemissive effect discovered by Heinrich Hertz. See also 1887 Physics; 1899 Physics.
Tools
Charles Vernon Boys [b. Wing, Rutland, England, March 15, 1855, d. Andover, England, March 30, 1944] develops a very sensitive radiometer consisting of a thermocouple that becomes part of a string galvanometer. See also 1878 Tools.
Transportation
In Ireland, faced with unusually bumpy roads, John Boyd Dunlop [b. Ayrshire, Scotland, February 5, 1840, d. Dublin, October 23, 1921] re-invents air-filled rubber tires and establishes a company to manufacture them. See also 1845 Transportation.
Frank Sprague operates the first commercial American tramway on a 17-mile line in Richmond, Virginia. See also 1880 Transportation.