1906: Information and Much More from Answers.com
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1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910
Denmark's Kristian IX dies at the Amalienborg Palace in Copenhagen January 29 at age 87 after a 42-year reign. His 62-year-old son will reign until 1912 as Frederik VIII.
The British battleship H.M.S. Dreadnought launched February 10 has ten 12-inch guns—the first battleship whose guns are all so large and are mounted on movable turrets that permit the vessel to fire in any direction without having to turn the ship. Former first lord of the Admiralty William W. Palmer, 2nd earl of Selborne, has helped to initiate the rebuilding of the Royal Navy; First Sea Lord John Arbuthnot "Jacky" Fisher, 65, 1st Baron Fisher of Kilverstone, has stolen credit for the design of the great ship, whose powerful steam turbines enable her to outdistance anything she cannot outfight, carries a crew of 773, and makes all other fighting ships obsolete (see 1914). Fisher takes the name dreadnought from his family crest. Berlin decides in May to increase tonnages of German battleships, add six cruisers to the fleet, and widen the Kiel Canal to permit passage of larger ships (see Tirpitz, 1900). Other nations follow suit, even countries such as Chile and the Ottoman Empire whose navies have been small.
The British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey, 44, assumes a "moral obligation" to support France in the event of a German attack, but the cabinet will not learn of his pledge to the French until 1911.
Liverpool lawyer Frederick E. (Edwin) Smith, 33, wins election to Parliament, gives his maiden speech March 12, attracts notice with his brilliant use of invective, and will soon become a leader of the Conservative Party.
The 10¢ monthly magazine Mother Earth begins publication at New York in March under the direction of anarchist Emma Goldman, now 37, with Alexander Berkman, now 35, who has just been released from prison after serving time for trying to murder industrialist Henry Clay Frick in the Homestead Strike of 1892 (see 1917).
Anarchist Johann Most dies at Cincinnati March 17 at age 60 while on a lecture tour, having attracted followers such as Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. He has been imprisoned many times for his statements (but never for any acts).
Portugal's Carlos I appoints João Franco prime minister in May and soon permits him to assume dictatorial powers while he devotes himself to frivolity (see 1902). A series of strikes and revolts have prompted the appointment, and although the dictator effects some reforms his coercive policies arouse strong opposition (see 1908).
Russia's Nicholas II appoints Pyotr (or Petr) Arkadevich Stolypin, 44, prime minister July 8 as demands increase for a government by law instead of by fiat (see revolution, 1905). Stolypin is a nobleman from an old landowning family, and landowners have resisted efforts to deprive them of their rights and privileges, but Stolypin has more pragmatic ideas (see 1911). The czar grants universal male suffrage May 24, but he rejects the Duma's suggestion that he grant amnesty to political prisoners. The Duma is dissolved July 21 and martial law declared.
Popular disturbances in Persia force the Kajar shah Muzaffar-ad-Din to convene a Majlis (National Consultative Assembly) in October. The court's corruption, the shah's erratic rule, and his failure to deal effectively with the nation's financial crisis have provoked mounting unrest, and in December he grants a constitution modeled on that of Belgium (see 1907).
London forces Constantinople to cede the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt.
The sultan of Morocco complains to Paris following encroachments on his territory by Gen. Louis-H.-G. Lyautey, now 51, who has subdued the tribes on the Algerian-Moroccan border in order to round off the frontier, but the sultan accepts French and Spanish control of reforms in his country following the Algeciras Conference, at which France and Spain have agreed to reaffirm Morocco's independence and integrity (see 1904). The country will nevertheless be the scene of international crises for years to come as Lyautey continues to push Algeria's frontier westward (see 1908).
A Tripartite Pact signed July 4 declares the independence of Ethiopia but divides the country into British, French, and Italian spheres of influence (see 1896; 1934).
Mary, Baroness Curzon, former vicereine of India, dies of a heart attack at Carlton House Terrace, London, July 18 at age 36—7 months after returning to England. Her years in the tropics with an insensitive husband have undermined her health; politician Gathorne Gathorne-Hardy, 1st earl of Cranbrook, dies at Hemsted Park, Kent, October 30 at age 92.
Japanese authorities abort an anarchist plot to assassinate the emperor. Foreign minister Takaaki Kato, 46, resigns in protest against the nationalization of Japan's railroads (he began his career with Mitsubishi, whose executives backed him in his career as he became ambassador to Britain). Kato will be reappointed ambassador to the court of St. James in 1908 and become foreign minister for a third time in 1913 (he held the position for a few months in 1900). Army chief of staff Gen. Gentaro Kodama dies at Tokyo July 23 at age 54.
Former Argentine president Bartolomé Mitre dies at his native Buenos Aires January 18 at age 84.
Cuba has another revolution as Liberals contest the reelection of President Tomás Estrada Palma (see 1902); President Roosevelt is unable to resolve the dispute, Estrada Palma resigns in September, U.S. forces occupy Cuba for a second time beginning September 29, and a provisional government takes power with U.S. administrator Charles Magoon heading a body of Cuban civilians under the Cuban flag and Cuban constitution. An advisory law commission works to revise electoral procedures (see 1909).
Nicaragua's president José Santos Zelaya invades Honduras, overthrows her government, tries to foment a revolution in El Salvador, and brings all of Central America to the brink of war (see 1893). Zelaya has refused to send delegates to a meeting convened at San José, Costa Rica, to maintain peace in the region, and his actions lead Mexico and the United States to intervene (see 1907).
Former Confederate Army general Joseph "Fighting Joe" Wheeler dies at Brooklyn, N.Y., January 25 at age 69 (he served with the U.S. Army in the Spanish-American War at San Juan and Las Guasimas); former Union Army general John McA. Schofield dies at St. Augustine, Florida, March 4 at age 74; former Union Army general-political leader-editor Carl Schurz at New York May 14 at age 77; former Union Army general William R. Shafter at Bakersfield, California, November 12 at age 71.
Wisconsin's governor Robert M. (Marion) La Follette, 51, resigns to enter the U.S. Senate and fight for the progressive ideas that he has pioneered in his state. A Republican who lost his seat in Congress 16 years ago as voters reacted against the McKinley Tariff Act of 1890, reformer La Follette has opposed his party's bosses, campaigning against bribery and corruption; elected governor in 1900 and reelected in 1902, he has instituted a system of direct primary elections, recruited expert advisers from the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, and will serve in the Senate until his death in 1925.
The U.S. Supreme Court grants a stay of execution to convicted black rapist Ed Johnson March 18 and agrees to hear an appeal on grounds that the young black man's right to a fair trial had been violated. An all-white jury has convicted the youth at Chattanooga, Tenn.; local whites consider the high court's ruling an unwarranted federal interference, a lynch mob breaks into the jail where Johnson is confined March 19, parades him through the streets and hangs him from a metal girder on the Walnut Street Bridge across the Tennessee River after he shouts, "God bless you all—I am innocent!" The mob begins shooting at him, a stray bullet severs the rope, Johnson's body falls to the bridge, and one of the men in the lynch mob puts his gun to Johnson's head and fires five times. The Supreme Court responds by conducting its first criminal trial (there will not be another in this century). It finds sheriff Joseph F. Shipp, other local law-enforcement officials, and some members of the lynch mob guilty of contempt of court, and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes rebukes the Chattanooga criminal justice system, calling Johnson's trial "a shameful attempt at justice." Johnson will be cleared of rape charges in February 2000.
Brownsville, Texas, has a race riot following an August 13 incident. A few members of a crack all-black infantry battalion stationed on the outskirts of town 19 days earlier have allegedly shot up the town of 7,000. One white resident was killed in a burst of gunfire, another wounded, and a woman raped. The townspeople make reprisals, President Roosevelt gives orders November 6 that three companies of black troops (167 men) be given dishonorable discharges for conspiring to remain silent, but evidence will emerge that "evidence" in the form of spent shells was planted in an effort to frame the soldiers.
Atlanta, Georgia, has a race riot September 22 as a spinoff of the Democratic Party feeds virulent white fear and resentment. The city has been noted as a bulwark of racial amity, but sensationalist press accounts create hysteria among white men about black sexuality. A mob armed with guns, clubs, knives, and bricks takes to the streets in the downtown Five Poins area; white men pull black men and women from streetcars, accost innocent people, kill at least 20 blacks at random, and mutilate and otherwise injure scores of others until the state militia is called in to restore order (although the militiamen sometimes subject only blacks to the "rule of law".)
Articles exposing the exploitation of workers in the Belgian Congo begin appearing in Everybody's Magazine (see 1903). Pennsylvania-born journalist-turned-sociologist Robert Ezra Parker, 42, received his Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg 2 years ago. He was asked to become secretary of the Congo Reform Association, has visited Africa to study the situation firsthand, and will continue publishing his findings next year. Leopold II of the Belgians has since 1885 had workers beaten or whipped to death for failing to meet rigid ivory and rubber production quotas, as many as 8 million have died from diseases introduced by Europeans or from famine as Leopold's army appropriated food and crops while destroying fields and villages; the king has taken some 220 million francs in profits from the Congo, using the money to erect monuments and triumphal arches, build museums, and buy costly villas and dresses for his teenage mistress Caroline (a former call girl) (see 1908).
Johannesburg lawyer Mohandas K. Gandhi, 37, speaks at a mass meeting in the Empire Theater September 11 and launches a campaign of nonviolent resistance (satyagraha) to protest discrimination against Indians. Gandhi has been in racially-segregated South Africa since 1893 (see 1913; African National Congress, 1912).
Finland grants women the right to vote on the same basis as men March 7, becoming the first European nation to do so (see New Zealand, 1898); all men and women 24 and older are enfranchised except those supported by the state (see 1907; Norway, 1913).
French suffragists demand a reduction in taxes so that deputies opposed to letting women vote will receive no salaries from the state.
Suffragist Susan B. Anthony dies at Rochester, N.Y., March 13 at age 86. Her niece the Rev. Anna Howard Shaw delivers her eulogy, hailing the work that Anthony has done to advance the cause of woman suffrage.
Britain's Labour Party calls for woman suffrage April 17. A London Daily Mail writer coins the term "suffragettes" for women such as Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel and (Estelle) Sylvia, 24, who campaign for woman suffrage (see 1905). Mrs. Pankhurst has said January 31 that women must become violent and risk arrest if they are to achieve their goals. Labour Party leader Keir Hardie introduces London barrister Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, 35, and his wife, Emmeline, 39, to the Pankhursts, and they offer their support. Annie Kenney interrupts a speech by the prime minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and is arrested again. Police jail suffragettes October 24, and they refuse meals beginning December 25 (see 1912).
San Francisco's board of education orders segregation of Asian children in city schools 6 months after the April earthquake and fire that devastate the city. The Japanese ambassador registers an emphatic protest October 25, and the order is rescinded (see Hayashi, 1907).
Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, now 34, completes the first sea voyage through the Northwest Passage (see 1854); a veteran of the 1897-1899 Gerlache de Gomery expedition to the Antarctic, Amundsen skipped port 3 years ago to escape creditors trying to stop his Arctic expedition with six crewmen aboard the converted 47-ton herring sloop Gjöa, and his voyage around the northern Canadian coast to the Yukon has taken all this time (see Antarctic, 1911).
Explorer-mountaineer Luigi, duc d'Abruzzi, becomes the first European to scale the highest peaks in east Africa's Ruwenzori Range (see 1899). His expedition studies the geology, glaciology, and topography of the mountains, mapping them and giving names (some of them African, some European) to the major summits, glaciers, and passes (see 1909).
British Army veteran Col. Percy (Harrison) Fawcett, 39, arrives at La Paz, Bolivia, in June on a commission from the Royal Geographical Society to define the boundary between Bolivia and Brazil. Fawcett has served with the Royal Artillery in Ceylon and worked for the secret service in North Africa. He outfits the first of seven expeditions that he will make into the jungle and discovers the rigors of dealing with disease, hostile natives, poisonous insects, and snakes.
Congress appropriates $2.5 million for relief following the April 18 San Francisco earthquake after rejecting offers of foreign aid. New York bankers loan hundreds of millions to rebuild the city (see 1907).
San Francisco banker A. P. (Amadeo Peter) Giannini, 35, hitches a team of horses to a borrowed produce wagon and manages to rescue the gold and securities in his vault. Giannini built his stepfather's wholesale produce business into the largest in the city, sold out his share in 1901, founded his Bank of Italy in 1904, and has been making loans to small farmers and businessmen. Having defied banking orthodoxy by actively soliciting customers, he loads $2 million in gold, coins, and securities onto his wagon bed, covers it all with produce, and heads home. Many other bankers want to remain shut until they have had a chance to sort out the damage, but Giannini sets up shop on the docks near North Beach and extends credit "on a face and a signature" to almost any small businessman or individual; given that he is the only banker in town with enough capital to make loans for rebuilding, Giannini's reliance on gold reserves will enable him to survive next year's financial panic (see Bank of America, 1928).
Labor leader George E. McNeill dies at Somerville, Mass., May 19 at age 68, having championed the 8-hour day.
Australia removes her last protective tariffs, contributing to a slowdown in manufacturing that was predicted by those opposed to federation; gold mining also declines, but wheat growing expands at a rapid pace.
Diamond mining magnate Alfred Beit dies a bachelor at his palatial Park Lane, London, residence July 17 at age 53, having left Johannesburg in 1908 following a stroke. He leaves vast bequests to fund university education in South Africa, Rhodesia, Britain, and Germany; his brother Otto, 41, retires with a large fortune to devote his efforts to developing the Rhodes Trust and other institutions.
Manual of Political Economics (Manuale d'economia politica) by Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, 58, at Switzerland's University of Lausanne elucidates a theory of pure economics with an analysis of ophelimity (the power to give satisfaction). The optimum allocation of society's resources cannot be attained, he says, so long as it is possible to make at least one individual better off (in his or her own estimation) while keeping others as they were before (in their own estimation).
Miner Harry Orchard confesses to last year's bombing that killed former Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg and others after interrogation by the Pinkerton National Detective Agency's western branch manager James McParland, who has made a career of subverting unions from within or acting as agent provacateur. McParland has promised him a reprieve from the hangman if he confessed, but Orchard claims that he was the hit-man for William Dudley "Big Bill" Haywood, 38, a miner since age 15 who helped found the IWW last year. Orchard also implicates IWW president Charles H. Moyer and miner-turned-merchant George A. Pettbone, who has advised the union. All three men are kidnapped at Denver in a plot hatched by McParland with Idaho's governor Frank Gooding and prosecutor James Hawley, who are in the pay of Idaho mining companies, IWW lawyers demand the men's release, Supreme Court justices pay a courtesy call on the White House, where President Roosevelt reads a letter calling his political antagonist Edward H. Harriman of the Union Pacific Railroad "at least as undesirable a citizen as [Eugene] Debs, or Moyer, or Heywood," the president thus overrides the presumption of innocence, and the Supreme Court rules December 3 that it was legal to extradite the IWW leaders from Colorado to Idaho to stand trial for murder (see 1907).
J. P. Morgan and steel magnate John W. Gates purchase Tennessee Coal & Iron Co., whose iron ore deposits are second in size only to those of United States Steel (see 1898; 1907).
Gary, Indiana, has its beginnings as United States Steel Corp. breaks ground for a new mill town on Lake Michigan. The town will be named to honor Big Steel's chairman Elbert Henry Gary, 60.
The Amalgamated Copper Co. headed by Standard Oil Co. chairman Henry H. Rogers acquires United Mining Co. and becomes the world's largest copper-mining concern.
E. I. du Pont de Nemours gains a near-monopoly in the U.S. powder industry (see 1902). Having bought up or otherwise absorbed the other members of the 34-year-old Gunpowder Trade Association (Powder Trust), it produces 100 percent of the privately-made smokeless powder, 80 percent of all saltpeter blasting powder, 75 percent of all black sporting powder, 72.5 percent of all dynamite, and 64.4 percent of all U.S.-made soda blasting powder. The Delaware legislature elects Henry Algernon du Pont to the U.S. Senate, where he will serve until 1917 (see 1915).
President Roosevelt appoints Secretary of the Navy Charles J. Bonaparte attorney general; now 55, Bonaparte uses the Sherman Act of 1890 to press antitrust suits aimed at breaking up many of the nation's monopolies, and he will file suit next year against E. I. du Pont de Nemours, whose officers will be found guilty in 1911 of conspiring to restrain trade in the explosives industry.
German cannon maker's daughter Bertha Krupp, 20, marries industrialist Gustav von Bohlen und Halbach, 34, who obtains an imperial edict permitting him to call himself "Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach" (see "Big Bertha," 1914).
Massachusetts-born speculator Jesse L. (Lauriston) Livermore, 29, arrives at New York with $2,500 he has made working in Boston, Chicago, and Denver bucket shops (crooked investment houses that find various ways to bilk their customers) (see 1907).
Wall Street's Dow Jones Industrial Average closes above 100 for the first time January 12, up from 40.94 when it was created in 1896, but it closes December 31 at 94.35, down from 96.20 at the end of 1905.
Fuller Brush Co. has its beginnings January 1 in a firm founded at Hartford, Conn., by Nova Scotia-born merchant Alfred Carl Fuller, 21. Having been fired from his first three jobs, Fuller quits his job as salesman for a Somerville, Mass., brush company, starts his own company with $375 in savings, develops a machine for making twisted-wire brushes, produces them at night in the basement of his sister's home, sells them door-to-door by day, builds a line of brushes with specific uses, and has sales of $8,500 in his first year (see 1910).
Merchant and philanthropist Marshall Field dies at New York January 16 at age 71, leaving an estate valued at $125 million.
Sears, Roebuck opens a large Chicago plant to produce and distribute goods designed for mail-order sales (see 1904; 1907).
New York's Tiffany & Co. moves into a new building at Fifth Avenue and 37th Street, where it will remain until it moves to 57th Street in 1940.
A 3-day Senate speech on railroad rates in April by the junior senator from Wisconsin Robert M. "Fighting Bob" La Follette elicits the comment from Pennsylvania Railroad president Alexander Johnston Cassatt, "I have for several years believed that the national government, through the Interstate Commerce Commission, ought to be in a position to fix railroad rates." Cassatt dies of heart disease at his Philadelphia home in Rittenhouse Square December 28 at age 67 as revelations come to light about graft among some of his company officials.
The Hepburn Act signed into law by President Roosevelt June 29 extends the jurisdiction of the Interstate Commerce Commission to cover express companies, sleeping cars, bridges, terminals, and ferries (see Elkins Act, 1903). It gives the ICC authority to change railroad rates it considers unreasonable pending resolution of lawsuits filed by the railroads. Sen. Benjamin R. Tillman, now 58, has been among the bill's strongest supporters.
Chinese engineers complete a railroad from Hankow to a point near Beijing (Peking). Provincial offical Zhang Zhidong (Chang Chih-tung), now 68, proposed construction of the line in 1889 when he was transferred from Hupeh to Hunan.
Mexican engineers complete the $50 million, 190-mile Tehuantepec National Railroad across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec between Salina Cruz and Puerto Mexico, reducing the distance from California to East Coast markets by 4,330 miles and delivery time to 30 days (see transcontinental railroad, 1869; Panama Canal, 1914).
An electrically-powered New York Central locomotive pulls a train out of Grand Central Station September 30, and the Central begins running electrically powered multiple-unit suburban trains in December (see 1903; 1907). Electrifying the tracks beneath Park Avenue not only makes the tunnel to Grand Central safer but also puts an end to the sparks, smoke, and soot that have emanated through grilles to the avenue above.
The first tunnels under the Hudson River come together October 6 to permit commuter trains to operate between Hoboken, N.J., and Morton Street in New York's Greenwich Village (see 1904). Two single-track tubes, each more than a mile long, connect Jersey City with Manhattan (see 1908; Penn Station, 1910).
A trolley tunnel financed by August Belmont II opens in December under the East River to link Bowling Green with Brooklyn's Joralemon Street and reduce the need for ferries.
Tugboat mogul Capt. Michael Moran dies at his Brooklyn, N.Y., home June 28 at age 72, having started his fleet in 1863 by buying a half interest in the 42-ton, 60-foot tugboat Ida Miller. The military used some Moran tugboats in 1898 as dispatch runners between Florida and the U.S. fleet off Cuba. Moran's family business will become the largest of the Port of New York's towing companies.
The U.S. War Department begins excavation of the Panama Canal (see 1903; 1914; medicine, 1904; Goethals, 1907).
Rolls-Royce, Ltd., is incorporated March 16 by English balloonist and motoring enthusiast Charles Stewart Rolls, 29, son of Lord Llangattock, and automaker (Frederick) Henry Royce, 43, who has produced an almost silent-running motorcar with a six-cylinder engine that produces from 40 to 50 horsepower. Royce introduced the machine in April 1904 and C. S. Rolls and Co. has sold the F. H. Royce and Co. car on an exclusive basis for nearly 2 years; it has nickel-plated brightwork, and Rolls executive Claude Johnson dubs it the Silver Ghost. He demonstrates its durability with a test, and he promotes it with the slogan, "The Best Car in the World." The new firm will move from Manchester to Derby in 1908, and it will discontinue all previous models to concentrate on the Silver Ghost, a machine that has been driven "14,371 miles nonstop," has proved that a gasoline-powered car can run as smoothly as a steam-driven car, and will remain in production for 19 years while Rolls-Royce, Ltd., develops a reputation for making the world's most luxurious motorcars.
England's Rover Co. produces a six-horsepower four-wheel motorcar in a new factory at Longbridge on the outskirts of Birmingham (see 1904). The plant will continue to turn out cars for more than 90 years as Rovers develop a reputation for reliability that will make them popular with physicians and police departments (see Land-Rover, 1948).
A Stanley Steamer reaches a speed of 127.7 miles per hour at Ormond Beach, Florida, but its quiet, non-polluting external combustion engine requires a 30-minute warm-up and must take on fresh water every 20 miles (see 1899).
W. C. Durant's Buick Co. produces 2,295 motorcars, up from no more than 28 in 1904 (see 1905; General Motors, 1908).
The North American Review reports that more Americans have been killed by motorcars in 5 months than died in the Spanish-American War.
Princeton University president (Thomas) Woodrow Wilson, 49, says of the motorcar, "Nothing has spread socialistic feeling in this country more than the use of the automobile. To the countryman, they are a picture of the arrogance of wealth, with all its independence and carelessness" (but see 1909).
The Mack truck is introduced by former Brooklyn, N.Y., wagon builders John, William, and Augustus Mack, who have moved to Allentown, Pa., and produced a 10-ton vehicle of considerable power that begins a reputation for "built like a Mack truck" bulldog stamina.
Aviation pioneer John J. Montgomery receives a patent September 18 for improvements to "aeroplanes," including "parabolically" curved (cambered) wings (see 1883). Now 48, Montgomery made highly publicized flights early last year and has sold the U.S. government on using his wings for Wright-built aircraft.
The first aircraft to take off under its own power and fly an appreciable distance taxis for 100 meters across a field at Bagatelle, outside Paris, October 23 and lifts off, flying a few meters above the ground for 60 meters in 7 seconds to win the 3,000-franc Archdeacon prize put up by the Aero-Club de France founded in 1898. Aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont has failed in a July attempt to fly a heavier-than-air craft (see 1903), but he achieved some success September 7 when the wheels of his 14-BIS lifted off for a moment at Bagatele in Paris, he reached a height of one meter there September 13, and on November 12 he travels 220 meters in 21 seconds at a height of six meters flying a machine of his own design that resembles a box kite. Santos-Dumont has solved the problem of making a heavier-than-air machine take off by its own means and establishes the world's first aviation record, achieving a feat that the Wright brothers have not yet accomplished.
Textile machine inventor Samuel C. Lister, 1st Baron Masham, dies at Swinton Park, Yorkshire, February 2 at age 91; gunsmith Daniel Wesson of Smith & Wesson Co. at Springfield, Mass., August 4 at age 81.
A U.S. patent issued November 6 to London-born metallurgist Henry Livingstone Sulman, 45, covers a flotation process that Sulman has developed with H. F. K. Picard for concentrating ores preliminary to extraction of their metal, grinding the crude ore to a fine powder, mixing it with water, adding frothing reagents (typically oil or fatty acids) plus collecting reagents. Blowing air through the mixture makes the mineral particles cling to the bubbles that rise from the froth while the waste material (gangue) sinks to the bottom. Sulman has worked earlier on methods (such as treatment with cyanogen bromide) for extracting gold.
The third law of thermodynamics formulated by German chemist Walther H. (Herman) Nernst, 42, states that the specific heats of ordered solids at the absolute zero of temperature (-273.15° C.) become zero themselves. A professor at the University of Berlin, Nernst postulates that entropy has an absolute value, that crystalline materials have zero entropy at absolute zero, and that at temperatures above absolute zero all matter tends toward random motion and to dissipate; since extracting energy from a system becomes more and more difficult as that system approaches absolute zero, Nernst's theorem suggests the impossibility of reaching absolute zero, but his discovery will make it possible to calculate the actual values of constants that characterize chemical reactions (see Giauque, 1927; technology [Haber], 1908).
Astronomer and aviation pioneer Samuel P. Langley dies at Aiken, S.C., February 27 at age 71.
Italian-born Russian botanist Mikhail Semionovich Tsvett, 34, separates plant pigments by extracting them from leaves with ether and alcohol and then percolating the solution through a column of calcium carbonate. The technique he has invented as a University of Warsaw laboratory assistant will be called chromatography, and he will go on to discover new forms of chlorophyll, coining the term carotenoids.
Danish philologist Johan Ludvig Heiberg, 52, visits the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Constantinople and discovers a prayer book whose text overlies what he recognizes as a copy of a treatise left by the mathematician Archimedes at his death in 212 B.C. (see 1200). Mold has obliterated some parts of the palimpsest, but Heiberg has the pages photographed, studies the photographs under a microscope, transcribes as much as he can make out, and publishes his transcription. The original palimpsest will disappear from the library, having probably been stolen (see 1930).
A monograph by Vermont-born Bryn Mawr geneticist Nettie Maria Stevens, 45, identifies the X and Y chromosomes, accurately pinpointing their role in determining the sex of an embryo (an XX combination produces a female, XY a male) (see McClung, 1901; Sutton, 1902). Stevens entered Stanford at age 35, received her bachelor's degree only 6 years ago, received her Ph.D from Bryn Mawr in 1903, and collaborated with Thomas Hunt Morgan 2 years ago on a paper about cytology and the regenerative process (see Morgan, 1909). Based on experiments with the Tenebrio molitor beetle, her paper establishes a relationship between cytology and heredity, but its implicit suggestion that a father "allows" the birth of a daughter by contributing his X chromosome offends some men; a similar work published independently and simultaneously by Stevens's former colleague Edmund Beecher Wilson is less specific in defining X and Y chromosomes.
Physicist Ludwig Boltzmann dies at Duino, Italy, September 5 at age 62, having worked to develop the science of statistical mechanics to explain and predict how the mass, charge, structure, and other properties of atoms determine the visible properties (e.g. diffusion, thermal conductivity, and viscosity) of matter. The symbol k will be called the "Boltzmann constant"; it has dimensions of energy per degree of temperature and occurs in nearly every statistical formulation of physics, whether classical or quantum.
The Great American Fraud by New York journalist Samuel Hopkins Adams, 35, exposes the fraudulent claims and hazardous ingredients of U.S. patent medicines. The book has been serialized in Collier's. The Pure Food and Drug Act signed into law by President Roosevelt June 30 prohibits "the importation and use of opium for other than medicinal purposes" (see Massachusetts law, 1905). The Senate has passed the Heyburn Bill February 21 by a 63 to 4 vote following pressure by the 59-year-old American Medical Association, and the House has approved it 240 to 17 June 23, but although the new law requires patent medicines to list their ingredients many widely advertised over-the-counter drugs continue to contain opium and its derivatives (see 1908; Harrison Act, 1914).
Psychology of Dementia Praecox by Swiss psychologist Carl (Gustav) Jung, 31, breaks new ground. Jung meets Sigmund Freud for the first time and has doubts as to the sexual aspects of Freud's theory of psychoanalysis (see 1895; 1908).
The Wasserman test developed by German physician August Wasserman, 40, and (independently) by Hungarian physician Lazlo Detre is a specific blood test for syphilis based on immunology discoveries by Belgian bacteriologist Jules (Jean Baptiste Vincent) Bordet, 36. The test will be administered routinely to applicants for marriage licenses (see 1938). Its use in St. Louis and New York indicates that 10 percent of pregnant married women are actively syphilitic and 5 to 6 percent of infants born to poor families are congenitally syphilitic (see Ehrlich, 1909).
Jules Bordet develops a vaccine against the whooping cough bacillus.
The treatise "Mechanism of Gas Exchange in Lungs" by Danish physiologist August Krogh, 31, shows that the capillaries (small blood vessels) in the lungs dilate or contract in proportion to the blood requirement of the lung tissues, and active muscles have larger numbers of open capillaries than less active ones.
Austrian pediatrician Clemens (Freiherr) von Pirquet, 32, notices that patients who have received injections of horse serum or smallpox vaccine generally have quicker and more severe reactions to second injections. He coins the word allergy, and it begins to replace the word anaphylaxis introduced by physiologist Charles Richet in 1902. Pirquet works to develop a test for tuberculosis (see 1909).
Ferdinand-Isidore Widal recognizes the retention of sodium chloride in patients with cardiac edema and nephritis (kidney inflammation); now 44, he recommends low-salt or salt-free diets for both diseases.
Ohio-born pathologist Howard Taylor Ricketts, 35, demonstrates in the spring that Rocky Mountain spotted fever can be transmitted by the bite of a cattle tick; he will describe the causative organism in 1908, and the toxin spread by ticks will be called Rickettsia (see rickettsialpox, 1944).
The French Army restores Capt. Dreyfus to rank and gives him the Légion d'Honneur July 12 following vindication of his case (see politics, 1898). Now 47, Dreyfus will live until 1935, but his case has left the bitter taint of anti-Semitism in France.
The American Jewish Committee is founded by U.S. Jews, mostly of German descent, to protect the civil and religious rights of Jews and to fight prejudice.
The Muslim League is founded by the 29-year-old Aga Khan (Aga sultan Sir Mahomed Shah) to safeguard the rights of Muslims in predominantly Hindu India. It will revise its goal in 1913 to favor self-government for India.
Pentecostalism establishes itself in April at Los Angeles, where Louisiana-born evangelist William J. (Joseph) Seymour, 36, has taken over a rundown building in Azusa Street and uses it for mass baptisms, attracting blacks like himself to have their souls "cleansed" by God (see Parham, 1900). Left blind in one eye by an attack of smallpox at Cincinnati, Seymour took offense at the racism of Charles Fox Parham, who did not permit blacks in his congregations. Parham hears of the revivalist meetings, travels to Los Angeles, denounces Seymour for involvement in spiritualism and hypnotism, abandons any leadership role, and will oppose efforts to organize Pentecostal churches. Seymour's baptismal rite is believed to prepare recipients for evangelism, and believers in Christ's imminent return will spread the message of "personal Pentecosts" throughout the world, focusing on Hebrews 1:8 and saying that they "take God at His word" and recognize the presence of the Holy Spirit (see Durham, 1911).
Utah authorities charge Mormon leader Joseph F. Smith with polygamy November 23 after his fifth wife gives birth to his 43rd child. Descended from the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Smith pleads guilty and pays $300, the maximum fine, after telling the Salt Lake City district judge that he considers each of his marriages to be a solemn contract.
British-controlled Egypt establishes a ministry of education with jurist Sa'd Zaghlul, 49, as minister. A son-in-law of the prime minister Mustafa Fahmi, Zaghlul will hold the post until 1910.
Former educator John Eaton dies at Washington, D.C., February 9 at age 76, having served as U.S. commissioner of education from 1870 to 1886 and been first U.S. superintendent of schools in Puerto Rico; former Harvard Law School dean Christopher C. Langdell dies at Cambridge, Mass., July 6 at age 80; former Cheltenham Ladies College headmistress Dorothea Beale dies at age 75, leaving an enormous financial legacy to the school that she headed beginning in 1858 (she has invested her money shrewdly while roaming the school grounds on her tricycle, asking passersby to push her up hills).
"The City That Was" by Oneida, N.Y.-born New York Sun reporter William Henry "Will" Irwin, 32, is an extensive chronicle of the earthquake and fire that devastate San Francisco in early April.
"The men with the muckrakes are often indispensable to the well-being of society," says President Roosevelt April 14 in an address to the Gridiron Club at Washington, D.C., "but only if they know when to stop raking the muck and to look upward . . . to the crown of worthy endeavor." Roosevelt has in mind John Bunyan's reference in Pilgrim's Progress (1684) to "a man who could look no way but downwards, with a muckrake in his hand," and has in mind also such magazines as McClure's (1902, 1905) and books such as The Pit (1903) and The Jungle (1905).
Newspaper publisher James E. Scripps dies at Detroit May 29 at age 71.
The Sunday Times of Johannesburg begins publication in South Africa.
International News Service (INS) is founded by William Randolph Hearst, whose wire service will compete with the AP founded in 1848 (see Brisbane, 1897; United Press, 1907).
Radio pioneer Aleksandr Popov dies at St. Petersburg January 13 (December 31, 1905, on the Russian calendar) at age 46, having been the first to use an antenna in transmitting and receiving radio waves.
Danish laboratory apprentice Peter Laurits Jensen, 20, links a microphone and a transmitter circuit as a sending apparatus and creates a receiver by connecting a crystal detector to a grounded telegraph ticker. Jensen has worked since 1903 for radio pioneer Valdemar Poulsen, who has developed an improved transmitter for generating continuous signals by means of an arc that burns in an atmosphere of hydrogen in a strong transverse magnetic field, but Poulsen's transmitter has been unreliable. Jensen will sell U.S. rights to his patents in 1909 to the California-based Poulsen Wireless Telephone and Telegraph Co. (later the Federal Telegraph Co.) and emigrate to America (see 1913).
New York Telephone Co. advertises in September that the city has 269,364 phones, a number two and a half times as large as London's.
German academic Arthur Korn, 36, uses "telephotography" October 17 to transmit a photographic image more than 1,000 miles (see Caselli, 1862). He invented a method in 1902 for manually breaking down and transmitting still photographs over electric wires and employed his technique 2 years ago to send a photograph by telegraph from Munich to Nüremberg and back, advancing development of the fax machine (see Belin, 1907).
The International Radio Telegraph Convention at Berlin adopts the distress call SOS (dot dot dot dash dash dash dot dot dot) to replace the CQD (Stop Sending and Listen) call adopted 2 years ago by Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. and agrees to drop the CQD call completely after 1912. Marconi will have acquired most of its competitors by 1913 and be operating 60 land stations across America, having installed its equipment on more than 500 steamships (see RCA, 1919).
The first radio broadcast of voice and music booms out of Brant Rock, Mass., Christmas Eve and is picked up by ships within a radius of several hundred miles. Quebec-born engineer Reginald A. (Aubrey) Fessenden, now 40, worked for Thomas A. Edison at Orange, N.J., in the late 1880s and evolved an "electrostatic doublet theory" of cohesion and elasticity based on electricity rather than the generally accepted gravitational force. He patented a high-frequency alternator in 1901 that generates a continuous wave instead of the intermittent damped-spark impulses now being used for transmission of wireless signals. He organized the National Electric Signalling Corp. in 1902 to sponsor his experiments; he has engaged Swedish-born General Electric Co. engineer Ernst (Frederik Werner) Alexanderson, 28, to build a large 80-kilohertz alternator for the station he has set up at Brant Rock. The alternator develops a frequency of 50,000 cycles, Fessenden's equipment features a receiver circuit of his own invention that blends an incoming radio frequency signal with another, slightly different, signal produced locally to yield a beat frequency (number of vibrations or oscillations per unit of time) in the audible range, and this heterodyne circuit will be generally adopted in radio broadcasting. By year's end Fessenden has established two-way wireless telegraphic communication between Brant Rock and Machrihanish, Scotland (see De Forest, 1909; Armstrong's superheterodyne, 1917; RCA, 1919).
New York's Pierpont Morgan Library is completed in Italianate marble style to designs by McKim, Mead & White adjacent to J. P. Morgan's brownstone in East 36th Street to house the banker's prodigious collection of rare books, manuscripts, documents, and incunabula (books printed before 1501). Imported works of art are subject to a 20 percent duty under terms of the 1897 Revenue Act (books and manuscripts are exempt if they are intended for educational, philosophical, religious, or scientific purposes), so most of Morgan's paintings and sculpture remain in England, but he has engaged former Princeton University clerk Belle Greene (originally Greener), now 26, as his librarian upon the recommendation of his scholarly nephew Junius Spencer Morgan. She claimed to be 22 when he hired her late last year, Morgan does not know that the olive-skinned young woman's father, Richard Greener, was the first black to be graduated from Harvard, and she will prove invaluable to him in acquiring more European art treasures. The library will be opened to the public in 1924, a north wing will enlarge it in 1962, and it will be further enlarged in 1976.
A Manual of Style published by the University of Chicago will go through 14 editions in this century and a 15th early in the 21st century as it becomes virtually a bible of printing style, grammar, and punctuation for generations of copy editors and proofreaders. "Read everything as if you yourself were the author, and your reputation and fortune depended upon its accuracy," it says. "Don't stultify yourself and discredit the office by asking foolish questions on the proof."
Nonfiction: The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Brooks Adams, now 68, whose classic autobiographical work, privately printed, will be published in 1918 to acquaint the world with its author's dynamic theory of history; Inquiry into Sense Psychology (Untersuchungen zur Sinnespscychologie) by Franz Brentano; The Idea of Phenomenology (Die Idee der Phänomenologie) by Moravian-born German philosopher Edmund Husserl, 47, who has been influenced by Brentano; The Development of the Organization and Constitution of German Cities (Die Entwicklung des deutschen Städtewesens) by Berlin-born German political theorist and legal expert Hugo Preuss, 45; The Will to Power (Der Wille zur Macht) by the late Friedrich Nietzsche, whose work has been grossly distorted by his sister Elisabeth (Förster-Nietzsche) and is published in two volumes (a one-volume edition appeared 5 years ago); The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce, now 64, who is the Hearst correspondent at Washington, D.C.: "Admiration: our polite recognition of another's resemblance of ourselves"; "Beauty: the power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband"; "Bore: a person who talks when you wish him to listen"; "Cynic: a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be"; "Destiny: a tyrant's authority for crime and a fool's excuse for failure"; "Epitaph: an inscription on a tomb, showing that virtues acquired by death have a strong retroactive effect"; "Edible: good to eat, and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm"; "History: an account mostly false, of events unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools"; "Once: enough"; "Politics: the conduct of public affairs for private advantage."
Fiction: The City of the Yellow Devil (Gorod Zholtogo D'yavola) by Maksim Gorky, who was imprisoned last year for his revolutionary activity but has had his sentence commuted to exile at the intervention of Western writers. Gorky has come to America to collect funds for the Bolshevik cause, but he has been ostracized since the revelation that his traveling companion was not his wife, and his novel is an attack on the American way of life; The Man of Property by English novelist John Galsworthy, 39, who introduces readers to Soames Forsyte and begins The Forsyte Saga that he will continue until 1922; Young Torless (Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Torless) by Austrian novelist Robert Musil, 25; The Tanner Children by Swiss novelist and short-story writer Robert Walser, 28; Puck of Pook's Hill by Rudyard Kipling, who will win next year's Nobel Prize for literature; The Broken Commandment (Hakai) by Japanese novelist Shimazaki Toson (Shimazaki Haruki), 34, whose autobiographical work breaks his father's commandment not to reveal that he and his family are members of Japan's outcaste burakumin group (see human rights, 1871); With Grass for Pillow (Kusamakura) and The Young Master (Botchan) by Natsume Sōseki, who makes use of his experience as a schoolteacher in the 1890s; The Four Million (stories) by O. Henry, who gains renown for "The Furnished Room" and "The Gift of the Magi"; White Fang by Jack London.
Poetry: Poems by English poet Siegfried Sassoon, 20; "The Highwayman" by English poet Alfred Noyes, 26: "The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,/ The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,/ The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,/ And the highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door"; Portage de midi by French poet Paul Claudel, 38; La Multiple Splendeur by Emile Verhaeren.
Poet Paul Laurence Dunbar dies at his native Dayton, Ohio, February 9 at age 33.
Juvenile: The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher and The Story of Miss Moppet by Beatrix Potter; The Railway Children by Edith Nesbit; The Fortunes of Philippa by English author Angela Brazil, 37.
Painting: Portrait of Gertrude Stein, Two Nudes, Seated Female Nude with Crossed Legs, The Harem, La Toilette, Woman with Loaves, Self-Portrait with a Palette, The Organ Grinder, The Flower Vendors, and Boy Leading a Horse by Pablo Picasso; Le Bonheur de Vivre and Young Sailor II by Henri Matisse; The Red Trees, The Seine at Chatou, and Dancer of the "Dead Rat" by Maurice de Vlaminck; Westminster Bridge, The Houses of Parliament, Port of London by André Derain; Olive Tree Near L'Estaque by French painter Georges Braque, 24; Street Decked Out with Flags at Le Havre by French painter Raoul Dufy, 29; At the Theater and Tragedian by Georges Rouault; Self-Portrait in Weimar by Edvard Munch; Young Men by the Sea by German painter Max Beckmann, 22; Coltaltepetl by Mexican painter Diego Rivera, 20; Large Bathers by Paul Cézanne, who dies of diabetes at Aix-en-Provence October 22 at age 67.
Sculpture: Chained Action by Aristide Maillol.
Theater: And Pippa Passes (Und Pippa tanzt!) by Gerhart Hauptmann 1/19 at Berlin's Lessingtheater; The Marquis of Bradomin (El marqués de Bradomin) by Ramón del Valle-Inclán 1/25 at Madrid's Teatro de la Primers; Lee and J. J. Shubert take over New York's huge Hippodrome on Sixth Avenue at the start of the season and use the world's largest theater to mount a three-part spectacle that includes a large band of genuine Sioux in war paint performing a Ghost Dance, a two-ring circus with clowns and a procession of elephants, and a three-scene romantic extravaganza featuring a giant water tank and hundreds of chorines costumed to represent every variety of fish; Captain Brassbound's Conversion by George Bernard Shaw 3/20 at London's Royal Court Theatre, with Shakespearean actress Ellen (Alicia) Terry, now 59 (Shaw has written it especially for her), Frederick Kerr, Edmund Gwenn; Caesar and Cleopatra by Shaw 3/31 at Berlin (in German), 10/31 at New York's New Amsterdam Theater, with Forbes Robertson, Gertrude Elliott, 49 perfs.; The Hypocrites by Henry Arthur Jones 8/30 at the Hudson Theater, with Richard Bennett, Doris Keane, 209 perfs.; Clothes by Cleveland-born playwright Avery Hopwood, 24, 9/11 at New York's Manhattan Theater, with Douglas Fairbanks, 113 perfs.; the Astor Theater opens 9/21 at 1537 Broadway (corner of 45th Street) with a revival of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (the theater will become a movie house in 1925) The Silver Box by John Galsworthy 9/25 at London's Royal Court Theatre; The Great Divide by Indiana-born poet-playwright William Vaughn Moody, 37, 10/3 at New York's Princess Theater with James Kirkwood, Alabama-born actor Henry B. Walthall, 28, Laura Hope Crews, Henry Miller (who has directed the play and makes it a success), 238 perfs.; The Three of Us by Illinois-born playwright Rachel Crothers, 28, 10/17 at the Madison Square Theater; The New York Idea by Philadelphia-born playwright Langdon (Elwyn) Mitchell (who uses the pen name John Philip Varley), 44, 11/19 at the 3-year-old Lyric Theater, with Mrs. Fiske, London-born actor George Arliss (originally Augustus George Andrews), 38, 66 perfs.; The Doctor's Dilemma by George Bernard Shaw 11/20 at London's Royal Court Theatre, with William Farren Jr., Harley Granville-Barker; Spring's Awakening (Frühlings Erwaken) by Frank Wedekind 11/20 at Berlin's Kammerspiel Deutchestheater; The Puppet Show (Balaganchik) by poet Aleksandr Blok 12/30 at St. Petersburg's Kommissarzhevskaya Theater; Caught in the Rain by William Collier and New York-born fellow actor Grant Stewart, 40, 12/31 at New York's Garrick Theater, with Collier, Stewart, 161 perfs.; Brewster's Millions by Winchell Smith and Byron Ongley (who have adapted the 1902 George Barr McCutcheon novel) 12/31 at New York's New Amsterdam Theater, with a cast that includes "George Spelvin," a name that first appeared 20 years ago in the cast list of Charles A. Gardiner's Broadway play Karl the Peddler and that Smith has used to designate a player who doubles in another role (the British equivalents of George Spelvin will be Walter Plinge, Mr. F. Anney, and Mr. Bart), 163 perfs.
Providence, R.I.-born Harvard English professor George Pierce Baker, 40, begins teaching a course in playwriting (English 47) whose 47 Workshop puts on plays for audiences.
Circus magnate James Bailey of Barnum & Bailey dies of acute erysipelas at his home near Mount Vernon, N.Y., April 11 at age 59; playwright Henrik Ibsen at Kristiania (Oslo) May 23 at age 78. A stroke in 1900 ended his career, and he is given a state funeral; tragedienne Adelaide Ristori dies at Turin October 8 at age 84.
Films: Alice Guy's The Life of Christ (La Vie du Christ). Guy this year and next will direct about 100 short films using Léon Gaumont's Chronophone, a device that synchronizes filmed images with sound recorded on wax cylinders. She will marry Gaumont cameraman Herbert Blaché next year and follow him to the United States (see Solax Co., 1910).
German-born Oshkosh, Wisconsin, clothing firm bookkeeper Carl Laemmle, 39, sees a Chicago nickelodeon on Milwaukee Avenue, recognizes its potential, uses his meager savings to convert a clothing store into a theater, paints it a brilliant white, equips it with 120 folding chairs rented from an undertaker, opens for business in February, and by year's end has opened two movie theaters, acquired a partner, and begun distributing films to other theaters in the area (see 1909).
New York's Vitagraph Studios hires local film hopeful Florence Turner, 19, as actress and wardrobe mistress at $18 per week. She will become known as the Vitagraph Girl as she stars in a series of movies.
Opera: Quattro Rusteghi (The School for Fathers) 3/19 at Munich, with music by Italian composer Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, 29; The Wreckers (Standrecht) 11/11 at Leipzig, with music by English composer Ethel Smyth, 48. Geraldine Farrar makes her Metropolitan Opera debut singing the role of Juliet in the 1867 Gounod opera Roméo et Juliette; Italian soprano Amalita Galli-Curci, 24 (or 17) makes her debut at Trani 12/26 singing the role of Gilda in the 1851 Verdi opera Rigoletto.
Librettist-playwright Giuseppe Giacosa dies at his native Colleretto Parella outside Turin September 1 at age 58.
Ballet: Newark, N.J.-born dancer-choreographer Ruth Dennis, 29, produces her first ballet, Radha, and changes her name to St. Denis. She will tour Europe with the ballet for the next 3 years (see 1914).
The Victrola introduced by the Victor Talking Machine Co. has a phonograph horn enclosed in a speaker (see "His Master's Voice," 1900). Eldridge Johnson signed up operatic tenor Enrico Caruso in 1901 and makes recordings by having Caruso sing directly into a horn while solo instrumentalists play into other horns (see 1922).
Stage musicals: Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway 1/1 at the New Amsterdam Theater, with Fay Templeton, Hammonton, N.J.-born actor Victor Moore, 29, music and lyrics by George M. Cohan, songs that include "Mary's a Grand Old Name" and the title song, 90 perfs. (Templeton plays a housemaid who scorns a fortune to marry the man she loves, but in real life she marries an industrialist and becomes one of the richest women in America); Twiddle-Twaddle 1/1 at Weber's Music Hall, New York, with Joe Weber, Trixie Friganza, book and lyrics by Edgar Smith, music by Maurice Levi, 137 perfs.; The Vanderbilt Cup 1/16 at the Broadway Theater, with Columbus, Ohio-born ingénue Elsie Janis (originally Elsie Jane Bierbower), 16, music by Robert Hood Bowers, 143 perfs.; George Washington, Jr. 2/12 at the Knickerbocker Theater, with George M. Cohan, San Francisco-born actor John Willard (originally Charles Edwin Clapp), 20, songs by Cohan that include "You're a Grand Old Flag," 81 perfs.; The Girl Behind the Counter 4/21 at Wyndham's Theatre, London, with Isabel Jay, 141 perfs.; His Honor the Mayor 5/28 at the New York Theater, with songs that include "Waltz Me Around Again, Willie (Around, Around, Around)," by Ren Shields, lyrics by Will D. Cobb, 30, 104 perfs.; About Town 8/30 at the Herald Square Theater, with English-born dancer Vernon Castle (originally Vernon Blythe), 19, Louise Dresser, Lew Fields, Jack Norworth, music by Melville Ellis and Raymond Hubbell, book and lyrics by Joseph Herbert, 138 perfs.; The Red Mill 9/24 at the Knickerbocker Theater, with Dave Montgomery, Fred Stone, music by Victor Herbert, book and lyrics by Henry Blossom, songs that include "In Old New York," "Every Day Is Ladies Day with Me," 274 perfs.
First performances: Jour d'été à la montagna by Vincent d'Indy 2/18 at Paris; Symphony No. 6 by Gustav Mahler 5/27 at Essen.
Composer-music teacher John Knowles Paine dies at Cambridge, Mass., April 25 at age 67.
Popular songs: "China Town, My China Town" by Jean Schwartz, lyrics by William Jerome; "School Days" by Will D. Cobb, lyrics by Gus Edwards; "Anchors Aweigh" (march and two-step) by U.S. Naval Academy musical director Charles A. Zimmerman, 45, and midshipman Alfred H. Miles, 23.
The International Collegiate Athletic Association founded January 12 at New York shortens football games from 70 minutes to 60 and works to make football safer after a 1905 season that saw 19 American boys killed playing the game and 154 seriously injured (see 1905). Some have been paralyzed from the waist down, but 26 boys will die playing football in 1909 and 246 will sustain major injuries as the sport grows in popularity. The ICAA will be renamed the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in 1910 (see 1939).
The forward pass is legalized in football (see 1913).
Canadian prizefighter Tommy Burns (Noah Brusso), 25, wins the world heavyweight championship February 23 by defeating Marvin Hart in a 20-round match at Los Angeles.
H. L. Doherty wins in men's singles at Wimbledon, D. K. Douglass in women's singles (she will marry Robert Lambert Chambers next year and play as Mrs. Dorothea Lambert Chambers); William J. Clothier, 24, wins in U.S. men's singles, Helen Homans in women's singles.
The first Newport-Bermuda yacht race takes competitors over a 635-mile course to begin an ocean sailing competition that will continue for more than 90 years.
"Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance" becomes a sportswriter catchphrase to denote efficient teamwork. Chicago Cubs shortstop Joe Tinker, 26, second baseman Johnny Evers, 27, and first baseman Frank Chance, 29, give the club an airtight infield that enables the Cubs to win 116 games, lose only 36, and take the National League pennant, setting a record that will never be broken (the 154-game season will be extended to 160).
The Chicago White Sox win the World Series, defeating the Cubs 4 games to 2.
The world's first ski course is laid out at Zürs by Vorarlberg skier Viktor Sohm, whose pupils include Hannes Schneider, 16 (see 1907).
President Roosevelt's 21-year-old daughter Alice Lee is married in the East Room of the White House February 17 to Congressman Nicholas Longworth (R. Ohio), 39, who was with her in Secretary of War William Howard Taft's party last year on a trip to Hawaii and the Orient.
Stetson Hat maker John B. Stetson dies of apoplexy at his De Land, Florida, home February 18 at age 75, leaving a $5 million fortune to his family. His factory on the outskirts of Philadelphia employs 3,500 people and produces 2 million hats per year for sale worldwide.
New Balance Athletic Shoe Inc. has its its beginnings in the New Balance Arch Co., founded at Belmont, Mass., by English-born entrepreneur William Riley, 33, to supply shoemakers with arch supports. Entrepreneur Paul Kidd will buy the company in 1929 and start making specialized shoes for people with problem feet and for athletes who can find no running shoes except those with spikes (see 1962).
The permanent wave introduced by Swiss-born London hairdresser Charles Nessler, 34, takes 8 to 12 hours and costs $1,000. Only 18 women avail themselves of Nestle's service, but by the time the permanent wave is introduced in the United States in 1915 it will be much cheaper and take far less time (see Buzzacchini, 1926; Nestle Colorinse, 1929).
Lever Brothers introduces Lux Flakes for chiffons and other fine fabrics (see Lifebuoy, 1897; Rinso, 1918; Lux Toilet Form, 1925).
Ontario, California, electric utility meter reader Earl Richardson begins manufacturing lightweight electric irons under the name Hotpoint. Homemakers have told him that they do their ironing on Tuesday, would use electric irons if they were not so heavy, but want to iron during daylight hours, not at night. Richardson persuades his plant supervisors to experiment with generating electricity all day on Tuesday as an experiment, and the plant gradually extends its hours of operation (see 1882; 1912; washing machine, 1907).
New York architect Stanford White is shot dead June 25 at age 52 at the roof garden restaurant atop the Madison Square Garden he designed in 1889. His murderer is Pittsburgh millionaire Harry Kendall Thaw, 36, whose beautiful wife, Evelyn Nesbit Thaw, was a chorus girl and White's mistress before her marriage. Thaw shoots White in the face three times at point-blank range (see 1909).
The murder of Cortland, N.Y., factory girl Grace Brown, 19, makes world headlines in July. A capsized rowboat found in Big Moose Lake in the Adirondacks the morning of July 13 leads to a search. A boy of 13 spots a young woman's body in eight feet of water early in the afternoon, police arrest Chester Gillett, 22, at a nearby resort July 14, and they charge him with murder. Raised by missionary parents at Kansas City, young Gillett took a job last year as foreman at his uncle's shirtwaist factory in Cortland, where the employees included Grace Brown, daughter of a local farmer. Pregnant by Gillett, Brown wrote him pitiful letters begging him to marry her and finally threatening to go to his family with her story. Gillett has ambitions to marry a society girl whom he has met, he wrote to Brown asking her to travel with him to the Adirondacks, where he said he would marry her. He signed the register at the Glenmore Hotel "Carl Graham and wife of Albany" upon his arrival by train on the morning of July 12 and took Brown out on the lake that afternoon in a hired rowboat. Gillett will be convicted of murder and executed next year at Auburn prison (see Fiction [An American Tragedy], 1925).
The Villa Karma is completed at Clarens outside Montreux, Switzerland, to designs by Moravian-born architect Adolf Loos, 35, who has eschewed both art nouveau and Beaux-Arts historicism in favor of a geometric simplicity devoid of ornamentation.
The Larkin Building completed at Buffalo, N.Y., to designs by Frank Lloyd Wright will stand until 1949. Built close to the tracks of the New York Central for a wholesale merchandiser of soap and groceries, the office building has an interior sealed off to create a quiet atmosphere; its huge fireproof interior reaches to the roof, with executive offices in tiers of galleries overlooking the central atrium. Its forbidding exterior is of stone that has been shipped from a Lake Superior quarry and cut on the site; magnesite imported from mines in Greece is fabricated on the site into custom-made fixtures and is cheaper than any other masonry material (the building costs 17¢ per cubic foot as compared with 23¢ to 30¢ for a standard fireproof structure).
An earthquake in Colombia January 31 leaves an estimated 1,000 dead; a quake in Taiwan (Formosa) March 16 kills 1,300; and a monster quake August 17 levels Santíago, Chile, killing an estimated 20,000.
The San Francisco earthquake April 18 is the worst ever to hit a U.S. city. The violent tremor of the San Andreas fault jolts the city at 5:13 A.M., it lasts less than a minute, but its strength will later be calculated as registering 8.25 on the Richter scale (see 1935). It cracks water and gas mains, and the ensuing 3-day fire razes two-thirds of the city, destroys 28,000 buildings on 520 city blocks, consumes property estimated at more than $400 million in value, and leaves 250,000 homeless. Troops are rushed in to restore order, they have orders to shoot looters on sight, but the soldiers themselves are the biggest looters (see commerce, 1907). The quake and fire destroy all of the city's Nob Hill mansions with the exception of the 20-year-old $1 million house of silver king James C. Flood. The 31-year-old Palace Hotel uses up the water that it has stored in vain attempts to save neighboring structures. Fire consumes the hotel, but construction begins on a new Palace Hotel and on other new hotels, houses, and office buildings. The official death toll is 478, but many injured people are taken away as far as Chicago and the real toll is probably closer to 3,000.
The American Antiquities Act approved by Congress June 8 authorizes the president to "declare by public proclamation historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest . . . to be national monuments."
Mesa Verde National Park is created by an act of Congress. Located on a large sandstone plateau that rises more than 8,500 feet above sea level, the 52,074-acre park in southern Colorado contains prehistoric cliff dwellings inhabited before 1300 by Anasazi tribespeople. Archaeologists will excavate multistory apartments in 1909.
Wasatch National Forest is established in the Stansbury, Sheeprock, Wasatch, and Uinta mountains of Utah and Wyoming. It covers 1,072,443 acres.
Mount Vesuvius erupts in April, covering Naples and the isle of Capri with volcanic ash and creating a panic as the eruptions continue for days (see 79).
A typhoon hits Hong Kong September 19 killing some 50,000.
Russia's new prime minister P. A. Stolypin introduces agrarian reforms to end the communal (mir) system of landholding that has existed since 1861. His ukase issued November 3 permits peasants to withdraw from communes as of January 1, 1907; receive their shares of the land; and own and operate the land privately. By 1915 some 2,755,633 peasants will have filed applications to leave the communes and more than 2 million will have left (see Lenin, 1922; Stalin, 1928).
The U.S. corn crop exceeds 3 billion bushels, up from 2 billion in 1885 (see 1963).
The King Ranch of Texas grows by acquisition to cover nearly a million acres with 75,000 head of cattle and nearly 10,000 horses (see 1885; 1940).
Barbed-wire inventor Joseph F. Glidden dies at De Kalb, Ill., October 9 at age 93.
An ice storm freezes Florida's citrus groves.
California orange growers begin to set out Valencia orange seedlings to raise fruit that will mature in the summer and make the state a year-round source of oranges, but most California oranges continue to be the Washington navels introduced in 1875.
Commercial kiwifruit cultivation begins in New Zealand. Native to China's Yangzi valley, the berry of a woody vine (actinidia sinensis) is grown from plants collected by a British botanist at the turn of the century and brought to the West, where it is known as the Chinese gooseberry.
China has famine as crops fail in much of the country. Russia, too, has crop failures (see 1907).
Cambridge University biochemists Frederick Gowland Hopkins and H. G. Willcock find that mice fed "zein" from corn plus the amino acid tryptophan (isolated by Hopkins with help from S. W. Cole) will live twice as long as mice fed "zein" alone.
A British School Meals Act passed by the Liberal government under pressure from the emerging Labour Party provides free meals for children. Many have been unable to profit from their education because they have come to school without breakfast, and the new measure permits local authorities to add up to a halfpenny per pound to taxes in order to fund a school meals program.
Gerrit Grijns suggests a new explanation for beriberi (see 1896). It may be caused not by a toxin in rice hulls, he says, but rather by the absence of some essential nutrient in polished rice (see Suzuki et. al., 1912).
A Pure Food and Drug bill introduced by Sen. Weldon B. Heyburn, 54, (D. Idaho) encounters Republican opposition. Sen. Nelson W. (Wilmarth) Aldrich, 64, (R. R.I.) asks, "Is there anything in the existing condition that makes it the duty of Congress to put the liberty of the United States in jeopardy? . . . Are we going to take up the question as to what a man shall eat and what a man shall drink, and put him under severe penalties if he is eating or drinking something different from what the chemists of the Agricultural Department think desirable?" But the Heyburn Bill regulates producers and sellers, not consumers, and its prohibitions are only against selling diseased meat, decomposed foods, or dangerously adulterated food, and it requires only that labels give truthful descriptions of contents (see Wiley, 1902; Sinclair, 1905).
A meat inspection amendment to the Agricultural Appropriation Bill introduced by Sen. Albert Jeremiah Beveridge, 43, (R. Ind.) passes without dissent, but the measure does not provide for federal funding of meat inspection.
The Neill-Reynolds report made public by President Roosevelt June 24 inspires Rep. James Wolcott Wadsworth, 59, (R. N.Y.) to introduce a meat inspection amendment that provides for federal funding of meat inspection. Settlement-house workers Charles P. Neill and James Bronson Reynolds, 45, prepared the report; the Wadsworth measure passes both houses of Congress and Roosevelt signs it into law.
Germany imposes a limit of 0.125 percent of sulfurous acids in foods, including dried cut fruits. The dried fruit industry has exposed freshly-cut fruits to the fumes of burning sulfur for years to promote rapid drying, kill yeasts and molds, kill enzymes in the fruit that cause quick browning and deterioration, repel insects, and enable the cured fruit to be stored for months with minimum loss in nutritive values and eating qualities (see 1907).
Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Co. is incorporated February 19 by W. K. (Will Keith) Kellogg, now 46, and St. Louis insurance man Charles D. Bolin (see 1902). Bolin puts up $35,000 to start the company, whose stock is owned largely by Kellogg's brother J. H., even though the younger Kellogg has his signature printed on each package. W. K. has bought commercial rights to the cereal from his brother, added malt, sugar, and salt to improve its taste, and wraps the box in waxed paper to keep the flakes fresh. He runs the company and devotes two-thirds of his budget to advertising (see 1907).
C. W. Post perfects his Post Toasties corn flakes (see 1904; 1914).
James D. Dole's Hawaiian Pineapple Co. announces August 1 that it has made a net profit of $30,489 (see 1904). The Oahu Railway and Land Co. extends its narrow-gauge line from Waipahu to Wahiawa so that pineapples can move to town by rail, and Dole is instrumental in persuading the American Can Co. to establish a can manufacturing plant in Honolulu. He takes an option on five acres of O.R. & L. land in the Iwilei district and makes plans to move his cannery to Honolulu (see 1908).
A-1 Sauce is introduced to the United States from England by G. F. Heublein & Bro. of Hartford, Conn. A chef to George IV created the sauce in the 1820s (see Smirnoff, 1939).
E. A. Stuart's Carnation Milk adopts "The milk from contented cows" as its slogan (see 1899). Stuart has gone to Chicago and told an advertising copywriter about the beauties of Washington State, inspiring her to create the line.
The "hot dog" gets its name from a cartoon by Chicago cartoonist Thomas Aloysius "Tad" Dorgan, 29, who shows a dachshund inside a frankfurter bun (see Feltman, 1867). Vendors employed by English-born caterer Harry M. (Magely) Stevens have been selling frankfurters at New York's Polo Grounds since 1901. His franks have been called "pigs-in-a-blanket," but Stevens will soon be known as the "hot dog king," and he will eventually gain rights to operate Madison Square Garden's dining room, employing vendors to serve sports fans in the Garden itself (see Nathan's, 1916). Britons continue to call sausages "bangers."
Sales of Jell-O reach nearly $1 million (see 1899). Francis Woodward once offered to sell the brand for $35 but now stops making Grain-O to devote all efforts of his Genesee Pure Food Co. to producing Jell-O.
Planters Nut and Chocolate Co. is founded at Wilkes-Barre, Pa., by Italian-born entrepreneur Amedeo Obici, 19, who arrived in America 7 years ago without money or English but with the knowledge that he had an uncle somewhere in Pennsylvania. He found the uncle, worked at his fruit stand in exchange for room and board, eventually bought a $4.50 peanut roaster, improved it by adding pulleys that turn the nuts automatically and prevent them from burning, and has expanded his peanut stand into a store and restaurant. In partnership with his future brother-in-law Mario Peruzzi, 31, he starts a firm that by 1912 will be using so many raw peanuts that Obici will open his own shelling plant and buy direct from farmers to avoid being squeezed by middlemen (see Mr. Peanut, 1916).
The U.S. population reaches 85 million, Britain has 38.9 million, Ireland 4.3, France 39.2, Germany 62, Russia over 120. China's population approaches 400 million.
India's population nears 300 million, up from little more than 200 million in 1850. Mohandas Gandhi in South Africa takes a vow of sexual abstinence (brahmacharya) and will oppose other means to limit population in India. (In 1885, at age 16, Gandhi had sex with his 14-year-old wife while his father died in another room of the house. British physicians in the last century introduced Western medicine to reduce India's death rate, and British moralists eliminated the slaughter of female children and other customs that held the population in check.)
The commercially-prepared spermicidal jellies are introduced.
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