1889: Information and Much More from Answers.com
- ️Wed Nov 30 4585
1881 1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889 1890
Austria's 31-year-old Archduke Rudolf and his beautiful 17-year-old mistress Baroness Marie Vetsera are found dead January 30 at Rudolf's hunting lodge Mayerling outside Vienna. The crown prince has shot the beautiful Marie and then taken his own life, leaving the Hapsburg emperor Franz Josef without an heir (Franz Josef has stifled his son's liberal, reformist, and anticlerical ideas, excluded him from government, and arranged his marriage in 1881 to a Belgian princess). The emperor's nephew Franz Ferdinand, now 25, will become heir apparent in 1896 (but see 1914).
Serbia's Milan Obrenovic IV abdicates March 6 at age 34 and retires to Paris after a 21-year reign. The king has circulated scandalous reports about his estranged wife, Natalie, extorted a divorce that was illegal in the eyes of the Church, and is succeeded by their 13-year-old son, who will reign until 1903 as Aleksandr I (see 1900).
The French revanchist Boulanger threatens to overturn the Third Republic in a coup d'état (see 1888), but a warrant is issued for his arrest, and he flees the country April 1, taking refuge first at Brussels and then at London. Boulanger will commit suicide in 1891.
British populist politician-reformer John Bright dies at Rochdale March 27 at age 77.
Irish Captain William O'Shea, MP, files for divorce on grounds of adultery December 24 and cites as co-respondent Charles Stewart Parnell, who has helped O'Shea advance his political career (see 1882). O'Shea's wife, Katherine, has been living more or less openly with Parnell for years and has evidently borne two children by him (see 1890).
Three-time Italian prime minister Benedetto Cairoli dies at Naples August 8 at age 64.
A Young Turks reform movement has its beginnings at Constantinople's Imperial Medical Academy, where a group of students conspire against the sultan Abdul Hamid II. Most of their leaders flee abroad when the plot is uncovered, most of them to Paris. Advocating a program of orderly reform under a strong central government, they will organize a Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), but a rival organization (the League of Private Initiative and Decentralization) headed by Prince Sabaheddin will oppose centralized government and favor enlisting European assistance to implement the liberal reforms that it endorses (see 1891).
Japan's Meiji emperor Mutsuhito hands the nation's first written constitution to his prime minister Count Kuroda February 11; written by Hirobumi Ito, it is modeled on the Prussian constitution and stipulates that the emperor shall exercise legislative power with the consent of the Imperial Diet, but Imperial ordinances are not valid if the Diet fails to approve them. Waseda University founder Shigenobu Okuma, now 51, continues to favor British parliamentary principles, with a cabinet responsible to the Diet, but General Koshaku Yamagata, now 50, returns home after a year spent studying local government in Europe; less progressive than Okuma or Ito, he becomes the nation's first prime minister under its new parliamentary government.
The Ivory Coast becomes a French protectorate January 10, and an Anglo-French agreement August 5 defines respective French and British spheres of influence on the Gold and Ivory Coasts and on the Sénégal and Gambia rivers.
Mahdists kill Ethiopia's Johannes IV March 12 in the Battle of Metemma. He is succeeded after a 17-year reign by Menelek of Shoa (Sahlé Mariam), whose claim to the throne is supported by the Italians against those of Johannes' son Ras Mangasha. Now 44, Menelek II will reign as king of kings until his death in 1913, defeating an Italian invasion force and modernizing the country.
The British South Africa Company headed by Cecil Rhodes receives almost unlimited rights and powers of government in the area north of the Transvaal and west of Mozambique (see 1890). Rhodes controls De Beers Consolidated Mines, which has become virtually the sole producer of diamonds in South Africa, using a workforce comprised largely of migrant African workers bossed by white overseers.
Former French governor of Senegal Louis Faidherbe dies at Paris September 29 at age 71, having been left paralyzed and half blind by his efforts in Africa.
A relief expedition headed by Henry M. Stanley "rescues" Equatoria's governor Mehmed Emin, 48. Stanley has been financed largely by the king of the Belgians Leopold II, who is also king of the Congo Free State, and by Leopold's friend Sir William MacKinnon of the Imperial British East Africa Company, both desirous of securing Equatoria and giving the Congo State an outlet to the Upper Nile. The Silesian-born Emin Pasha (originally Eduard Schnitzer) became a medical officer in the Turkish army at age 25, learned Arabic, Farsi (Persian), and Turkish in his spare time, adopted a Turkish name while serving in northern Albania in the early 1870s, and was appointed governor of Equatoria by the late General Charles "Chinese" Gordon in 1878. The province was severed from the rest of Egypt in 1884, Emin was elevated to the rank of pasha, and he has ended slavery in Equatoria. He and Stanley leave for the coast April 10 with some 1,500 others and arrive December 4 at Bagamoyo, where Emin will soon be asked by the Germans to undertake an expedition charged with securing territories south of Lake Victoria and along its shores to Lake Albert (but see 1890).
Former Mexican president Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada dies in exile at New York in April at age 61.
Trinidad formally annexes Tobago April 6 at the insistence of the British government; both islands have been British colonies since 1814 (see 1962).
Venezuela's military dictator (caudillo) Antonio Guzmán Blanco is ousted in a coup d'état while visiting Europe, where he has spent much of his time since assuming power in 1870. He has amassed a large private fortune through profits gained at public expense in negotiations of loans with foreign bankers.
The first Pan-American Conference opens October 2 at Washington, D.C., to cement relations among Western Hemisphere nations. All Latin American countries except Santo Domingo send representatives, the delegates establish the Pan-American Union as an information bureau, but they reject a convention calling for the promotion of peace by arbitration and reject a plan of reciprocity.
Portugal's Luiz I dies at Lisbon October 19 at age 51 after a 28-year reign in which slavery has been abolished in every Portuguese colony. He is succeeded by his 26-year-old son, who has devoted his youth to painting and oceanographic studies; the new king will reign until 1908 as Carlos I.
Brazilian army officers depose Pedro II November 15 after a 49-year reign as emperor, adopt a new constitution, and proclaim a republic under the leadership of General Manoel Deodoro da Fonseca, 62 (see 1891).
President Benjamin Harrison takes office at Washington, D.C., March 4 (see 1888). He faces a Congress that is almost evenly divided, with 39 Republicans and 37 Democrats in the Senate, 166 Republicans and 159 Democrats in the House. The federal government has run a surplus every year except one since 1866, but Harrison's administration will do its best to get rid of it, appropriating pensions to Civil War veterans and trying to use a bloated budget to bolster the weak minority presidency.
North and South Dakota enter the Union November 2 as the 39th and 40th (or 40th and 39th) states, Montana enters November 8 as the 41st, Washington November 11 as the 42nd.
New York State adopts the paper Australian ballot for statewide elections, becoming the first U.S. state to do so (see Britain, 1872; voting machine, 1892).
Former U.S. secretary of war Simon Cameron dies at his Donegal Springs, Pennsylvania, home June 26 at age 90; former Confederate president Jefferson Davis at New Orleans December 6 at age 81.
The medicine man Wawoka of the Nevada Paiute interprets a January 1 solar eclipse as a sign from the Great Spirit and orders a ghost dance. White men's bullets cannot penetrate the shirts worn by braves in the ceremonial dance, he promises; the War Department prohibits the dance lest it stir up violence (see human rights [Wounded Knee], 1890).
Civil War Union Army general and Indian fighter Ranald S. "Bad Hand" Mackenzie dies on Staten Island, New York, January 19 at age 49.
The Missouri Assembly adopts legislation that prohibits racial mixing in public schools, ending a practice that has been common in rural areas. The state's supreme court in 1891 will uphold a state order requiring Grundy County to stop providing education in its public school to four black pupils, declaring in the case of Lehew v. Brummel, "Color carries with it natural race peculiarities . . . some of which can never be eradicated" (see Gaines, 1936).
The new Japanese constitution holds that human rights are a privilege granted by the state. The constitution makes it impossible for a woman to become empress as in centuries past and denies women the right to participate in politics.
U.S. state legislatures begin to tighten divorce laws to discourage marital separation following revelations that the United States has the world's highest divorce rate. From now until 1906, grounds for divorce will be reduced from more than 400 to fewer than 20, only three states will continue to permit courts to grant divorces on any grounds that they see fit, North Carolina will prohibit divorce altogether, New York will grant divorces only for reasons of adultery, New Jersey only for adultery or desertion.
Chicago's Hull-House opens in the South Halsted Street slums under the direction of social worker Jane Addams, 29, with financial help from her Rockford College classmate Ellen Gates Starr, 30. Having visited London's Toynbee Hall, Addams rents the rundown Charles Hull mansion in the center of the city's ghetto and opens a settlement house in September that will help the poor immigrants of the neighborhood with problems such as sweatshops, child labor, truancy, juvenile delinquency, industrial safety, and political corruption. Within a year, Hull-House volunteers and a small resident staff will have helped more than 50,000 people with education, recreation, child care, and other services. Bertha Palmer lends her support to Hull-House and will soon be seen—fur coat and all—performing volunteer duties there amidst poor immigrants (see Chicago Fire, 1871).
Baltimore bookkeeper Mary Richmond, 28, takes a $50-per-month job on a trial basis as a fund raiser for the local Charity Organization Society, a community clearing house. To see how the money is being spent, she visits the poor and begins to develop the casework method of determining applicants' individual needs. Richmond will help save from bankruptcy a secret fraternal society for blacks that provides life and burial insurance for former slaves at a time when insurance companies will not accept such people as policyholders. She will set objective standards for giving to the poor that will make social work a paid profession.
"The man who dies [thus] rich dies disgraced," writes steel magnate Andrew Carnegie in his essay "Wealth" in the North American Review. Echoing the sentiments expressed in an 1869 pamphlet by the late Lewis Tappan, Carnegie says in the magazine's June issue that the very rich should live without extravagance, provide moderately for their dependents, leave little to their male heirs, and give the rest away in their own lifetime, doing for the poor "better than they would or could do for themselves." He favors stiff inheritance taxes if necessary, and his words about "the gospel of wealth" raise questions about the possible unintended consequences of private contributions interfering with natural market processes. Oil magnate John D. Rockefeller praises Carnegie for his philanthropies, whose purpose is to help the poor help themselves (see library benefactions, 1881; Carnegie Institute, 1900; Carnegie Institution, 1902; Carnegie Foundation, 1905; Carnegie Corp., 1911; Rockefeller Institute, 1901).
Oklahoma Territory lands formerly reserved for Native Americans open to white homesteaders at high noon April 22 by order of President Harrison, and a race begins to stake land claims. "Sooners" who have entered the territory prematurely claim prior rights in many areas, bitter fights break out, but by sundown there are booming tent towns at Guthrie and at Oklahoma City, formerly a small water and coaling station for the Santa Fe Railroad but suddenly a city of 10,000 (see 1891).
Silver king James C. Flood dies in a hotel room at Heidelberg, Germany, February 21 at age 62, having built a great brownstone mansion on San Francisco's Nob Hill.
The Exhibition Universelle opens at Paris May 6.
South African diamond magnate Barney Barnato, now 37, sells his 9-year-old firm to Cecil J. Rhodes for more than £5 million, a life membership in De Beers Mining, and Rhodes's support in obtaining membership in the exclusive Kimberly Club, which has refused to admit Jews (see 1880). Rhodes gains a virtual monopoly in the South African diamond industry (see politics, 1890).
Explosives manufacturer Henry du Pont of E. I. du Pont de Nemours dies at his Delaware home August 6 at age 77. His son Henry Algernon, now 51, joined the firm in 1878 and will urge that the partnership be turned into a corporation; his cousin Eugene du Pont, 56, takes over the presidency that he will hold until his death in 1902 (a trained chemist, he has served as an assistant to his late cousin Lammot du Pont).
The Great London dock strike shuts down the Port of London for nearly a month beginning August 20 and cripples the city's commerce. Labour activists Ben Tillett, Tom Mann, and John Burns have announced the formation of a dockers' union August 19 following a minor dispute at the South-West India Dock. Burns leads a procession of strikers through the city, and when the new union runs short of money August 29, Australian supporters quickly remit almost £30,000 to help refill its coffers. British supporters raise another £49,000. The employers begin negotiating September 5, they agree September 10 to pay another "tanner" (sixpence) per hour and grant other concessions; the strikers return to work September 16, and their victory helps to extend British trade unionism from the skilled classes to the less skilled. Socialist Henry M. Hyndman is widely believed to have controlled the strikers but has in fact done no such thing. Union membership begins a dramatic rise, with unskilled workers forming a number of new unions.
Sea captain-turned-merchant Robert Bennet Forbes dies at his native Boston November 23 at age 85, having made a vast fortune in the Chinese opium trade as head of Russell & Company and later supervised construction of Union ships in the Civil War.
Richard Sears sells his mail-order watch business for $70,000 but soon starts another with a catalog of watches, watch chains, and other jewelry offered with the slogan "Satisfaction or Your Money Back" (see 1886; 1893).
First Lady Caroline Harrison (née Scott), 56, has electricity installed in the White House, but neither she nor the president will touch the switches. An employee turns on the lights each evening, and they remain burning until the employee turns them off the next morning.
I. M. Singer Company introduces the first electric sewing machines, based on a patent issued January 25, 1887, for a motor developed by Philip Diehl, head of Singer's experimental department at Elizabethport, New Jersey. The company sells a million machines (many of them to sweat-shop operators), up from 539,000 in 1880 (see 1903).
An electric train-lighting system patented by Cincinnati-born engineer Harry Ward Leonard, 28, is the first of its kind. Leonard worked with Thomas Edison to introduce the central-station electrical system for cities (see 1882); he will patent an electric elevator control in 1892.
Chemist-industrialist Ludwig Mond and Charles Langer coin the term fuel cell (see Grove, 1839). They try without success to build a working model of a cell that would use a mixture of air and coal gas (see Bacon, 1959); credit for coining the term fuel cell will by some accounts belong to one William White Jaques, who will be the first to use phosphoric acid in the electrolyte bath.
Pennzoil Company has its beginnings in the South Penn Oil Company founded May 27 as a producing unit of the Standard Oil Trust (see 1911).
Union Oil Company has its beginnings 75 miles northwest of Los Angeles, where Pennsylvania-born oilman Lyman Stewart, 49, makes a strike in Torrey Canyon. Lyman, his brother Milton, and his partner Wallace L. Hardison will merge with another company next year to create Union Oil, concentrating their activities in the oil fields around Santa Paula (see Doheny, 1892; Hartwell field, 1904).
The Maritime Canal Company of Nicaragua incorporated by Congress February 20 to build, manage, and operate a ship canal begins work October 22 (see French failure, 1888), but while supporters of the new company say that Nicaragua has a healthier climate than Panama, opponents say the country has too many active volcanoes and that the Nicaraguan route is too long (see politics [Panama], 1902).
Iron-clad ship inventor John Ericsson dies at New York March 8 at age 85. His remains are returned to his native Sweden at the Swedish government's request.
A hurricane strikes Apui, Samoa, March 16, catching three U.S. Navy warships—the Nipsic, Trenton, and Vandalia—along with the Royal Navy ship Calliope and the German ships Adler and Eber. The Vandalia goes down with four officers and 39 men, but the flagship Nipsic rescues some of her crew, including Lieut. Henry D. Wiley, 29, who is taken off the mast of his sinking ship and will go on to become an admiral. The Trenton and both of the German ships also are lost in a disaster that takes a total of 145 seamen.
Europe's Orient Express completes arrangements for travel between Paris and Constantinople without change of train (see 1883). The first through train leaves the Gare de l'Est June 1 and arrives at Constantinople in 67 hours, 35 minutes—more than 13 hours faster than in 1883 but 7½ hours slower than the time that will be standard within 10 years. By the turn of the century the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits will be operating wagon-lits cars on the Fleche d'Or (Golden Arrow) between London and Paris, the Rome Express, Simplon Express, Nord Express, an express between Paris and St. Petersburg, the Lombardy Express, Italy and Riviera Express, Arlberg Express, Iberia Express (between Paris and Madrid), and Lusitania Express (between Madrid and Lisbon). It will also be running wagon-lits trains between Douala and Yaoundé in the Cameroons, between Casablanca and Ouijda, and between Oran and Algiers in North Africa, between Abidjan and Ouajadoujou in West Africa, and between Pointe-Noire and what soon will be Brazzaville in French Equatorial Africa, and between Elisabethville and Gilolo in the Congo, with most of them with restaurant cars serving the finest cuisine in the grand manner (see Simplon-Orient Express, 1919).
Europe's first electric trolley goes into service at Northfleet, Kent, England (see Richmond, Va., 1888). Cars for the trolley have been imported from a Richmond, Virginia, company.
The Canadian Pacific opens Montreal's Windsor Station, designed by architect Bruce Price along lines favored by the late H.H. Richardson and built in 2 years at a cost of $300,000. The first CP train to reach Saint John, N.B., arrives from Montreal June 3, making the Canadian Pacific truly a coast-to-coast railway.
Railroad builder James J. Hill organizes the Great Northern Railway Company in September, having taken over the charter of the Minneapolis and St. Cloud Railway and leased the Manitoba Railway for 999 years (see 1878). The recent discovery by John F. Stevens of Marias Pass through the Cascade Mountains opens the way for a rail line to the Pacific northwest, and the Great Northern's directors ask Hill to extend the road westward from Montana to Puget Sound (see 1893).
Brazilian railroad trackage reaches 6,000 miles, up from 800 in 1874.
The Oahu Railway & Land Co. begins operations November 16 with nine miles of track. Cape Cod-born founder Benjamin Franklin Dillingham, now 45, arrived in Hawaii as a ship's officer in 1865, broke his leg in a fall from a rented horse, had to be left behind, became a clerk at a Honolulu hardware store, bought the store in 1869 for $28,000, and married the daughter of a prominent missionary family. The territorial legislature gave approval to his project last year, King Kalakaua granted a royal warrant, and Dillingham opens the line on the king's birthday. Oahu's sandalwood forests have disappeared, whaling has declined, most people scoff at "Dillingham's Folly," and his railroad will haul only 16,000 tons of freight in 1891, but by the early 1900s he will have 160 miles of track extending across sugar plantations and pineapple farms to revitalize the island's economy. By 1929 the OR&L will be hauling 100,000 tons.
Railroad engineer Horatio Allen dies at his home near Orange, New Jersey, December 31 at age 87.
The "safety" bicycle patented in 1885 goes on sale in the United States. Within 4 years, more than a million Americans will be riding the new bikes.
Michelin et Cie. is founded at Clermont-Ferrand May 28 by French entrepreneur Edouard Michelin, 29, and his Paris-born civil engineer brother André Jules, 36, who take over the agricultural-equipment business founded by their grandfather Artistide Barbier and his cousin in 1832. The Michelins use vulcanized rubber to make seals, belts, valves, and pipes (see pneumatic tires, 1891).
French automakers René Panhard, 48, and E. C. Levassor acquire rights to manufacture motor vehicles in France, using the Daimler patents of 1882 and 1886. They will mount the Daimler engine on a chassis in 1891 (see pneumatic tires, 1892).
Nellie Bly ships out of Hoboken, New Jersey, November 14 in an attempt to outdo the hero of the 1873 Jules Verne novel Le Tour du Monde en Quatre-Vingt Jours. Now 22, New York World reporter Elizabeth "Nellie Bly" Cochrane has persuaded her editor to give her a bold new assignment, and she leaves at just after 9:40 in the morning, determined to break the fictional record of Phileas Fogg (see 1890; communications, 1887).
The Flight of Birds as the Basis of the Act of Flying (Der Vogelflug als Grundlage der Fliegekunst) by German engineer Otto Lilienthal, 41, shows the advantages of curved surfaces over flat ones for winged flight. Lilienthal has studied bird flight and built gliders to prove his thesis; he will make more than 2,000 flights in single- and double-winged gliders from an artificial hill near Lichterfelde (see Cayley, 1853; Montgomery, 1883; Chanute, 1894).
English chemist Frederick August Abel, 62, and Scottish chemist James Dewar of 1873 Dewar's vessel fame obtain a patent for cordite, a smokeless, slow-burning explosive powder made of nitroglycerin, nitrocellulose, and mineral jelly.
Canadian-born U.S. chemist Herbert H. (Henry) Dow, 23, discovers a cheap new process for producing the bromine used by the pharmaceutical and photographic industries. Dow finds that when he adds certain chemicals to cold brine and passes a current of air through the solution and onto scrap iron, a moisture collects on the iron that drips into a container as a solution with a high percentage of commercial-grade bromine (see 1891).
Shoe-lasting machine inventor Jan E. Matzeliger dies at Lynn, Massachusetts, August 24 at age 36.
The Comptograph sold to the Manufacturers' National Bank of Pittsburgh in December by the Chicago firm Felt & Tarrant is the world's first recording adding machine (see 1887; 1888).
Chemist Michel Chevreul dies at his native Angers April 9 at age 102; physicist and electric storage battery inventor Gaston Planté at Paris May 21 at age 55; physicist James P. Joule at Sale, Cheshire, October 11 at age 70, having done more than anyone to establish the idea that heat is a form of energy.
A worldwide influenza pandemic will affect 40 percent of the human race in the next 2 years (see 1918).
Japanese bacteriologist Shibasaburo Kitasato, 37, in Robert Koch's laboratory at Berlin isolates the bacilli of tetanus, becoming the first to obtain a pure culture of the bacillus; he also isolates the bacillus of symptomatic anthrax (see 1890).
Emile Roux and his Swiss colleague Alexandre (Emile John) Yersin, 26, at the Pasteur Institute show that the diphtheria bacillus produces a toxin (see Klebs, 1883; Löffler, 1884; von Behring, 1890).
German physiologist Joseph Freiherr von Mering, 40, and his colleague Oskar Minkowski, now 31, remove the pancreas of a dog in an effort to disrupt its digestion (the pancreas contains an enzyme that degrades fat); they observe that although the animal survives, it urinates more frequently, and the urine attracts flies and wasps (see 1884; Lancereaux, 1860; Langerhans, 1869). When they analyze the urine, they find that the dog has a canine equivalent of diabetes that ultimately causes it to go into coma and die. Their discovery will lead to the finding that the pancreas synthesizes insulin, a hormone necessary for the body's metabolizing of sugar (see Sharpey-Schafer, 1916).
The Mayo Clinic has its beginnings in the St. Mary's Hospital opened at Rochester, Minnesota, by the Sisters of St. Francis, who 6 years ago ministered to the injured in the wake of a tornado that devastated the town. The hospital's medical staff consists of physician-surgeon William W. (Worrall) Mayo and his sons William J. (James), 28, and Charles H. (Horace), 24, whose clinic will grow to receive nearly 500,000 visitors per year (see Kendall, 1915).
Surgeon William S. Halsted, now 38, performs his first radical mastectomy (see 1867; Halsted, 1884). His procedure will in some cases involve removal of several ribs as well as the breast, chest muscles, and lymph nodes; it will be the universally accepted treatment for breast cancer in America for nearly a century, although it will be discredited in Europe by the 1930s and replaced by a modified operation in which the chest muscles are left intact (see 1971).
The British Medical Journal publishes a letter from Aberdeen physician John McWilliam suggesting that repeated electrical stimulation might be used to maintain normal heart rhythm in patients whose heart beats are too slow (see pacemaker, 1958).
Pope Leo XIII sends Mother Cabrini to the United States to work with poor Italian immigrants (see 1880). She opens a school, returns to Italy to oversee her convents, but will return to America next year and found a New Orleans convent, school, and orphanage. She will also start a hospital at New York and establish additional convents at Denver, Seattle, Los Angeles, Central America, South America, and Europe (see 1946).
Philosopher-rabbi Samuel Hirsch dies at Chicago May 14 at age 73.
Deaf-mute teacher Laura D. Bridgman dies at Boston May 24 at age 59, having proved that systematic education of people like herself can be successful; former Yale president Theodore Dwight Woolsey dies at New Haven July 7 at age 87.
Barnard College opens in October near New York's Columbia University after 3 years of effort by Annie Nathan Meyer, 24, who has charmed and cajoled Columbia trustees and alumni. Columbia has had a Collegiate Course for Women in which women could study independently for the same examinations as men; Meyer passed the entrance exam for the Collegiate Course in 1885, and when her father discovered what she had done he warned her that she would never marry, since "men hate intelligent wives." Located in a small brownstone on Madison Avenue at 44th Street (Columbia is at 49th Street), the new women's college is named for Columbia's late president Frederick August Porter Barnard, who has died at New York April 27 at age 80 after a long career in which he favored extending the university's educational opportunities to women. Its first dean is Bryn Mawr graduate Emily James Putnam, 24, a classics scholar who has done post-graduate work at Girton College, Cambridge.
The New York Educational Alliance organized by German-Jewish groups provides education and recreation for slum dwellers on the city's Lower East Side, most of them from eastern Europe.
The Wall Street Journal that begins publication July 8 is the outgrowth of a daily financial news summary distributed by Dow Jones & Company, a firm organized 7 years ago by New York economists and financial reporters Charles H. Dow, now 38, and Edward D. Jones, now 33, to publish the Customer's Afternoon Letter from an unpainted basement office next door to the New York Stock Exchange. A Connecticut-born farmer's son whose father died when he was 6, Dow has been a member of the New York Stock Exchange since 1885 and a partner in the brokerage firm Goodbody, Glyn & Dow. The Journal will grow to become the second largest U.S. newspaper in terms of circulation, with regional and foreign editions.
The Memphis Commercial-Appeal begins publication. Local cotton merchant West James Crawford, 45, has started the Commercial with some associates and they soon absorb the Appeal.
Dutch-born Scribner's magazine advertising manager Edward W. (William) Bok, 25, becomes editor of the 6-year-old Ladies' Home Journal and begins raising the standards of the women's monthly, soliciting suggestions from readers, inaugurating personal advice columns, and attracting prominent U.S. and European authors to write articles on sensitive subjects that other magazines avoid while also publishing fiction of a higher quality than is found in most women's magazines (see patent medicine, 1892; Post, 1897)
Former typewriter manufacturer Philo Remington dies at Silver Springs, Florida, April 4 at age 72 (he sold his interests in the typewriter several years ago); Atlanta Constitution editor Henry W. Grady returns from a speaking engagement at Boston and dies of pneumonia at Atlanta December 23 at age 49.
An automatic coin-operated telephone patented August 13 by Hartford, Connecticut, inventor William Gray is installed in the Hartford Bank. Few people can afford residential phone subscriptions, Gray has had trouble finding a phone to summon a doctor for his ailing wife, and he will incorporate Gray Telephone Pay Station Company in 1891 with backing from Amos Whitney and Francis Pratt of Pratt & Whitney; it will rename itself Gray Manufacturing and install pay phones in stores, hotels, restaurants, and saloons, giving 65 percent of the take to the telephone company, giving 10 percent to the store, and keeping 25 percent for the Gray Company (see 1905).
Telephone pioneer Antonio Meucci dies at Clifton (Staten Island), New York, October 18 at age 81, having made a working model of a telephone as early as 1859.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica appears in a ninth edition that includes an article on anarchism by Prince Pyotr Kropotkin, an article on Darwin's theory of evolution by Thomas Henry Huxley, an article on Keats by Algernon Swinburne, and articles on taboo and totemism by James G. Frazer (see 1797; 1994).
Nonfiction: Time and Free Will (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience) by French philosopher Henri (Louis) Bergson, 29; A History of the Later Roman Empire, from Arcadius to Irene (two volumes) by Irish-born Cambridge historian and classical scholar J. B. (John Bagnell) Bury, 27; Introduction to Political Economy by Johns Hopkins professor Richard T. (Theodore) Ely, 35, who will resign under pressure in 1892 after enraging right-wing elements with his historical account of the labor movement (he will head the University of Wisconsin's economics department until 1925); The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow and Three Men in a Boat by English humorist Jerome K. (Klapka) Jerome, 30, whose account of a trip up the Thames from Kingston to Oxford establishes his reputation.
Fiction: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain, who writes, "The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder's moral perceptions are known and conceded world over; and a privileged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name" (illustrations are by Cincinnati-born artist Daniel Carter Beard, 39); The Child of Pleasure (Il Piacere) by Gabriele D'Annunzio; An Irish Cousin by Irish novelist Edith (Anna Oenone) Somerville, 31, and her cousin Violet (Florence) Martin, 27, who write under the name Martin Ross (their books will be published under the name Somerville and Ross).
Novelist Wilkie Collins dies at his native London September 23 at age 65; Champfleury (Jules-François-Félix Husson) at Sèvres December 6 at age 78.
Poetry: The Ballad of East and West by Rudyard Kipling: "and never the twain shall meet"; Hot Houses (Serres chaudes) by Belgian poet Maurice (Polydore Marie Bernard) Maeterlinck, 27; Lake Lyrics and Other Poems by Canadian poet William Wilfred Campbell, 28, who was ordained 4 years ago but will retire from the ministry in 1891 and enter civil service; A Little Book of Western Verse by journalist Eugene Field, who has joined the staff of the Chicago Morning News (it will become the Chicago Record next year).
Poet Gerard Manley Hopkins dies of typhoid fever at Dublin June 8 at age 44; Robert Browning at Venice December 12 at age 77.
Painting: Landscape with Cypress Tree, The Gardener, The Laborer, The Postman Joseph Roulin, L'Hôpital de St. Paul à Saint Rémy, The Starry Night, and Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe by Vincent van Vogh, who has been diagnosed as having epilepsy and is suffering from a mental disorder, possibly caused in part by the lead in his paint (he sucks his brushes). He has cut off his ear and presented it to a young prostitute at Arles; La gueule (The Hangover) by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec; Girl in a Boat with Geese by Berthe Morisot (date approximate); Mother and Child by Mary Cassatt; Masks (Intrigues) and Portrait of an Old Woman by James Ensor; Mending the Nets by Max Liebermann; Still Life with Japanese Print by Paul Gauguin; The Gulf Stream by Winslow Homer; Promenade at Sunset, Paris, Mrs. Hassam and Her Sister, La Fruitière, and Peach Blossoms—Villiers-le-Bel by Childe Hassam; The Last of the Buffalo by Albert Bierstadt.
The Protar f.7.5 lens designed by German physicist Paul Rudolph, 31, for Carl Zeiss of Jena is the world's first anastigmatic lens to be commercially successful (see Tessar, 1902).
Goodwin Film & Camera Company is founded by New Jersey clergyman-inventor Hannibal W. (Williston) Goodwin, 67, who has been granted a patent on a "photographic pellicle produced from a solution of nitrocellulose dissolved in nitrobenzol or other nonhydrous and non-hydroscopic solvent and diluted in alcohol or other hydrous and hydroscopic diluent." Goodwin has overcome curling of film by use of a celluloid varnish that remains flat when applied to a piece of glass or metal and can be sensitized with a gelatin emulsion, he has sent a 17-foot length of film to George Eastman at Rochester, New York, to be coated and sensitized, Eastman has written him in mid-February that he has succeeded in coating the film with a sensitized emulsion; Eastman chemist Henry Reichenbach has tried without success to use cellulloid but has applied 17 days after Eastman's letter for a patent on a transparent roll film produced from a solution of camphor, fusel oil, and amyl nitrate dissolved in nitrocellulose and wood alcohol (see Eastman, 1888). Eastman begins construction of Kodak Park on the outskirts of Rochester, but Goodwin will challenge the Eastman patent (see 1891; cellulose acetate film, 1924).
Theater: The Lady from the Sea (Fruen fra Haven) by Henrik Ibsen 2/12 at Kristianaia's (Oslo's) Kristiania Theater; Miss Julie (Froken Julie) by August Strindberg 3/14 at Copenhagen's Studentersamfundet with Siri von Essen (the playwright's wife) in the title role. The play about a sexual liaison between a young woman of good birth and her father's valet (Strindberg is himself a housemaid's son) creates a scandal; The People of Hemso (Hemsoborna) by Strindberg 5/29 at Djurgardsteatern; Before Dawn (Vor Sonnenaufgang) by German playwright Gerhart (Johann Robert) Hauptmann, 26, 10/20 at Berlin's Lessingtheater. The play pioneers German naturalist drama and creates a sensation; Honor (Ehre) by German playwright Hermann Sudermann, 32, 11/27 at Berlin's Lessingtheater; The Fruits of Enlightenment (Plody Prosvesheniya) by Count Leo Tolstoy 12/30 at Tolstoy's estate (it will be performed next year for the czar, who will dislike it, and although he will permit amateur productions he will forbid professional performances).
Stage musicals: Doris 4/20 at London's Lyric Theatre, with music by Alfred Cellier; The Red Hussar 11/23 at the Lyric Theatre, with Marie Tempest, book by Henry Pottinger Stephens, music by Edward Solomon, 175 perfs.
Opera: Esclarmonde 5/18 at the Opéra-Comique, Paris, with music by Jules Massenet, who has written the title role for California soprano Sybil Sanderson; The Gondoliers (or The King of Baratila) 12/7 at London's Savoy Theatre, with tenor Courtice Pounds as Marco Palmieri, Gilbert and Sullivan songs that include "I am a Courtier Grave and Serious," "Take a Pair of Sparkling Eyes," "There Lived a King," "O My Darling, O My Pet," "An Enterprise of Martial Kind," "I Stole the Prince," "Roses White and Roses Red," and "We're Called Gondoliers," 554 performances.
Dictionary of Music and Musicians by Royal College of Music director George Grove, now 69, appears at London in four volumes and will go into numerous updated editions.
First performances: Symphony in D minor by César Franck 2/12 at the Paris Conservatoire; Symphony No. 1 in D major by Bohemian composer Gustav Mahler, 29, 11/20 at Budapest.
English organist-electrician Robert Hope-Jones, 30, applies electricity to the organ for the first time. Chief electrician of the Lancashire and Cheshire Telephone Company at Birkenhead, Hope-Jones moves the console to a position that would be much too far from the pipes for a pneumatic system. He will emigrate to the United States in 1903 and sell his patents in 1908 to the Rudolph Wurlitzer Company of North Tonawanda, New York (see 1890; 1912; Hammond, 1934).
Japanese Musical Instrument Manufacturing Company (Nippon Gakki Siego Kabushiki Kwaisha) is founded by organ and piano maker Torakasu Yamaha with ¥30,000 in capital. Yamaha introduced the first Japanese organ in 1885 and the Yamaha piano 2 years later.
Instrument maker C. G. Conn produces the first American-built saxophone (see Sax, 1840; Conn, 1876). Now 45, Conn lost his Elkhart, Indiana, factory to fire in January 1883, quickly built a larger one, and expanded production last year by acquiring the Fiske Company of Worcester, Massachusetts (he will operate it until 1898). He hires 15 French craftsmen from an English factory, produces the first all-metal clarinet, and by 1890 will have 300 employees in his Elkhart plant (see Sousaphone, 1898).
New York's Harlem Opera House opens in 125th Street. German-born cigar maker-theatrical magnate Oscar Hammerstein, 42, has built it.
The Chicago Auditorium opens December 9 with Adelina Patti singing "Home, Sweet Home" to an audience that includes President Harrison. The acoustically perfect new auditorium seats more than 3,500 and is part of a 17-story building that Louis H. Sullivan will complete next year.
March: "Washington Post March" by John Philip Sousa, who has written it for the Washington, D.C., newspaper.
Popular songs: "Down Went McGinty" by Irish-born U.S. comedian Joseph Flynn.
William Renshaw wins in men's singles at Wimbledon, Blanche Bingley Hillyard in women's singles; Henry Slocum wins in U.S. men's singles, Bertha Townsend in women's singles.
Pugilist John L. Sullivan, now 30, defeats John Joseph "Jake" Kilrain July 8 on Charles Rich's plantation at Richburg, Mississippi, in the last bareknuckle defense of the title (bareknuckle fighting has been outlawed in every state, and the 22-year-old Marquess of Queensberry rules are followed almost universally). Recognized by Richard K. Fox of the Police Gazette as the world's champion, the Greenpoint, New York-born Kilrain, also 30, has been the odds-on favorite because Sullivan was out of shape, but the "Boston Strong Boy" has taken off weight and donned green-and-white tights to vie for the $20,000 purse; he rejects Kilrain's offer of a draw after 60 rounds in 106° heat (115° by some accounts), and the fight continues, going 75 rounds in 2 hours, 16 minutes, before Kilrain's handlers throw in the sponge; it will be the last major bareknuckle prizefight of any kind.
The first All-America football team has a backfield and linemen selected by Yale athletic director Walter Chauncey Camp, 30, from among college varsity players across the country (see 1875; 1891).
The Daisy Air Rifle goes into production January 16 at Plymouth, Michigan, where Plymouth Iron Windmill Company general manager L. C. Hough has tested the BB gun devised by local inventor Clarence Hamilton and exclaimed, "It's a daisy!" Hamilton's rifle had an air chamber and shooting barrel made from drawn-brass tubing joined together by a molded section of lead, tin, and antimony that provided a cone-shaped holder for the BB shot that was dropped into the end of the barrel. A wire link connected a plunger to a malleable iron lever resting on the main barrel section, and pulling the lever compressed the spring. Hough's workmen have improved on Hamilton's design, consumers have shown more interest in the company's prototype air rifles than in its windmills, it uses nickel-plated steel to make the guns (they wholesale at 50¢ each), and Hough will develop a method for bluing the steel (quicker and cheaper than nickel-plating). Salesman Charles Bennett will open up export markets for the air rifle worldwide, notably in China, and Plymouth Iron Windmill will change its name to Daisy Manufacturing Company. (see 1939).
The Flexible Flyer sled introduced by Philadelphia farm-equipment maker Sam Leeds Allen, now 48, has runners that can be flexed over their entire length to permit turns twice as tight at twice the speed possible with other sleds. Allen's daughter Elizabeth has run her non-steerable sled into a tree, inspiring him to invent the Flexible Flyer with double-thick runners whose concave channels give them steering bite and are mounted beneath boards of fine-grained oak varnished to a gleaming finish.
Nintendo Company has its beginnings at Kyoto, where entrepreneur Fusajiro Yamauchi begins manufacturing playing cards (hanafuda). He will make western playing cards for the export market starting in 1902, and they will become popular in Japan as well as abroad. Yamauchi will establish a partnership in 1933 under the name Yamauchi Nintendo, his son will take over the company in 1950 and absorb the manufacturing operation; he will rename the firm Nintendo Playing Card Company in 1951, and it will be the first successful Japanese manufacturer of plastic playing cards (see "Donkey Kong," 1981).
Paris milliner Jeanne Lanvin, 22, opens a salon at 22, rue de Faubourg Saint Honoré that will survive into the 21st century as the city's oldest fashion house (see perfume, 1925).
Carpet sweeper inventor Melville R. Bissell dies at Grand Rapids, Michigan, March 15 at age 45; his wife, Anna, takes charge of the company he started in 1876, will establish national distribution, and will head the firm until her own death in 1934.
Tobacco magnate R. J. Reynolds comes to New York and makes a secret deal with James B. Duke, allowing Duke to purchase a two-thirds interest in his company for $3 million while retaining management control (see American Tobacco Co., 1890; Reynolds, 1875; Prince Albert, 1907; Supreme Court decision, 1911).
Former Texas outlaw Belle Starr (originally Myra Belle Shirley) is shot dead by person or persons unknown in Oklahoma Territory February 3, just 2 days short of her 41st birthday.
The Cleveland Street scandal titillates London. Revelations appear about a West End homosexual brothel that employs post office messenger boys to gratify the appetites of clients whispered to include the Prince of Wales, his equerry Lord Arthur Somerset, 38, son of the duke of Beaufort, and his son Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward, duke of Clarence (see Jack the Ripper, 1888). Some of the post office boys are bribed to go abroad so that they will not give evidence, and when one boy does give evidence against the earl of Euston, the newspaper editor who allows his testimony to be printed receives a 1-year jail sentence for libel.
The Eiffel Tower is completed at Paris for the Exhibition Universelle that opens May 6. Designed by engineer Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, now 57, the soaring 984.25-foot tower has a wrought-iron superstructure on a reinforced concrete base, it contains more than 7,000 tons of iron, 18,038 girders and plates, 1,050,843 rivets, and has three hydraulic elevators, one of them built by Otis Company of Yonkers, New York. Many if not most Parisians regard the tower as a monstrosity.
The Pavilion de l'Eléctricité at the Exhibition Universelle has been designed by Lyons-born architect Hector (Germain) Guimard, 22, who has trained at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, traveled in England and Belgium, learned at Brussels of Art Nouveau, and designed a Paris restaurant.
London's Savoy Hotel opens August 6. Gilbert & Sullivan opera impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte has had the seven-story hotel (it will be enlarged to have 15) built of reinforced concrete on a steel frame (timber is used only for floors and window frames), it has its own artesian well, its elevators run all night, a single room goes for 7½ pence per night (double with bath, 12 pence). Britain's first fireproof hotel, the Savoy has 70 private bathrooms while the new Hotel Victoria on Northumberland Avenue has only four baths to serve its 500 guests.
New York's first skyscraper opens September 27 at 50 Broadway. Architect Bradford Lee Gilbert has climbed to the top of the 13-story structure during construction and has let down a plumb line during a hurricane to show crowds gathered to watch the building collapse that it is steady as a rock.
Otis Company installs the world's first electric elevators in New York's Demarest building on Fifth Avenue at 33rd Street.
The Johnstown Flood May 31 kills more than 2,200 Pennsylvanians in a city of 30,000. The earthen Old South Fork Dam that created the Conemaugh Lake on the Conemaugh River has given way 14 miles away in the mountains, a torrent of water roars down on the city at 50 miles per hour, and its force tosses a 48-ton locomotive one mile.
English gardener Gertrude Jekyll, 46, publishes an article deploring the "bedding out" that has started in large gardens and almost submerged "the beauties of the many little flowering cottage plots of our English waysides." Jekyll had intended to be a painter but increasing myopia forced her to change her mind. In the next few decades she will help to establish the herbaceous border throughout the country; her own garden at Munstead Heath, Surrey, will attract visitors for more than a century.
The Maine salmon catch reaches 150,000 pounds.
The Hudson River shad catch reaches an all-time high of 4.33 million pounds. The catch begins to decline, and although it will climb back up to 4.25 million pounds in 1942, it will then fall off drastically, and water pollution will spoil its taste.
The constitutional conventions of the new states of North Dakota and Montana hear Major John Wesley Powell urge delegates to measure land values in acre-feet—the area that can be covered with 12 inches of water from irrigation or natural sources (see 1888). County lines should follow drainage divides, says Powell, with each river valley a political unit whose inhabitants can work cooperatively, but the politicians pay little heed.
Congress votes to give the 27-year-old U.S. Department of Agriculture cabinet rank; outgoing President Cleveland appoints Jeremiah McLain Rusk, 59, the first secretary of agriculture.
The first spindle-type cotton picking machine is tested by U.S. inventor Angus Campbell, whose machine will not be developed and produced commercially for more than half a century (see Rust, 1927).
Discontented southern farmers merge their farm organizations into the Southern Alliance (see 1882).
Kansas and Nebraska farmers pay interest rates of 18 to 24 percent on loans, with rates sometimes going as high as 40 percent. Local brokers and then local loan companies secure funds from eastern investors and take healthy cuts for themselves.
British entomologist Eleanor A. Ormerod receives an urgent request from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's chief entomologist for help in dealing with the Mediterranean caterpillar, whose depredations threaten worldwide destruction of stored flour inventories. Now 61, she advises him to have the managers of flour mills turn on the steam and scald the critters.
Rust finishes off Ceylon's coffee industry (see 1869). Demand increases for Latin American coffee.
British dairymen get their first milking machines (see Colvin, 1878). William Murchland at Kilmarnock, Scotland, manufactures the devices.
Wage rates are dependent in large measure on the nutritive "efficiency" of food consumed, says Johnsburg, N.Y.-born Wesleyan University agricultural chemist Wilbur O. (Olin) Atwater, 35 (see Voit, 1881). Having studied in Germany and set up an Office of Experimental Stations in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Atkinson has read surveys indicating that working-class U.S. and European families spend 40 to 50 percent of their budgets on food—far more than was necessary for proper nutrition. American workers are more productive than their German counterparts, he says, because their diets are higher in fats and protein (see calorie, 1895).
Congressmen propose a pure food law but meet with ridicule (see 1882; 1892).
A New York margarine factory employee tells a state investigator that his work has made "his hands so sore . . . his nails came off, his hair dropped out and he had to be confined to Bellevue Hospital for general debility," but the "bogus butter" made from hog fat and bleaches is widely sold as "pure creamery butter" and is no worse than "butter" made from casein and water or from calcium, gypsum, gelatin fat, and mashed potatoes (see 1886).
The first large-scale English margarine plant begins production at Godley in Cheshire (see 1876; 1880). Danish entrepreneur Otto Monsted competes with U.S. and Dutch firms that are producing margarine in volume (see 1914).
British sugar consumption rises to 76 pounds per capita, up from 60 pounds in 1875, to make Britons by far the heaviest sugar users in the world.
A U.S. ice shortage caused by an extraordinarily mild winter gives impetus to the development of ice-making plants (see 1880; Western Cold Storage, 1887). By year's end the country has more than 200 ice plants, up from 35 in 1879.
Aunt Jemima pancake flour is the first self-rising flour for pancakes and the first ready-mix food ever to be introduced commercially. Editorial writer Christian Ludwig Rutt, 29, of the St. Joseph (Mo.) Gazette and his friend Charles G. Underwood used their life savings last year to buy an old flour mill on Blacksnake Creek, but a falloff in westward migration by wagon train has decreased demand for mill products. Faced with disaster, Rutt and Underwood have experimented for a year and come up with a formula combining hard wheat flour, corn flour, phosphate of lime, soda, and a pinch of salt that they package in one-pound paper sacks and sell as Self-Rising Pancake Flour, a name Rutt changes to Aunt Jemima after attending a minstrel show where two blackfaced comedians do a New Orleans-style cakewalk to a tune called "Aunt Jemima" (see 1893).
Calumet baking powder has its beginnings at Chicago, where local food salesman William M. Wright, 39, turns his bedroom into a laboratory and develops a baking powder that he produces at night and sells during the day. Wright will make a fortune and invest much of it in Calumet Farm, whose 550 Kentucky-bred trotters will win major races, including the Hambletonian, and whose thoroughbreds will win eight Kentucky Derby races and, after his death, two Triple Crowns—Whirlaway in 1941 and Citation in 1948.
McCormick spices have their beginnings at Baltimore, where local entrepreneur Willoughby McCormick employs two girls and a boy in a one-room factory with cellar and backyard. He goes into business selling flavoring extracts, fruit syrups, juices, and non-food items such as glue and liniment (see 1902).
The pea viner is introduced to expedite pea canning; it takes the whole pea vine and separates peas from pods in a continuous operation (see 1883).
The flavor-enhancing agent Arome introduced by Maggi & Cie. will find wide popularity in Europe (see 1884; Fabrique de Produits Maggi, 1890; MSG, 1908).
Milwaukee's Pabst brewery gets its name as the Empire Brewery produces 585,300 barrels for the year and is renamed (see Pabst, 1864; blue ribbon, 1893).
Coffee blender James Folger dies of a coronary occlusion at San Francisco June 26 at age 51. His son James A. Folger II, 26, has been working for the company since 1882, takes over its management, and will head it until his own death in 1921.
Lenox china is introduced by Trenton, New Jersey, ceramist Walter Scott Lenox, 30, who has established the Ceramic Art Company. His porcelain will be ranked in quality with that of Wedgwood and Spode (see 1918).
D'Oyly Carte engages César Ritz of Monte Carlo's Grand Hotel as manager of London's new Savoy Hotel. Ritz brings along as mâitre chef de cuisine Auguste Escoffier, who cooks after-theater suppers in the hotel restaurant (seepèche Melba, 1894).
1881 1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889 1890