1907: Information and Much More from Answers.com
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1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910
The Tillman Act approved by Congress January 26 prohibits corporations and nationally chartered (interstate) banks from making direct financial contributions to candidates for public office (see Pendleton Act, 1883). President Roosevelt has sought to bring a measure of control to campaign financing, but the legislation's enforcement mechanism is so weak that the new law will be toothless (see Corrupt Practices Act, 1910).
British Member of Parliament Winston Churchill calls the House of Lords "one-sided, hereditary, unpurged, unrepresentative, irresponsible, absentee." Having quit the Conservative Party last year and joined the Liberal Party, Churchill will later call for total abolition of Parliament's upper chamber.
A Franco-Japanese treaty signed June 10 guarantees "open door" access of both France and Japan to China and recognizes the special interests of Japan in Fujian (Fukien) Province and in parts of Manchuria and Mongolia.
Korea's Yi dynasty emperor Kojong (I T'ae-wang) abdicates under pressure July 19 at age 55 after 43 years in power. His son inherits the throne, and Kojong dies at Seoul later in the year (see 1904). The Japanese who occupy his country set up a figurehead ruler and Korea becomes a Japanese protectorate under terms of a treaty signed July 25 (see 1909).
French authorities in Vietnam depose the puppet emperor Than Thai who has reigned (but not ruled) since 1889 as the sixth Nguyen dynasty emperor and proclaim his 8-year-old son Vinh San emperor September 5. The new emperor's supporters slyly give him the name Duy Tan (the Chinese characters for that are the same as those of the radical new nationalist organization Duy Tan Hoi) and he will reign (but not rule) until 1916.
Britain grants dominion status to New Zealand, whose former prime minister Sir John Hall dies at Christchurch June 25 at age 82.
Egyptian nationalists kill a British officer in the village of Dinshwai while the viceroy, Lord Cromer, is home on leave (see 1892). His subordinates in the "Veiled Protectorate" come down hard on the peasantry, widespread protests ensue, Prime Minister Campbell-Bannerman's Liberal cabinet tries to placate the people, and Lord Cromer, now 66 and in failing health, resigns (see 1908).
The Persian shah Muzaffar-ad-Din dies of a heart attack at Teheran January 9 at age 54 after a weak reign of 11 years in which he has been obliged to borrow money from Russia and make political concessions in return while he spent money on extravagant visits to Europe (in 1900, 1902, and 1905). He is succeeded by his son, 35, who will reign until 1909 as Mohammed Ali. His reactionary prime minister Atabegi-Azamis is assassinated in August, and a liberal ministry headed by Nasir ul-Mulk takes over. The new shah attempts a coup d'état December 15 and imprisons the new liberal prime minister, but popular uprisings throughout the country force him to yield (see 1908). An Anglo-Russian entente concluded August 31 resolves differences between Britain and Russia in Persia and elsewhere in Asia. The entente follows by 2 days a Russian note recognizing British preeminence in the Persian Gulf.
Sweden's Oskar II dies at Stockholm December 8 at age 78 after a 35-year reign in which he also ruled Norway until 1905. His popular son, 49, will reign until 1950 as Gustav V.
The Washington Conference convened in the wake of last year's conference at San José, Costa Rica, ends in an agreement signed by all five Central American states pledging them all to keep peace amongst their countries (see 1906). Nicaraguan dictator José Santos Zelaya soon breaks the treaty and tries to unify all of Central America under his rule (see 1909).
Oklahoma enters the Union November 16 as the 46th U.S. state.
Russian revolutionary Aleksandra Kollontai organizes public meetings under the auspices of the Union of Textile Workers (whose members are mostly women), pretending that they are lectures on maternal hygiene and whatnot, but Czarist police break up the meetings when lecturers speak out against social exploitation and support woman suffrage (see 1905). Police arrest Bolshevik revolutionary Inessa Armand, 33, who has dedicated herself to social reform after bearing five children. She met V. I. Lenin on a long visit to Switzerland in 1903 and has since then subordinated her efforts in behalf of women's rights to working for the wider cause of emancipating the working class and all of society. The abortive revolution is suppressed.
Romanian peasants revolt in Moldavia beginning in March to protest their inability to buy land; they also protest their exploitation by the crown and by grain merchants such as Leopold Louis-Dreyfus. Some 10,000 die before Carol I can regain control of the country in April.
Austria institutes universal direct suffrage.
Mounted London police ride into a deputation from the Women's Social and Political Union February 13 as they march on Parliament to demand voting rights. The suffragettes clash with police for 5 hours, 15 of them reach the House of Commons, and a record 57 are sent to Holloway Prison February 14. Some have had their clothes ripped and their bodies bruised. Suffragist Annie Kenney vows to lead 1,000 women onto the floor of the House of Commons if it does not grant women the vote by the end of its session, but Parliament kills the woman suffrage bill March 8.
Finnish women win their first seats in the nation's Parliament March 15 (see 1906).
Norway's Storting votes 95 to 26 June 14 to grant suffrage for women provided that they, or their husbands, pay taxes regularly. An estimated 300,000 Norwegian women are eligible to vote.
The Equality League of Self-Supporting Women is founded by Seneca Falls, N.Y.-born suffragist Harriet Eaton Blatch (née Stanton), 51, daughter of the late Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who has lived in England and been impressed by the activities of the Women's Franchise League. She will found the Women's Political Union next year.
Suffragists rally in New York's Madison Square December 31 to petition Congress for woman suffrage. An English suffragist addresses the crowd and asks, "Do you think it would be possible for women to make a worse mess of politics than the men have?"
German industrialist Emil Kirdorf, 60, organizes a fund to combat his country's growing trade union movement. Son of a man whose textile company failed, Kirdorf started the coal-mining firm Gelsenkirchener Bergwerks and has been a director of the Rhenish-Westphalian Coal Syndicate (see 1926).
Indian industrialist Dorabji Jamsetji Tata incorporates Tata Iron and Steel Co. and founds the town of Jamshedpur at the junction of the Kharkai and Subarnarekha rivers in Bihar state, where he will build the nation's chief ironworks and steel mills (see 1903). They will be joined in time at Jamshedpur by a vehicle assembly plant, factories that produce locomotive engine parts, agricultural implements, and enameled ironware as well as the National Metallurgical Laboratory and eight colleges affiliated with Ranchi University.
A U.S. economic crisis looms as a result of drains on the money supply by the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, the demands imposed by the rebuilding of San Francisco following last year's earthquake and fire, several large railroad expansion programs, and the fact that a late season has tied up farmers' cash. New York Stock Exchange prices suddenly collapse March 13.
Western Federation of Miners (WFM) leader "Big Bill" Haywood goes on trial at Boise, Idaho, May 9, on charges of having conspired to murder the former governor of Idaho Frank Steunenberg in 1905 (see 1906). Local lawyer William E. Borah, 42, heads the prosecution (and later wins election to the U.S. Senate). Haywood's lawyer Clarence S. Darrow of Chicago shows that Haywood's accuser has perjured himself, Haywood wins acquittal, and the WFM quits the IWW in protest against the violent direct-action tactics favored by the "Wobblies" (see Darrow, 1893; 1910).
A July 4th address by Princeton University president Woodrow Wilson urges an attack on the illegal manipulations of financiers rather than on corporations, and President Roosevelt attacks "malefactors of great wealth" in a speech August 20.
Financier J. P. Morgan acts singlehandedly to avert financial panic after a rush by depositors October 23 to withdraw their money from New York's Knickerbocker Trust, a bank run that is followed by others at Providence, Pittsburgh, Butte, and at New York's Trust Co. of America. Morgan locks up leading New York trust company presidents overnight in his new library in East 36th Street until 5 o'clock in the morning of November 4 until they agree to cooperate. Morgan obtains a pledge of $10 million in John D. Rockefeller money from National City Bank president James Stillman ($10 million in specie from the Bank of England arrives via the new ship Lusitania); First National Bank president George F. (Fisher) Baker, 67, supports Morgan, as do financiers Edward H. Harriman and Thomas Fortune Ryan, and Morgan promises New York's mayor George McClellan $30 million at 6 percent interest to keep the city from having to default on some short-term bonds.
President Roosevelt commends J. P. Morgan for his action and permits United States Steel Co. to acquire the financially troubled Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Co. for $35.3 million in U.S. Steel bonds (see 1906), despite questions as to the legality of the acquisition under the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act. The president's action November 4 saves the Wall Street brokerage firm of Moore & Schley from collapse, faith is restored, and the stock market recovers to some extent.
Investor Hetty Green extends loans to business firms, large retailers, even the city of New York as the financial panic dries up other sources of capital. Now 71 (but no longer the richest woman in America), she has correctly predicted the downturn, taken most of her money out of the bank, sold off many of her real-estate lots, and has substantial amounts of cash; she charges only 6 percent interest when others are asking 40 percent but pays her bookkeeper no more than $75 per week.
Speculator Jesse L. Livermore, now 30, emerges from Wall Street's financial panic with $3 million (see 1906). He shorted Union Pacific stock, invested his profits in Anaconda Cooper, sold Anaconda short to make another killing, and is hailed as "The Boy Plunger" (see 1925).
Wall Street's Dow Jones Industrial Average closes December 31 at 58.75, down from 94.35 at the end of 1906.
London retail merchant William Whiteley dies January 24 at age 75 after being shot in the head at his Westbourne Grove store by a man claiming to be his illegitimate son.
Bullock's opens March 4 at Los Angeles. Canadian-born merchant John Gillespie Bullock, 36, has backing from his former employer, Arthur Letts, 45, an English-born merchant whose dry goods store at Broadway and 4th Street will become The Broadway Store; Bullock will erect a 10-story building on Broadway in 1912.
Neiman-Marcus opens September 10 at Dallas, and its initial stock is practically sold out in 4 weeks. The two-story fashion emporium at the corner of Elm and Murphy Streets has been started by former Atlanta advertising agency president A. L. Neiman, his wife Carrie, and his brother-in-law Herbert Marcus, who have been offered the choice of selling out for $25,000 in cash or receiving stock in the Coca-Cola Company plus the Missouri franchise for Coca-Cola syrup. They have opted for the cash, start the store with $30,000 in capital ($22,000 of it from Neiman), invest $12,000 in carpeting and fixtures for the premises that they lease at $750 per month, and Carrie Neiman stocks it with $17,000 worth of tailored suits for women, evening gowns, furs, coats, dresses, and millinery for the women of Dallas, a city of 86,000 with 222 saloons (see 1913).
Sears, Roebuck distributes more than 3 million copies of its fall catalog (see 1906; 1927).
Canadian-born entrepreneur Cyrus Eaton, 23, travels to Manitoba to secure a franchise for an electric power plant. A protégé of John D. Rockefeller, Eaton obtains the franchise with backing from former Rockefeller associates, and when his backers back out because of the financial panic, he borrows money and builds the plant himself. Eaton will sell it in 2 years at a good profit and will promote gas and electric companies in hundreds of cities throughout the Midwest and Southwest (see Continental Gas and Electric, 1912).
Standard Oil of Indiana is indicted for having received secret rebates on shipments of crude oil over the Chicago and Alton Railroad. Federal district court judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, 41, imposes a fine of more than $29 million on 1,462 separate counts, but the decision against the subsidiary of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil of New Jersey will be reversed on appeal.
Gulf Oil Co. is founded by a reorganization of Guffey Oil (see Spindletop, 1901).
Royal Dutch-Shell is created by a merger of Henri Deterding's Royal Dutch Oil with the 10-year-old Shell Transport and Trading Co. of English oilman Marcus Samuel, now 72 (see 1892; Anglo-Persian, 1914).
U.S. motorcar production reaches 43,000, up from 25,000 in 1905 (see 1908).
New York City horsecars give way to motorbuses, but most urban transit is by electric trolley car, "El," and subway (see 1904; 1932; Fifth Avenue Transportation Co., 1885).
Taximeter cabs equipped with meters that compute fares based on distance traveled and time elapsed appear at New York in May, giving the United States her first successors to hansom cabs. Local motor enthusiast Harry Nathaniel Allen, 30, has obtained $3 million in backing from friends in Europe and from some of his father's associates in New York, brought bright red Darracq Landaulets over from Paris, coined the term "taxicab," founded the New York Taxicab Company, and obtained a license from the city to open taxi stands at hotels, restaurants, railroad stations, steamship piers, and ferry terminals. Other drivers substitute meter-equipped cars for their previously horse-drawn cabs and appropriate the term "taxicab," but Allen is obliged to open a school for drivers, since there are so few qualified applicants available, and establishes a school for auto mechanics to keep his fleet in repair, but the Darracqs have been built for smooth European boulevards and do not stand up to the rough, cobblestoned New York streets; Allen is soon obliged to abandon them in favor of four-cylinder, 14-horsepower gasoline-driven machines, and by the spring of next year he will be operating more than 700 taxicabs, having built a four-story garage, reputedly the first to have floors connected by ramps.
The Bendix Co. is founded by Moline, Ill.-born inventor Vincent Bendix, 25, who left home at age 16 to study mechanics at New York. The Bendix starter drive that Bendix will perfect in the next 5 years will lead to the development of a self-starter for motorcars (see brake, 1912; Kettering, 1911).
Trials by Britain's Royal Automobile Club begin a shift from steam wagons to trucks and tractors powered by internal combustion engines.
The first long-distance motorcar rally begins June 10 as five cars leave Beijing (Peking) for Paris. The newspaper Le Matin has promoted the event, and the winner is a 40-horsepower Italia driven by Prince Scipione Borghese, who arrives at Paris August 10 (see 1908).
Milwaukee Road toolmaker William A. Davidson quits his foreman's job to join his brothers Arthur and Walter at the 4-year-old Harley-Davidson Motor Co. That firm is incorporated September 17, with its stock split four ways among the founders. Its payroll has risen to 18, and dealer recruitment begins. The company will deliver its first motorcycle for police use to the Detroit Police department next year; total production will reach 18,000 per year by 1917, and by 1920 "the hog" will be the world's largest-selling motorbike, carried by more than 2,000 dealers in 67 countries worldwide.
The White Star Line passenger ship R.M.S. Adriatic arrives at New York from Liverpool May 14 to begin a 19-year career on the transatlantic run. Built by Harland & Wolff at Belfast, the Adriatic returns to Southampton rather than Liverpool (seeOlympic, 1911).
The Cunard Line's S.S. Lusitania arrives from Liverpool at Pier 54 on New York's North River September 13 on her maiden voyage, leaves for home September 21, and returns with specie from the Bank of England to relieve the U.S. financial crisis. Built by John Brown & Co. at Clydebank and named for the Roman province that has long since become Portugal, the 31,550 ton Lusitania is 700 feet in length overall with four screws. She can carry 2,000 passengers, a crew of 600 and, although slowed by fog on her first voyage, averages 23.99 knots per day on her second westward passage, regaining the Blue Riband for Britain (she will soon be averaging 25.65 knots).
The Cunard Line's R.M.S. Mauretania arrives at Pier 54 from Liverpool November 22 on her maiden voyage and averages 26.06 knots per day on her return trip (she clocked 27.04 knots on her trials). Slightly larger than her sister ship Lusitania, the 31,938-ton, four-screw liner is 790 feet in length overall, 88 feet wide, 61 feet deep, has six decks, can accommodate 2,335 passengers (560 in first class, 475 in second, 1,300 in third), carries 812 in officers and crew, burns 1,000 tons of coal per day, and requires a "black squad" of 324 firemen and trimmers to feed her furnaces (see 1910). She will remain in service until 1935, making her final crossing in 1934.
President Roosevelt appoints Brooklyn, N.Y.-born Lt. Col. George W. (Washington) Goethals, 49, Army Corps of Engineers, chairman and chief engineer of the Isthmian Canal Commission that has begun work on the Panama Canal (see 1906). The first man to have the job quit after a year, his successor John F. Stevens has resigned out of frustration in April, both were railroad engineers, the president has named someone who cannot quit, and Goethals will see the job through (see 1908).
Britain and Ireland have 23,100 miles of operating railway, Canada 22,400, Austria-Hungary 25,800, France 29,700, Germany 36,000, Russia 44,600, India 29,800, the United States 237,000.
Union Station at Washington, D.C., opens October 27 to serve as a gateway to the nation's capitol. Designed by Chicago architect Daniel H. Burnham of Burnham & Root, the new terminal is located at the bottom of Capitol Hill at the edge of a shantytown area once known as "Swampoodle" and with its 75 miles of track occupies about 200 acres, more than any building in America. The largest train station in the world has been modeled on the Baths of Diocletian and the Arch of Constantine at Rome; it will be completed next year (see 1988).
A helicopter designed and built by French engineer Paul Cornu, 26, flies briefly at Coquainvilliers, near Lisieux, November 13, but Cornu's design proves impractical (see Sikorsky, 1913).
Svenska Kullager Fabriken, or Swedish Ball Bearing Factory (SKF) is founded at Göteborg by Swedish engineer Sven Gustav Wingquist, 30, who has used a steel alloy that contains chrome and manganese to perfect an almost frictionless ball bearing. Wingquist's $28,000 company will be worth $28 million by 1919 and grow to be Sweden's largest industrial enterprise, with 14 factories in seven countries, including one at Stuttgart and four in the Philadelphia area.
Bethlehem Steel's Saucon Mills open at Bethlehem, Pa., to roll wide-flanged girders and beams that are lighter (and therefore cheaper) than conventional riveted girders but just as strong (see commerce, 1905). Bethlehem has acquired patents from inventor Henry Grey and will license other steel mills to manufacture Grey beams on a royalty basis; by 1911 Bethlehem will have reduced United States Steel Co.'s share of the market to 50 percent, down from 67 percent in 1902 (see 1913).
The first U.S. company to produce oxygen for oxyacetylene torches is founded by a group of manufacturers who make carbon electrodes used to power electric furnaces that produce alloying metals (see 1903; Union Carbide, 1911).
Aluminum Ore Co. (later Aluminum Co. of America [Alcoa]) is created through a renaming of the 22-year-old Pittsburgh Reduction Co. (see Mellon, 1891). The company will introduce aluminum foil in 1910. General manager Arthur Vining Davis, now 40, will serve as president from 1910 to 1928 and chairman from 1928 to 1957, promoting Alcoa's Wear-Ever line of cookware and resisting Justice Department antitrust investigations as the price of aluminum comes down to below 15¢ per pound and Davis makes himself the third-richest man in the world.
Russian-born University of Göttingen mathematical physicist Hermann Minkowski, 43, realizes that the work of Hendrik Lorentz and Albert Einstein can best be understood in a non-Euclidean space (see Lorentz, 1895; Einstein, 1905). Space and time have heretofore been considered independent, but Minkowski couples them in a "space-time continuum," working out a four-dimensional treatment of electrodynamics that he publishes under the title Raum und Zeit (see Pauli, 1925).
"On the Foundations of Mathematics" ("Over de grondslagen der wiskunde") by Dutch mathematician L. E. J. (Luitzen Egbertus Jan) Brouwer, 26, is a doctoral thesis that questions the logical foundations of mathematics and pioneers what will be called the Intuitionist doctrine of mathematics as mental constructions governed by self-evident laws (see 1908).
Yale zoologist Ross Granville Harrison, 37, perfects a method of culturing animal tissues in a liquid medium, making it possible to study tissues without the variables and mechanical difficulties of in vivo examinations. The method will permit Harrison to make discoveries about embryonic development and facilitate research in embryology.
Chemist Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev dies at St. Petersburg February 2 at age 72. He missed winning last year's Nobel Prize by one vote; Nobel chemist Henri Moissan dies at his native Paris February 20 at age 54 following an appendectomy; physicist (and French senator) Pierre E. M. Berthelot dies at his native Paris March 18 at age 79; chemist Sir William H. Perkin dies of pneumonia at Sudbury, near Harrow, Middlesex, July 14 at age 69, having pioneered the aniline-dye industry but chosen to rely on "natural" medicines to cure him rather than modern therapies; physicist-mathematician William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, at Glasgow December 17 at age 83, having suffered continuous pain for 20 years from acute facial neuralgia (he is reputed to have said about 7 years ago, "X-rays are a hoax.").
A Laboratory of Tropical Diseases is established at the Pasteur Institute in Paris by pathologist-parasitologist Alphonse Laveran, now 62, who has followed up his work on malaria (see 1880) with research into trypanosomiasis, leishmaniasis, and other protozoal diseases. He will found the Société de Pathologie Exotique next year.
Surgeon Ernst von Bergmann dies at Wiesbaden March 25 at age 70.
New York sanitary engineer George Soper tracks down Typhoid Mary (cook Mary Mallon) in the spring as new cases of the disease appear (see 1903). The young daughter of Lincoln Bank president Charles Henry Warren has come down with typhoid fever at the family's Long Island summer home. Soper finds that Mallon has recently left the Warrens' employ, he discovers that cases have cropped up in other households that had employed Mallon, and he confronts her in the kitchen of her newest employers on Park Avenue, demanding a feces sample. She chases him away with a carving fork, the Board of Health sends out five police officers who wrestle her to the floor, she says the Board of Health is just trying to "get credit for protecting the rich." Some newspapers take up her cause, but she is placed under quarantine detention on North Brother Island in the East River, and although she will be released in 1910 and find other food-preparation jobs, often using assumed names, she will be confined again in 1915 and remain confined until her death in 1938.
Physiologist J. S. Haldane develops a method of stage decompression that permits a deep-sea diver to ascend safely to the surface without developing "the bends" (see science, 1905; 1911).
Bubonic plague kills 1.3 million in India (see 1910).
The Prolongation of Life by Elie Metchnikoff suggests that "friendly bacteria" in yogurt will crowd out "poisonous bacteria" that shorten human life (see 1892). Now 62, Metchnikoff has become obsessed with the idea that aging and most degenerative diseases are exacerbated by putrefaction caused by the hundreds of millions of bacteria that inhabit the intestinal tract, especially the colon. These bacteria can gradually be starved out, he says, by reducing intake of the protein they feed on. Having read that rural Bulgarians often live into their 90s and 100s, he has journeyed to Bulgaria, found that people there eat enormous quantities of yogurt, concluded that something in yogurt extends lifespans, probably by accelerating the extermination of their intestinal bacteria, and given the name bacillus Bulgaricus to the lactic acid bacterium that he has identified (he has also identified the Streptococcus lactis bacterium that ferments milk to make yogurt). Metchnikoff will eat quantities of yogurt himself in the conviction that lactic acid bacteria are hostile to the human bacteria that produce intestinal "intoxication" (but see 1916).
Study of Organ Inferiority and Its Psychical Compensation (Studie über Minderwertigkeit von Organen) by Viennese psychiatrist Alfred Adler, 37, introduces the term inferiority complex. Adler has worked closely with Sigmund Freud but will become increasingly skeptical about Freud's notion that sexual conflicts in early childhood produce mental illness.
German neurologist Alois Alzheimer, 43, uses special staining techniques to uncover cerebral abnormalities. "I have lost myself," a 56-year-old patient has written in her journal, and Alzheimer finds accumulations of plaque around nerves in her brain and unusual bundles of cells in the cerebral cortex, that part of the brain responsible for memory and reason. Physicians have speculated for centuries as to the cause of anxiety, agitation, and feelings of helplessness in demented patients; Alzheimer finds a clue, but although it can begin as early as age 40 and will later account for more than half of all dementia, what will come to be called Alzheimer's disease (a chronic, progressive, presenile disorder) will remain so rare that little research will be conducted into it until more people live beyond age 65.
Pathologist Johannes Fibiger at the University of Copenhagen dissects rats infected with tuberculosis (see diphtheria serum, 1897). Now 40, he finds that three of them have tumors in their stomachs. Apparently malignant, the tumors have evidently been produced following an inflammation of stomach tissue caused by the larvae of a worm (it will later be called Gongylonema neoplasticum) that has infected cockroaches the rats have eaten (see 1913).
Wilmington, Delaware, social worker Emily Bissell (née Perkins), 46, heads the first Christmas seal drive to aid tubercular children (see 1904). She has hit on the scheme of designing and printing the seals that she sells at the Wilmington Post Office to raise money for combating the disease that takes more lives than any other. Priced at 1¢ each, her seals raise $3,000, and when they are sold nationwide beginning next year the revenue will increase to $120,000—easily enough to build a home for consumptives at Wilmington.
The encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis issued by Pope Pius X condemns modern heresy. Its target is mainly the position espoused 5 years ago by the French biblical scholar Alfred Firmin Loisy, whose book The Gospel and the Church (L'Evangile et l'Eglise) was placed along with Loisy's other works on the Church's Index of Forbidden Books in 1903. The Vatican will excommunicate Loisy next year but he will neither protest nor recant his views.
Former Russian Orthodox Church director general Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev dies at St. Petersburg March 23 at age 79, having held the position from 1880 to 1905 and used its enormous power to support censorship while opposing religious freedom, constitutional and democratic government, trial by jury, and free secular education.
The University of Saskatchewan is founded at Saskatoon.
The University of Hawaii has its beginnings in a school opened at Honolulu.
The Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy is founded by local social workers Julia Clifford Lathrop, now 49, and Sophonisba Preston Breckenridge, 41.
French engineer Edouard Belin, 31, invents what some will call the first facsimile ("fax") transmission device (but see Korn, 1906). He uses his apparatus to transmit a photographic image from Paris to Lyons to Bordeaux and back to Paris, an achievement for which he will be credited with having helped to develop the fax machine. Arthur Korn sends a photograph from Munich to London via Berlin and Paris in the first international transmission; the German police will use Korn's system to transmit fingerprints and photographs of criminals, and both systems will be developed in the next 20 years to meet demands by newspapers for pictures (see 1921).
Wireless telegraphy service begins October 18 between the United States and Ireland (see Marconi, 1901; United Fruit, 1910; Sarnoff, 1912).
Russian physicist Boris Rosing links the Braun tube of 1897 to "electric vision" (see Baird, 1926).
United Parcel Service (UPS) has its beginnings in the American Messenger Co. founded by Seattle entrepreneur James E. Casey, 19, and a schoolmate whose bicycle delivery service will acquire its first truck in 1910 and change its name in 1910; the company will be entirely employee-owned until 1999; by that time it will long since have become the world's largest package delivery service, with deliverymen in chocolate brown uniforms driving trucks of the same color in virtually every U.S. community and many countries overseas. UPS will grow to deliver some 3 billion packages per year.
The United Press (UP) founded June 1 competes with the Associated Press (AP) started in 1848 and the Hearst International News Service (INS) started last year. The new wire service is created by a merger of Publishers' Press, owned since 1904 by newspaper publisher Edward Wyllis Scripps, now 53, and the Scripps-McRae Press Association in which Scripps has been a partner since 1897. Roy (Wilson) Howard, 24, heads UP's New York office and will be UP president in 5 years (see 1925; Cleveland Press, 1878; UPI, 1958).
Rube Goldberg starts work with the New York Evening Journal to begin a career as cartoonist. San Francisco-born graduate engineer Reuben Lucius Goldberg, 24, will have his cartoons syndicated beginning in 1915, he will often show absurdly elaborate machines he has devised to perform simple tasks, and his ludicrous inventions will appear for nearly 60 years.
The drawing "Injun Summer" by Indiana-born Chicago Tribune cartoonist John T. (Tinney) McCutcheon, 37, appears September 30 and will be reprinted each fall for decades. Its top half shows a small boy and his grandfather looking at an Indiana cornfield, its bottom half an Indian camp with the shocks of corn transformed into tepees.
Nonfiction: Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking by William James, who retires from Harvard this year at age 65 and has borrowed the term from Charles S. Peirce, now 67; Child Labor Legislation Handbook by Brooklyn, N.Y.-born reformer Josephine C. (Clara) Goldmark, 29, who received her bachelor's degree from Bryn Mawr in 1898 and began work 5 years later with the National Consumers' League; Socialist History of the French Revolution (Histoire socialiste de la Révolution française) by Jean Jaurès, whose work reenergizes the study of France's revolutionary period (Jaurès cofounded the Paris newspaper L'Humanité 3 years ago); The Dancing Mouse; a Study in Animal Behavior by Pennsylvania-born psychologist Robert Mearns Yerkes, 31; Syria: The Desert and the Town by Gertrude Lowthian Bell, now 39, who has learned Arabic, studied Byzantine history, and traveled widely in the Mideast on her own, venturing with only one servant among wild desert tribes, pretending at times to be German (she speaks the language passably well) because she knows that the Ottoman Turks who control Palestine and Mesopotamia prefer Germans to Britons (see politics, 1915); Autobiography of a Super-Tramp by poet William Henry Davies, with an introduction by George Bernard Shaw.
Lady Ottoline Morrell (née Ottoline Violet Anne Cavendish Bentinck), 34, begins a career as literary hostess that will continue until 1938, inviting prominent writers and artists to the Bloomsbury house that she and her husband, Philip, a Liberal MP, bought last year at 44 Bedford Square. They will acquire a country house in Oxfordshire in 1914, and the beautiful six-foot-tall Lady Ottoline will cultivate admirers who will include Bertrand Russell and Lytton Strachey.
San Francisco-born emigree Alice B. (Babette) Toklas, 30, meets Gertrude Stein at Paris in September and begins a 37-year relationship that will make the two inseparable. She knew Stein's family in California and within a few years will have moved into the apartment that Stein shares with her brother at 27, rue de Fleurus, where the two women will have a salon that will be world famous.
Fiction: The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad, whose "agent" is not an individual but rather the anarchy that works unseen within any society; Mother (Mat) by Maksim Gorky; The Longest Journey by E. M. Forster; The Hill of Dreams by Arthur Machen, who writes of ancient Roman forts and occult Welsh mysteries; The Iron Heel by Jack London; The Turn of the Balance by Brand Whitlock; The Mystery of the Yellow Room and The Perfume of the Lady in Black by French mystery writer Gaston Leroux, 39; Three Weeks by Elinor Glyn, whose "risqué" novel about a Balkan queen's adulterous relationship with an Englishman gains wide readership.
Novelist-poet-editor Thomas Bailey Aldrich dies at Boston March 19 at age 70 after writing a poem to mark the centennial of the late Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's birth; novelist J. K. Huysmans dies of cancer at Paris May 12 at age 59.
Poetry: The Seventh Ring by Stefan George; "Barrel-Organ" by Alfred Noyes: "Go down to Kew in lilac-time, in lilac-time, in lilac-time;/ Go down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn't far from London)"; The Last Blackbird and Other Lines by Yorkshire-born poet Ralph Hodgson, 35; Songs of a Sourdough by English banker-poetaster Robert (William) Service, 33, whose bank transferred him to the Yukon late in 1904 and who will leave the North for good in 1912. His poems include "The Cremation of Sam McGee" and "The Shooting of Dan McGrew": "A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;/ The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune;/ Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,/ And watching his luck was his light-o'-love, the lady that's known as Lou"; Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems by St. Louis-born poet Sara Teasdale, 23, whose dramatic monologue "Guenevere" has appeared in the May issue of Reedy's Mirror.
Poet Giosuè Carducci dies at Rome February 16 at age 71; Sully Prudhomme at Chatenay September 6 at age 68, having been the first to receive the Nobel prize in literature; Francis Thompson dies of tuberculosis at London November 13 at age 47.
Juvenile: The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (Nils Holgerssons underbara resa) by Selma Lagerlof; The Enchanted Castle by Edith Nesbit; Three Girls in School; The Honourable Miss, A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town; and The Little School Mothers: A Story for Girls by L. T. Meade; Five Little Peppers in the Little Brown House by Margaret Sidney (Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop); The Story of Sir Lancelot and His Companions by Howard Pyle.
An exhibition of cubist paintings at Paris begins a radical departure from expressionist and impressionist painting. Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, 26, and others lead the movement to reduce nature to its geometric elements with paintings in "little cubes." German-born art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 23, opens a small Paris gallery and will soon represent Braque, Léger, Picasso, André Derain, Juan Gris, and Maurice de Vlaminck on an exclusive basis.
Other paintings: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon by Pablo Picasso explodes and rearranges the human form to pioneer a revolutionary style; Nude with Raised Arms Seen From the Front by Picasso, who has based it on a photograph of an African woman; Young Sailor II and Luxe, Calme et Volupté by Henri Matisse; Blackfriars Bridge and The Bathers by André Derain; Rooftops of Montmagny by French painter Maurice Utrillo, 23; The Snake Charmer by Henri Rousseau; Fauve Landscape with Red and Blue by Alfred H. Maurer; Amor and Psyche by Edvard Munch; The Hotel Room by John Singer Sargent; Cavalry Charge on the Southern Plains by Frederic Remington; Forty-Two Kids by Ohio-born New York painter-lithographer George (Wesley) Bellows, 25, who gains his first success with a picture of urchins tumbling, swimming, diving, and playing around a New York dock and follows it with Stag at Sharkey's, inspired by Tom Sharkey's boxing arena at 127 Columbus Avenue (boxing is still illegal in the city but patrons circumvent the law by joining Sharkey's "club" for the evening, and every handbill promoting a fight bears the words, "Both Members of This Club"); Laughing Child by Cincinnati-born New York painter Robert Henri (originally Robert Henry Cozad), 42; Election Night by Pennsylvania-born New York painter John French Sloan, 36; Adele Bloch-Bauer by Gustav Klimt; Young Woman in a Black Dress, Sunflowers, and Trieste Harbor by Austrian painter Egon Schiele, 17.
The National Academy of Design rejects paintings by New York artists William Glackens, George Luks, and Everett Shinn, prompting Robert Henri to resign his membership and join with Sloan, symbolist Arthur B. Davies, impressionist Ernest Lawson, and postimpressionist Maurice Prendergast to form what critic James Gibbons Huneker labels "The Eight" (less sympathetic critics call them "the apostles of ugliness" or "the revolutionary black gang"). Influenced by Thomas Eakins, they have revolted against academicism (see 1908).
Sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens dies at Cornish, N.H., August 3 at age 59.
Photographs: The North American Indian by Seattle photographer Edward S. Curtis, now 39, is published in its first volume. Curtis was on the 1899 Harriman Alaska Expedition with George Bird Grinnell, who persuaded him that the Indian way of life would be gone within 20 years and must be captured in photographs. He introduced him to his friend President Roosevelt, who promised support and introduced him to J. P. Morgan, who has pledged up to $75,000 to finance the project. Curtis continues to photograph Indians who include Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, but since he often poses his subjects in costumes that he carries in his wagon his pictures lack authenticity. His work will appear in 300 20-volume sets, printed at a cost of nearly $1.5 million and priced at $3,000 to $3,500 each, depending on the binding.
Theater: Don Juan in Hell (Act III of Man and Superman) by George Bernard Shaw 1/4 at London's Royal Court Theatre, with Ben Webster, Mary Barton; The Truth by Clyde Fitch 1/7 at New York's Criterion Theater, with Zelda Sears, 34 perfs.; Salomy Jane by Paul Armstrong (who has adapted a Bret Harte story) 1/19 at New York's Liberty Theater, with Eleanor Robson, 122 perfs.; The Playboy of the Western World by John M. Synge 1/26 at Dublin's Abbey Theatre (the audience becomes so incensed at Synge's portrayal of the Irish peasantry that his play precipitates a riot); The Maidens of the Mount (Die Jungfrau von Bischofsberg) by Gerhart Hauptmann 2/2 at Berlin's Lessingtheater; The Philanderer by Bernard Shaw 2/25 at London's Royal Court Theatre; The Life of Man (Zhizn cheloveka) by Russian playwright Leonid Nikolayevich Andreyev, 35, 2/22 at St. Petersburg's Vera Kommissarzhevskaya's Theater; A Flea in Her Ear (La puce à l'oreille) by Georges Feydeau 3/2 at the Théâtre des Nouveautés, Paris; The Rising of the Moon by Lady Gregory 3/9 at Dublin's Abbey Theatre; The Dream Play (Ett Drömspiel) by August Strindberg 4/17 at Stockholm's Svenska Teatern; The Witching Hour by Augustus Thomas 4/18 at Hackett's Theater, New York, 212 perfs.; The Man of Destiny by Bernard Shaw 6/4 at London's Royal Court Theatre, with Dion Boucicault as young Napoleon Bonaparte; A Grand Army Man by David Belasco and others 10/16 at the new Stuyvesant Theater, designed by George Keister at 111-121 West 44th Street, with David Warfield, William Elliott, Boston-born ingénue Jane Cowl, 22, Denver-born ingénue Antoinette Perry, 19, 149 perfs. (Perry has been performing since before she was 17 but will give up the stage for 15 years beginning in 1909; the theater will be renamed the Belasco in September 1910); Bonds of Interest (Los intereses creados) by Jacinto Benavente 12/9 at Madrid's Teatro de Lara; Polly of the Circus by Brownsville, Ill.-born playwright Margaret Mayo, 25, 12/23 at New York's Liberty Theater, with New York-born ingénue Mabel Taliaferro, 20, and a family of European acrobats, 160 perfs.
Romantic actor Richard Mansfield dies at New London, Conn., August 30 at age 53 (or 50). He collapsed from overwork last year and tried without success to regain his health; playwright Alfred Jarry dies destitute at Paris November 1 at age 34.
The Barnum & Bailey Circus created in 1881 is acquired by Albert C. Ringling, 55, and his brothers Otto, 49, Alfred T., 45, Charles, 44, and John, 41, who will combine it in 1919 with their own acrobats, clowns, high-wire daredevils, midgets, trapeze artists, and other entertainers to create the three-ring Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey Circus, The Greatest Show on Earth, touring it around the country (see 1936; "Weary Willie," 1921).
Samuel Lionel "Roxy" Rothafel, 25, turns a dance hall in back of his father-in-law's Forest City, Pa., saloon into a motion picture theater with a secondhand screen and projector. The Minnesota-born showman charges 5¢ admission and will soon attract the attention of vaudeville magnate B. F. Keith.
Film: Edwin S. Porter's Rescued from an Eagle's Nest with Kentucky-born actor D. W. (David Llewlyn Wark) Griffith, 32, who is billed as "Lawrence Griffith" in the one-reeler. Griffith works briefly for the Thomas A. Edison studio at Orange, N.J., but will become a director himself next year.
Bell & Howell Co. is founded by Chicago movie projectionist Donald H. Bell, 39, and camera repairman Albert S. Howell, 28, with $5,000 in capital. The firm will pioneer in improving equipment for motion picture photography and projection (Bell will sell out to Howell in 1921) (see 1909; 1911; Kodak, 1929).
Stage musicals: The Girls of Gottenberg 5/15 at London's Gaiety Theatre, with Gertie Millar, Edmund Payne, music by Lionel Monckton; The Honeymooners 6/3 at New York's Aerial Gardens, with George M. Cohan and his parents (Jerry J. and Helen F.), music and lyrics by Cohan, 72 perfs.; The Follies of 1907 7/18 at the Jardin de Paris on the roof of the New York Theater, with 50 "Anna Held Girls" in an extravaganza staged by Florenz Ziegfeld, now 38, who married comedienne Anna Held 10 years ago. Often regarded as "the brains" behind Ziegfeld's shows, she writes lyrics to Vincent Scotto's song "It's Delightful to Be Married (The Parisian Model)," show girls appear in a swimming pool in a simulated motion picture sequence, and opulent new editions will appear each year until 1931 (with the exceptions of 1926, 1928, and 1929) featuring chorus lines composed of beautiful Follies girls chosen with an eye to slenderness of figure as Ziegfeld creates a new ideal to replace the ample figure now in vogue, 70 perfs.; The Girl Behind the Counter 10/1 at the Herald Square Theater, with Connie Edliss, Louise Dresser, Lew Fields, Vernon Castle, music and lyrics by Howard Talbot and Arthur Anderson, 260 perfs.; The Talk of the Town 12/3 at the Knickerbocker Theater, with Victor Moore, music and lyrics by George M. Cohan, songs that include "When a Fellow's on the Level with a Girl That's on the Square," 157 perfs.
Opera: The 1905 Richard Strauss opera Salomé has its first New York performance at the Metropolitan Opera 1/22. J. P. Morgan and other Met directors protest that the opera is indecent, it is removed from the Met's repertory, refunds are issued to ticket holders for the remaining three performances, and Salomé will not be revived at the Met until 1934; The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitesch and of the Maiden Fevrona 2/7 at St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Theater, with Russian soprano Xeniya Georgiyevena Derzhinskaya, 18, creating the role of Fevrona, music by Nikolai Rimski-Korsakov; Ariane et Barbe Bleue 5/10 at the Opéra-Comique, Paris, with music by Paul Dukas; The Merry Widow 6/8 at Daly's Theatre, London, with Lily Elsie, Gabrielle Ray, music by Franz Lehár, 778 perfs. (see 1905). Producer George Edwardes has had the show's book virtually rewritten with a younger widow and a lot of comedy.
First performances: Introduction and Allegro for Harp and String Orchestra, Flute, and Clarinet by Maurice Ravel 2/22 at Paris; Symphony No. 3 in C major by Jean Sibelius 9/25 at Helsinki.
Ballet: The Dying Swan (Le Cygne) 12/22 at St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Theater, with Anna Pavlova dancing to music by Camille Saint-Saëns for Le Carnival des Animaux adapted by Michel Fokine.
Ballerina-choreographer Lucile Grahn dies at Munich April 4 at age 87; music publisher Gustave Schirmer at Boston July 15 at age 43; composer Edvard Grieg near his native Bergen, Norway, September 4 at age 64.
Popular songs: "Marie of Sunny Italy" by Russian-born New York singing waiter-songwriter Irving Berlin, 19, who has changed his name from Israel Baline; "Dark Eyes" ("Sérénade Espagnole") by Neil Moret; "(The) Glow Worm" by German songwriter Paul Lincke, English lyrics by Lila Cayley Robinson; "On the Road to Mandalay" by Ohio-born New York baritone singer-composer Oley Speaks, 33, lyrics from the 1890 poem by Rudyard Kipling; "The Caissons Go Rolling Along" by Edmund L. Gruber, who has written it for a reunion in the Philippine Islands of the U.S. Fifth Artillery that helped defeat the Spanish in 1898 (it will not be published until February 1918).
The world's first permanent ski school opens at St. Anton in the Austrian Arlberg region of the Alps under the direction of Hannes Schneider, who will develop a system based on the snowplow, stem turn, and stem christiania (see 1906). Local skiers will spread his Arlberg system throughout Europe.
Sir Norman Everard Brookes, 28, (Australia) wins in men's singles at Wimbledon (the first non-Briton to do so), May Sutton in women's singles; Bill Larned wins in U.S. men's singles, Evelyn Sears in women's singles.
Kansas-born West Coast pitcher Walter Perry Johnson, 19, signs with the Washington Senators of the American League to begin a 21-year career with the Senators. Johnson will win the nickname "Big Train" for his fast ball, pitch 802 games, win 414, and record 3,497 strikeouts in 5,923 innings (his 1913 record of pitching 56 consecutive scoreless innings will stand for 55 years).
The Chicago Cubs win the World Series with Tinker, Evers, and Chance in the infield helping to defeat the Detroit Tigers 4 games to 0 after one game has ended in a tie.
Police arrest Australian long-distance swimmer Annette Kellerman, 22, for indecent exposure at Boston's Revere Beach, where she has appeared in a skirtless one-piece bathing suit. Even infants will be required to wear complete bathing costumes on U.S. beaches for more than 25 years (see 1917).
The dropseat unionseat patented by the 42-year-old underwear maker William Carter Co. will enjoy wide popularity.
Uncle Sam's 3 Coin Register Bank is introduced by the Durable Toy and Novelty Co.; six inches high, four wide, five deep, and made of heavy-gauge steel, it takes nickels, dimes, and quarters, registering the input with figures displayed in a little window.
The Meccano Co. started by Liverpool-born bookkeeper Frank Hornby, 44, markets a toy construction set. Encouraged by his wife, mother, and two sons, Hornby made construction toys for his boys before the turn of the century. Starting with a flat sheet of copper in his home workshop, he cut the metal by hand into ½-inch-wide strips of various lengths, drilled holes at ½-inch intervals, made nuts and bolts by hand, borrowed the money from his meat-packer employer David Elliott for patent fees, and in 1901 obtained a patent for a 16-piece set called Meccanics Made Easy. He and Elliott became partners; although their toy cost half a workman's weekly wage, it found a market. The partners sold 2,000 sets in tin boxes by 1903. They added gears and other elements to their tin-plated strips, plates, nuts, and bolts; Hornby has bought out Elliott's share; he soon replaces the tin boxes with cardboard cartons; and beginning in 1912 he will introduce a spring motor made by the 49-year-old German toy company Gebrüder Marklin & Cie. (see Erector Set, 1913).
France's l'Oréal perfume and beauty product empire has its beginnings in a firm started by chemist Eugène Schueller that will become the world's largest supplier of hair products, employing 1,000 biologists.
Corsican-born French perfume manufacturer François (-Marie-Joseph-Spoturno, originally Francesco Giuseppe Spoturno) Coty, 33, goes into partnership with jeweler René Lalique to produce a fragrance called Ambre Ange in glass flasks whose surfaces are subtly molded (see Lalique, 1885). Art nouveau jewelry by Lalique attracted attention at the Paris Exposition 7 years ago. Coty has studied at Grasse, he met Lalique last year, Lalique will establish a small glass factory at Combs-la-Ville, and together the two men will enjoy tremendous success (see 1918; communications [Figaro], 1924).
Persil is introduced by Henkel & Cie. of Dusseldorf: the world's first household detergent, it is not suitable for heavy-duty laundry use (see Tide, 1946).
The Thor washing machine introduced by Hurley Machine Co. of Chicago is the first complete, self-contained electric washer. Some U.S. power companies still turn on their generators only at sunset (see Hotpoint iron, 1906), but more now keep them on all day, making it possible for housewives to use electric appliances such as washing machines, irons, vacuum cleaners, and fans during the day.
The Maytag Pastime washer introduced by Parsons Band Cutter and Self-Feeder Co. of Newton, Iowa, is a sideline to the farm equipment produced by the company that Frederick Louis Maytag, 50, has headed since 1893. The washer has a corrugated wooden tub with a hand-operated dolly inside. Maytag will add a pulley mechanism in 1909 to permit operation of the machine from an outside power source, he will introduce an electric washer in 1911, but Maytag's entry into the washer field is primarily to solve the problem of seasonal slumps in the farm implement business (see 1922).
Armstrong Linoleum is introduced by the Armstrong Cork Co. founded by Thomas Marton Armstrong at Pittsburgh in 1860.
The Hoover Vacuum Cleaner has its beginnings in an electric suction device for home use invented by asthmatic Canton, Ohio department store janitor J. (James) Murray Spangler (see Booth, 1901). He has rigged up a contraption consisting basically of an old electric fan, a tin soap box, and a brush, stapling these to a sateen pillow slip; the fan creates a partial vacuum by pumping out air, and dirt swept up by the brush rushes into the pillow slip. Spangler's cousin Susan tries the device, finds that it works, and shows it to her husband, William H. Hoover, 58. He has been making leather accessories for horse-drawn carriages, sees that the automobile is diminishing his business, will buy Spangler's patent next year, and will manufacture the machine, hiring door-to-door salesmen to demonstrate it (see 1919).
A pamphlet entitled "The Waste of Daylight" by London builder William Willett, 50, appears in July with arguments that setting clocks ahead by 80 minutes in the spring and back in the fall would provide more time for outdoor recreation in the warm-weather months and have other benefits (see Franklin, 1784). Willett will finance efforts to implement what many call his "crazy idea," prominent politicians will introduce bills into Parliament making daylight saving compulsory, but calling for saving 80 minutes instead of 1 hour raises objections (see 1916).
Alfred Dunhill, Ltd., opens in London's Duke Street near Piccadilly Circus. Tobacconist Dunhill, 35, took over his fathers harness shop in 1893, began offering motorcar accessories when motoring became popular, and has started an enterprise that will be among the first to import Cuban cigars and become world famous for its pipes and tobacco blends.
Prince Albert Tobacco challenges Bull Durham and other American Tobacco brands and will soon be the leading U.S. pipe tobacco; introduced by R. J. Reynolds, it is advertised as the "Natural Joy Smoke" (see Supreme Court decision, 1911; Camels, 1913).
The New York Customs House on the south side of Bowling Green is completed to designs by Cass Gilbert.
Britain's Edward VII opens a new Central Criminal Court designed in baroque style by architect Edward Mountford, 52, for the Old Bailey and other courts. Built on a site formerly occupied by Newgate Prison, the building replaces a Central Criminal Court building put up in 1834.
The Washington Cathedral that will be completed in 1976 goes up in the nation's capital. London architect George F. Bodley and his Bostonian pupil Henry Vaughan have designed the great Gothic structure; architect Philip Hubert Frohman will take over in 10 years and lengthen the nave from 246 feet to 534 (see 1964).
Berlin's Hotel Adlon opens on the Pariser Platz near the Brandenburg Gate.
Prague's Hotel Pariz opens near the 400-year-old Powder Tower in Old Town. The neo-Gothic and art nouveau structure will welcome guests throughout the century.
Rome's Excelsior Hotel is opened by Swiss hotelman Baron Pfyffer d'Altishofen.
Metropole hotels open at Brussels and Moscow (year approximate), providing new levels of luxury.
San Francisco's Fairmont Hotel opens April 17 on the Nob Hill site intended originally for the mansion of the late James G. "Bonanza Jim" Fair. Nearly completed before last year's earthquake and fire, the Fairmont has been financed by Fair's daughters and will be augmented in 1961 by a 29-story tower containing 252 additional rooms.
A new St. Francis Hotel goes up on San Francisco's Union Square to replace the hotel that opened in 1904 but was destroyed by last year's fire.
Architect William Le Baron Jenney dies at Los Angeles June 15 at age 74.
New York's Plaza Hotel opens October 1 on the Grand Army Plaza opposite the southeast end of Central Park on a site formerly occupied by the Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt mansion. Henry Janeway Hardenbergh has designed the 18-story, $12 million, 1,000-room hotel in the French Renaissance Beaux-Arts style that he used for the Waldorf of 1893, Astor House of 1897, Willard of 1901, and Astor of 1904, giving it a three-story marble base, ten stories sheathed in white-brick, balustrade balconies, a massive cornice, and a five-story mansard slate roof with dormers, gables, and a copper crest that has already begun to turn green. The New York Daily Tribune reports that the Plaza has 753 rooms for about 600 guests and the "hundreds of servants" they require. Single rooms fetch as much as $25 per night.
A violent earthquake rattles Kingston, Jamaica, January 14, killing about 800 people, destroying or seriously damaging nearly every building in the capital and in Port Royal, creating a fire that damages much of what survives. The capital's public offices will be rebuilt under the direction of architect Sir Sydney Oliver.
An earthquake in Central Asia October 21 leaves an estimated 12,000 dead.
Parliament passes the National Trust Act to promote the preservation of (and public access to) British buildings of historic and architectural interest and land of natural beauty (see 1895). Supported by admission fees, donations, and legacies in addition to annual membership subscriptions (available to anyone), the Trust will protect some 350 "stately homes" (including Chartwell, Cliveden, Penrhyn Castle, Petworth House, Powis Castle, and Sudbury Hall), parts of Hadrian's Wall, 100 grand gardens and landscaped parks, 17 entire villages, more than 2,000 farms, and some nature reserves such as Hatfield Forest. Parliament will extend the powers and privileges of the Trust in 1919, 1937, and 1939, and a National Trust for Scotland will be founded in 1931.
San Francisco's mayor urges damming of the Tuolumne River in Yosemite Park's Hetch Hetchy valley to give the city a reliable source of water in the wake of last year's disastrous fire. John Muir rallies opposition to the proposal; Gifford Pinchot supports it and seizes upon the word conservation to describe his philosophy (see 1905; 1913).
Senators from Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming force President Roosevelt to sign an appropriations bill containing a rider that repeals the Forest Reserves Act of 1891. The president signs a proclamation 10 days later creating 16 million acres of new forests in the five states, forests that cannot be cut for timber, and before the Roosevelt administration expires early in 1909 it will have set aside 132 million acres in forest reserves.
The Hagenbeck Zoo (Carl Hagenbeck Tierpark) opens at Hamburg, Germany, in a 27-hectare (67-acre) park with moated, barless, open-air enclosures designed to simulate the animals' natural habitats. Hagenbeck will supply circuses and zoos worldwide with his trained animals (his privately-owned zoo will maintain more than 2,000 specimens of some 300 species).
The first canned tunafish is packed at San Pedro, California, according to some accounts by A. P. Halfhill (see 1903).
China's famine continues (see 1906). Foreign missionaries begin relief operations in January, the American Red Cross appeals for funds to relieve the hunger and sends 5,000 bushels of wheat for spring planting. It is reported in February that 500,000 Chinese are expected to die from starvation and many succumb to smallpox. Chinese officials block distribution of famine relief supplies, the government fears a general uprising as conditions worsen, the U.S. State Department reports in April that 400,000 Chinese are receiving foreign relief but reports later in the month say that 5,000 are dying each day. The Famine Relief Commission sends potatoes to Shanghai, the Red Cross announces in late May that the famine is over and contributions are no longer needed, but a U.S. military attaché at Beijing (Peking) says in mid-June that the famine continues and that relief will not reach victims in time. A letter published in July says that 15 million Chinese along the Yangzi River are slowly starving to death.
Russia's famine continues despite a $15 million government appropriation in early January (see 1906). A former member of the Duma arrives in the United States in February to raise money for famine relief and says 1 million peasants face starvation within 3 months if aid is not forthcoming. The United States sends 600,000 tons of wheat in May to relieve the famine-stricken areas, but by September an estimated 30 million peasants are reportedly short of food. Czar Nicholas II signs a $3 million famine appropriation bill in May, Western reporters are informed in early June that no further aid is needed, but the Duma is obliged in December to pass a $7.5 million famine appropriation bill (see 1911).
Famine in Armenia and East Turkey force emigration of many people, some of them to the United States.
Japan has August floods that destroy rice crops and leave thousands starving.
An increase in scurvy is reported in famine-stricken areas of Russia, with several thousand cases reported in March.
Pellagra is observed for the first time in Mississippi, where cornmeal is a dietary staple (see 1749; 1913).
A slim figure is still considered a mark of ill health, despite the Ziegfeld Follies ideal, and this belief will persist for another decade, with patent medicines that promise a remedy for underweight outnumbering those that promise weight loss, before overweight loses its reputation as a mark of robust well-being. The slim figure, meanwhile, will become an impossible dream for millions of women whose genetic predisposition makes such a body unrealistic no matter what weight-loss diet they try.
The Nutrition of Man by Russell H. Chittenden expands on his ideas that adult Americans eat too much protein (see 1904; Sherman, 1911).
Nutritionist W. O. Atwater dies of cancer at Middletown, Conn., September 22 age 53. His obituaries hail him as the founder of the home economics profession whose research played a vital role in changing U.S. eating habits.
U.S. Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Chemistry chief Harvey W. Wiley issues an order (Food Inspection Decision No. 76) July 13 limiting the sulfur content of foods to 350 parts per million (see Germany, 1906). The action is aimed at French wines containing high concentrations of sulfur dioxide; the French government retaliates by imposing a limit of 1,000 parts per million on sulfur dioxide in the dried, cut fruits that France has been importing in quantity from California; U.S. congressmen from that state urge the Bureau of Chemistry to defer enforcement of the order, but the State of Pennsylvania moves in September to bar sale of cured fruits containing any sulfurous acid (see 1908).
Saccharin and other benzoic acid derivatives should be banned from use in food, says chemist Harvey W. Wiley. Rep. James S. Sherman, 51, (R. N.Y.) says that saccharin saves his canning firm thousands of dollars per year; Wiley interrupts him at a White House conference to say, "Yes, Mr. President, and everyone who eats these products is deceived, believing he is eating sugar, and moreover his health is threatened by this drug!" President Roosevelt replies angrily, "Anybody who says saccharin is injurious is an idiot! Dr. Rixey gives it to me every day." Wiley has developed important refining techniques for the sugar industry, Ira Remsen heads the scientific board named by the president to review the data on saccharin, and the board's final report in 1910 will conclude that a continuing daily consumption of 300 milligrams of saccharin presents no hazard (see 1879; sodium cyclamate, 1937).
Work by Philadelphia chemist Mary Engel Pennington, 34, attracts the attention of Harvey W. Wiley, who has her take a civil service exam. She signs the exam paper M. E. Pennington and by the time her gender is discovered has become indispensable to Wiley, who makes her first chief of the U.S. Food Laboratory. She has been operating her own laboratory, specializing in bacteriological analysis, and Wiley assigns her to work on the problem of keeping refrigerated food fresh. Like outside air, air within a refrigerated locker loses its ability to hold moisture as it approaches the freezing point. Food in the locker dries out, and adding humidity just makes it moldy. Pennington's solution to the problem of humidity control in refrigeration will be widely adopted in industry.
Canada Dry Pale Dry Ginger Ale is registered in January as a trademark by John J. McLaughlin, who 3 years ago found a way to eliminate the dark brown color of his Belfast Style Ginger Ale and has also eliminated the sharpness found in other ginger ales (see 1890). McLaughlin calls his product "the Champagne of Ginger Ales," and demand for the beverage will soon oblige him to bottle it at Montreal and Edmonton (see New York, 1922).
The Coca-Cola Company buys out its Atlanta advertising agency (whose proprietors open a Dallas retail store under the name Neiman-Marcus) (see 1899; Britain, 1909; distinctive bottle, 1915).
Pepsi-Cola sales increase to 104,000 gallons, up from 7,968 gallons in 1903, as Caleb Bradham establishes a network of 40 bottling plants (see 1920).
Mackeson Milk Stout is introduced by the Hythe, Kent, brewery acquired by the Mackeson family in 1801.
Minnesota Valley Canning Co. at Le Seur begins packing peas in addition to sweet corn (see 1903; giant symbol, 1925).
The Kellogg brothers adopt "the Sweetheart of the Corn" as an advertising symbol for Kellogg's Corn Flakes (see 1906). Kellogg stenographer Fanny Bryant is photographed with her arms full of corn stalks, and the Kelloggs are excommunicated from the Seventh Day Adventist Church (whose headquarters moved 4 years ago from Battle Creek to a suburb of Washington, D.C.) (see 1911; 40% Bran Flakes, 1915).
The American Sugar Refining trust is found to have defrauded the government out of import duties (see 1899). Several company officials are convicted, and more than $4 million is recovered (see Domino Sugar, 1911).
American Sugar Refining Co. president H. O. Havemeyer goes out pheasant hunting on his private shooting preserves with his son Horace after Thanksgiving dinner at his Commack, Long Island, estate, comes down with acute indigestion, and dies in the large house December 4 at age 60.
Hershey milk-chocolate Kisses are introduced by Hershey Chocolate Co. to compete with Buds, sold by a Lititz, Pa., candy maker since 1893 (see 1903). Each chocolate titbit comes individually wrapped in silver foil, and by the time that blue-and-white paper streamers are added in 1921 Hershey will be turning out millions of Kisses per day.
An immigration act passed by Congress February 20 excludes undesirables, raises the head tax on arrivals to $4, and creates a commission to investigate.
An executive order by President Roosevelt in mid-March bars all Japanese laborers coming from Canada, Hawaii, or Mexico from entry to the continental United States. Japanese immigrants have been arriving at the rate of about 1,000 per month, raising fears that the influx will depress wages and lead to a Japanese takeover of choice farmland (the order's impact is mostly on California farm labor). The Japanese diplomat Tadasu Hayashi, 57, has sent Washington a note in mid-February (see "gentlemen's agreement," 1908).
Nearly 1.29 million immigrants enter the United States, a new record that will not be surpassed in this century.
The British Empire occupies 20 percent of the world's land surface and has a population of 400 million.
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