1912: Information and Much More from Answers.com
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China becomes a republic January 1 with Sun Yat-sen as provisional president (see 1911). The boy emperor Pu Yi (P'ui-i) abdicates February 12 (he is given a pension and a summer palace near Beijing (Peking) but permitted to live in the Forbidden City, where he will remain until 1924), and the National Assembly elects northern general Yuan Shikai as provisional president February 15. Gen. Yuan controls the army and police; now 52, he has his queue cut to symbolize the end of the Qing (Manchu) dynasty; Sun Yat-sen resigns to unite the country, whose treasury is empty and whose provinces are in the hands of rival warlords, but Yuan Shikai will soon try to make himself dictator (see 1913). Population pressures on China's finite resources of land and water have created rebellions in the final decades of the Qing dynasty, rebellions sparked not only by the disruptions of Western imperialism but also by rural unrest. Intellectual leader Liang Qichao, now 38, returns from exile in Japan and helps found the Progressive Party (Jinbudang [Chinputang]). The Dalai Lama returns to Tibet in June and his titles are restored (see 1910; 1913).
Vietnamese nationalist Phan Boi Chau reorganizes his resistance movement against French rule (see 1904). Having abandoned his idea of restoring the monarchy, he establishes the Vietnamese Restoration Society (Viet Nam Quang Phuc Hoi) at Guangzhou (Canton), but the group fails in a plan to assassinate the French governor general of Indochina, and Chau will be imprisoned at Guangzhou from 1914 to 1917 (see 1925).
Japan's Meiji emperor Mutsuhito dies July 30 at age 60 after a 45-year reign that has restored imperial power (see 1867; 1868). Mutsuhito is succeeded by his 33-year-old son Yoshihito, who will reign as the Taisho emperor until 1926, a period that will see Japan emerge as a world power of the first rank.
Irish-born New Zealand politician William F. (Ferguson) Massey, 56, becomes prime minister and signs legislation enabling freeholders to buy their land at its original value. A onetime farmer outside Auckland, Massey will remain in office until his death in 1925, giving a nonpolitical commission responsibility for civil-service positions but using such repressive measures against striking miners and dock workers that he will unintentionally help opponents form a Labour Party in 1916.
French statesman Raymond Poincaré, 51, forms a ministry January 14 that will wrestle with problems of Morocco, Italy's Tripolitanian war, and the Balkan wars. Former premier Henri Brisson dies at Paris April 11 at age 76.
Royal Navy lieutenant Charles Samson flies a Shorts S27 biplane off a platform built on the stationary battleship H.M.S. Africa January 19 and in May flies a plane off the moving ship Hibernia during the Royal Fleet Review at Weymouth, inaugurating an era of naval air power. The Royal Flying Corps authorized by royal warrant May 13 supersedes the Air Battalion of the Royal Engineers, sustains its first fatal crash July 5 near Stonehenge, continues flying as usual, and by year's end has 12 manned balloons and 36 biplanes for use as fighter aircraft (see Trenchard, 1913).
The U.S. Navy tries in July to launch a plane from the deck of a ship, using a catapult powered by compressed air, but the plane crashes into the sea (see 1911; aircraft carrier, 1918).
Denmark's Frederik VIII visits Hanburg, leaves his hotel for a solitary evening walk, suffers a heart attack, and dies June 14 at age 69 after a 6-year reign (his body is not identified until later). His 41-year-old son will reign until 1947 as Kristian X.
Montenegro declares war on the Ottoman Empire October 8, the Turks decline October 12 to undertake reforms in Macedonia demanded by the great powers, Constantinople declares war on Bulgaria and Serbia October 17, the Greeks join the conflict, and the Turks suffer major reverses.
The Treaty of Lausanne October 18 ends the 12-month war between Italy and the Ottoman Turks (see 1911). Italian forces have occupied Rhodes and the other Dodecanese Islands in May; peace talks began in July; and Constantinople, under pressure in the Balkans, has finally agreed to give up Tripoli, with Italy to exit the Dodecanese Islands as soon as the Turks exit Tripoli.
Bulgarian forces triumph October 22 at Kirk Kilisse in Thrace, the Serbs gain a victory October 24 to 26 at Kumanovo, and Bulgarian troops under Mikhail Savov, 55, win the Battle of Lule Burgas October 28 to November 3, bringing them to the last lines of defense before Constantinople. Moscow warns that it will use its fleet to resist a Bulgarian occupation of Constantinople, and the Bulgarians fail in an attack on the Turkish lines.
Serbian forces overrun northern Albania and reach the Adriatic November 10; they gain victory at Monastir November 15 to 18, but Austria declares her opposition to Serbia having access to the Adriatic and announces her support for an independent Albania, which declares independence from the Ottoman Empire November 28 (see 1924). Austria and Russia begin to mobilize, but an armistice December 3 ends most of the hostilities (see 1913).
Egyptian minister of justice Sa'd Zaghlul resigns after a dispute with the khedive Abbas Hilmi II after 6 years of government service in which he has won praise from the British viceroy Evelyn Baring, 1st Lord Cromer, for cooperating "with Europeans in the introduction of Western civilization into the country" (see 1910). Zaghlul's compliance has antagonized Egyptian nationalists (but see 1913).
New Mexico enters the Union January 6 as the 47th state; Arizona enters February 14 as the 48th.
U.S. Marines land in Honduras in February, in Cuba 4 months later, and in Nicaragua in August to protect American interests. They will remain in Nicaragua until 1933.
Peru's president Augusto Leguía y Salcedo completes his term in office, having served since 1908 as a tool of the ruling oligarchy. He travels to London, where he will remain until 1919.
Former U.S. governor of the Philippines Gen. Arthur MacArthur (ret.) dies of a heart attack at Milwaukee September 5 at age 67.
Former U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt wins all the Republican primaries, but party bosses beholden to Wall Street block his nomination by the convention. Sen. Robert M. La Follette (R. Wis.) has organized the National Progressive Republican League to oppose the policies of President Taft, but his health fails temporarily, so Roosevelt incorporates La Follette's group into a new Progressive Party (called the "Bull Moose" Party after Roosevelt is badly wounded by a would-be assassin in Wisconsin October 14 and says he feels "fit as a bull moose"); the so-called "Man on Horseback" runs on a platform that calls for federal aid to agriculture, a federal income tax, and new federal agencies to regulate business. He wins 88 electoral votes and 28 percent of the popular vote. No other party will hereafter deny the nomination to anyone who sweeps the primaries, and no Republican candidate for federal office in this century will defy the nation's moneyed interests. President Taft wins only 8 electoral votes and 23 percent of the popular vote; socialist Eugene Debs polls more than 900,000 votes; and New Jersey governor Woodrow Wilson receives 435 electoral votes with 42 percent of the popular vote to give Democrats control of the White House for the first time since Grover Cleveland left office in 1897.
Argentina's oligarchical legislature establishes universal and compulsory male suffrage beginning at age 18 with a secret ballot under legislation passed at the insistence of Buenos Aires-born Radical Party leader Hipólito Irigoyen, 60, who has gained the support of President Roque Sáenz Peña.
Cuban troops put down large demonstrations by black workers in Oriente Province, where Evaristo Estenoz and Pedro Ivonet have organized a movement to protest a ban of political associations based on color and race, secure better jobs, and gain more political patronage (see politics, 1909). President José Miguel Gómez will leave office next year, but his successor Mario García Menocal will continue the pattern of corrupt maladministration set by both his predecessors.
The African National Congress has its beginnings in the South African Native National Congress founded January 8 at Bloemfontein, where Xhosa, Zulu, and other tribal chiefs have gathered with heads of religious groups to protect the rights of native peoples from encroachment by whites (see Gandhi, 1906; Mines and Works Act, 1911; Natives' Land Act, 1913).
London police arrest English suffragists Emmeline Pankhurst and Emmeline and Frederick Pethick-Lawrence in early March following demonstrations (Pankhurst and two others have broken the windows of Prime Minister Asquith's residence at 10 Downing Street after leaving a note for him). Annie Kenney takes over the WSPU for 2 months while Pankhurst and the Pethick-Lawrences are in Holloway Gaol. Christabel Pankhurst has not been allowed to practice law and is joined by her mother in repudiating the Pethick-Lawrences after their release. The Pankhursts join the United Suffragists, and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence voyages to America to support U.S. suffragists.
Italians gain almost universal male suffrage under legislation adopted June 29. The measure also provides that salaries be paid members of Parliament. Italy's lower house of Parliament votes 209 to 48 against giving women the right to vote (but see 1919).
Daisy Bates applies for the position of Protector of Aborigines in Australia's Northern Territory (see 1902); she has had more experience in living with the natives than anyone else, but her application for the salaried job is rejected on the ground that a woman would need a police escort, which would hamper her work among people who regard their wives as chattels that can be sold or traded and whose population is being ravaged by sexually transmitted diseases contracted from white settlers. Given the unpaid job of Honorary Protector in the Eucla district, she is obliged in June to put her 183,000-acre cattle station up for sale in order to finance the work that will occupy her for more than 30 years (see Nonfiction, 1938).
A mass meeting of the Wage Earner's League and the Collegiate Equal Suffrage League in the Great Hall of the People at New York's Cooper Union April 22 protests the state legislature's failure to pass a resolution endorsing female suffrage. Labor leader Rose Schneiderman attacks a state senator who has said that if women were to get "into the arena of politics with its alliances and distressing contests—the delicacy is gone, the charm is gone, and you emasculize woman"; rising to her full four feet nine inches, she says, "I wonder if it will add to my height when I get the vote . . . It is just too ridiculous, this talk of becoming less womanly." She speaks of women in laundries standing 13 to 14 hours each day in terrible steam and heat with their hands in hot starch. "Certainly these women won't lose any more of their beauty and charm by putting a ballot in a ballot box once a year than they are likely to standing in the . . . laundries all year round."
A New York suffrage parade marches up Fifth Avenue from Washington Square beginning at sundown May 4. The 10,000 marchers reverently carry huge banners bearing the names of the late Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Julia Ward Howe, 1,000 sympathetic men join them, as does a contingent led by New York-born feminist Inez Milholland, 25 (Vassar '09), wearing Grecian robes and mounted on a white horse. Chivalry may entertain "people of noble leisure," she says, but "privileges and chivalry" have done nothing for women teachers seeking equal pay. The laws "must remember the masses of mankind," nor should sentimentality be used to exclude women "from the ideals of independence and power." An overflow crowd that includes women of all ages, occupations, and professions packs Carnegie Hall to hear speeches urging that women be given the vote.
Male voters in four U.S. states—Michigan, Kansas, Oregon, and the new state of Arizona—vote in the November 6 elections to adopt constitutional amendments granting female suffrage, but Wisconsin voters reject the proposal.
France's Parlement votes in November to repeal article 340 of the Napoleonic Civil Code, easing restrictions against women, but French women will not vote in general elections until 1945.
American Red Cross founder Clara Barton dies at Glen Echo, Maryland, April 12 at age 90. She had been planning to establish a Red Cross in Mexico.
A relief fund to aid less affluent survivors of R.M.S. Titanic brings contributions that total $77,342.75 by April 20 (the ship has sunk in the North Atlantic April 15); $10,000 comes from J. P. Morgan (who is taking his annual spa cure at Aix-les-Bains in southern France), $10,000 from Vincent Astor, $2,000 from Edward S. Harriman, $2,500 from John D. Rockefeller, $2,500 from Singer Manufacturing Co., $1,000 from Levi P. Morton.
British explorer Robert Falcon Scott and his men reach the South Pole January 17 and find Roald Amundsen's flag there (see 1911). "Great God! This is an awful place," Scott says; he has planned his expedition less carefully than Amundsen, relying on Siberian ponies rather than dogs, and the ponies have to be shot to provide food; with each man pushing a sledge whose load averages 190 pounds, the daily ration of 4,800 calories is inadequate and the entire party starves to death (see Shackleton, 1914).
Munich-born German explorer Wilhelm Filchner, 34, penetrates the Antarctic ice pack of the Weddell Sea at 77°50' South early in the year aboard his ship Deutschland. He charts what he calls the Luitpold Coast between 29° and 37° West (naming it for Bavaria's prince regent), his ship becomes trapped in the pack ice in March, and drifts with it until November 26, when it becomes free at 63°37' South, 36°34' West.
Arctic explorer-naval engineer George W. Melville dies at Philadelphia March 17 at age 70.
Lawrence, Mass., woolen mills have a bitter strike beginning in January as women join with men in smashing machines. Anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman have helped organize the strike by women employees, who work the same hours as men but for less pay and do housework in addition. The strikers carry banners with the slogan "We want bread and roses too"; a woman striker is killed January 30 in a street fight with police, and Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 21, gets her first taste of labor-management violence. Born at Concord, N.H., but raised in New York, Flynn has worked full time for the IWW since 1907. The strikers send about 150 children to New York to get them out of harm's way, but when police step in with billy clubs to stop the departure of a second group February 24, the resultant national publicity about women and children being beaten puts pressure on the mill owners to settle the strike, and they meet most of the strikers' demands (see 1913).
A minimum wage law for women and children enacted by the Massachusetts legislature is the first state law of its kind.
Liberty Mutual Insurance Co. is founded at Boston to write workers' compensation policies in Massachusetts.
The 1,513 passengers and crew lost in the sinking of R.M.S. Titanic on the North Atlantic April 15 include such prominent millionaires as John Jacob Astor IV, 47; copper heir Benjamin Guggenheim, 47; Pennsylvania Railroad executive John B. Thayer, whose athletic son Jack survives, and Philadelphia traction magnate George D. (Dunton) Widener, 50, along with his bibliophile son, Harry Elkins Widener, 27, who goes down clutching a 1598 edition of Bacon's essays (see education, 1915). A jeweled edition of Omar Khayam that took 2 years to design and create was sold to the agent of an American collector at Sotheby's March 29 for £405 and is also lost with the ship. Survivors include also costume and fashion designer Lady Duff Gordon, now 48 (who will be accused of having used bribery to get into a lifeboat), and Denver millionaire Molly (originally Margaret) Brown, 44, who has donned woollen underwear, heavy bloomers, two wool petticoats, a $4,000 sable muff, and a $60,000 chinchilla cape, marshaled dozens of shivering women and children into lifeboats, boarded the last one, and threatened to throw the only seaman aboard into the drink if he did not start rowing. She has picked up an oar herself, ordered the other 23 women in the boat to stop crying and start rowing, given most of her clothing to the others, and—now down to her underwear—threatened malingerers with a Colt pistol. She and her companions are rescued after more than 5 hours on the North Atlantic, and she is hailed as a national heroine when she reaches New York.
Travelers' Insurance Co. announces in June that passengers aboard the ill-fated White Star liner R.M.S. Titanic have carried at least $1 million in insurance and that claims will be paid promptly (Pennsylvania Railroad executive John B. Thayer has been paying premiums since 1907 on a $120,000 casualty policy).
Cargo lost in the sinking of R.M.S. Titanic is valued at $420,000.
West Virginia authorities call in the National Guard April 18 to suppress a coal miners' strike.
Kalamazoo, Mich., corset makers strike against a company they charge with immoral behavior. One striker says, "The girls are compelled to pay for their own thread, and this is quite an item. It is a common practice for foremen to forget to charge them for the thread for several days and then to suggest a way in which these girls may repay them for this 'kindness.'" Police arrest the striking women.
The Japanese newspaper Manchoho Shimbun publishes a letter June 8 addressed to the president of a large textile company complaining about having to work 12-hour days. Japan's economy is dependent on textile exports, and textile factories depend on cheap labor.
Congress extends the 8-hour day to all federal employees; in private industry most workers labor 10 to 12 hours per day 6 days per week.
A measure signed into law by President Taft August 23 creates a Commission on Industrial Relations. A delegation led by social reformer Jane Addams and Rabbi Stephen Wise urged the president early in the year to establish such a commission to examine the activities of labor unions, employer associations, and federal and state bureaus that have jurisdiction in such matters, with special attention paid to the economic and social disruptions created by strikes, and the president's State of the Union message to Congress February 2 asked lawmakers to authorize a commission with sweeping investigatory powers, but Taft irks reformers when he names the commissioners after the November election; the Senate refuses to confirm his nominees, who are acceptable to the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Federation of Labor, and the National Civic Federation but not to more radical labor organizations (see 1913).
The International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) calls a strike in December (but see 1913).
Wall Street's Dow Jones Industrial Average closes December 31 at 87.87, up from 81.68 at the end of 1911.
R. H. Macy's closes for a day to mourn the loss of Isidor Straus, who has gone down with R.M.S. Titanic and drowned at age 67 (see 1902). His wife, Ida, drowns along with her husband, having refused to join other first-cabin women in the lifeboats. Nathan Straus is so shaken by the loss of his brother that he will sell his interest in the New York store next year to Isidor's sons Jesse Isidor Straus, now 40, Percy Seldon Straus, 36, and Herbert N. Straus, 30 (see Thanksgiving Day parade, 1924).
L. L. Bean, Inc., of Freeport, Maine, is founded by local merchant and outdoorsman Leon Lenwood Bean, 39, who last year invented what he called the Maine Hunting Shoe and now goes into partnership with his brother Gus to open a small clothing store. His hunting shoe has a leather top and rubber bottom. He prices it at $4 to $5.50 per pair depending on size, and markets it by obtaining a list of licenses issued to hunters, sending each a three-page brochure. "You cannot expect success hunting deer or moose if your feet are not properly dressed," says the brochure, and it offers a money-back guarantee. Ninety of the first 100 hunting shoe orders are returned because their leather tops have separated from their rubber bottoms, but Bean visits United States Rubber Co. at Boston, persuades the firm to make a light, low-heeled rubber shoe strong enough for a leather top to be added, uses a combination of stitching and glue to prevent separation, makes good on all the returns, and will move in 5 years into a store on Freeport's main street that it will occupy until 1962, although mail orders will account for most of his sales, chamois shirts and down vests supplementing those of the Maine Hunting Shoe that will be patented in 1918. Sales will top $1 million per year by 1937 (see 1951).
A new Filene's with a seven-foot doorman opens at Boston September 3 at the corner of Washington and Summer streets in a building designed by Daniel Burnham (see Automatic Bargain Basement, 1909). Edward Filene will hold free tea dances beginning in 1919, and although his Automatic Bargain Basement is losing money and will continue to sustain losses for 7 more years, it will then become profitable and endure as a Boston institution (see Federated, 1929).
S. S. Kresge is incorporated, having grown since 1899 to operate 85 stores with annual sales of $10 million. Now 45, founder Kresge will become chairman in 1925, and by that time he will be operating more than 300 stores and have net worth of $200 million. Kresge, Inc. will have 677 stores in 27 states by 1940 (see Kmart, 1962).
Cyrus Eaton of Cleveland organizes Continental Gas and Electric Co., the first great utility holding company (see Eaton, 1907; Insull, 1932).
Middle West Utilities Co. is founded at Chicago by Commonwealth Edison founder Samuel Insull, now 52 (see 1892). Having earlier confined his efforts almost entirely to the city, he acquired some central stations 2 years ago that were serving 12 Lake County, Ill., communities, connected them with eight other rural towns and a few farms, created a unified system providing 24-hour service through a network of transmission lines, and reduced the unit cost to rate-payers to 40 percent of what it cost from separate systems. Other utilities across the country have followed his lead, and Insull has started Middle West with a view to developing a system that will serve the entire state of Illinois and as many other Midwestern states as well. Within 5 years the new entity will have assets of more than $175 million (see 1932).
Electric light bulbs begin to last longer thanks to Brooklyn, N.Y.-born General Electric research chemist Irving Langmuir, 31, who discovers that filling incandescent bulbs with inert gases will greatly increase the illuminating life of tungsten filaments developed by his colleague W. D. Coolidge. Confuting conventional wisdom that the vacuum in the light bulb is what permits its filament to burn so long, Langmuir shows that while bulbs with poor vacuums are no worse than those with the best, adding nitrogen gas (which does not react with the tungsten filament) will avoid evaporation of the filament and prolong the life of the bulb. Langmuir will substitute argon for nitrogen (see science, 1894; Coolidge, 1913).
Oklahoma's Wheeler Well No. 1 begins making a fortune for wildcatter Thomas B. (Baker) Slick, 28, who has leased more than 100,000 acres of the state's oil lands (see Marland, 1911). The discovery well that starts gushing in March is in the Cushing Field, which will by some accounts earn Slick $75 million; by 1919 it will be producing 17 percent of the crude oil marketed in the United States and 3 percent of all the oil produced in the world, driving prices down by the sheer volume of its own output and that of other Oklahoma fields (see Healdton, 1913).
The U.S. Navy establishes petroleum reserves at Elk Hills and Buena Vista Hills, California, as it converts its ships from coal to diesel (see Teapot Dome, 1914).
Sun Oil Co. founder Joseph N. Pew dies at his desk in his Philadelphia office at age 63 (approximate), having devised new ways to capture and pipe natural gas; Pew bought into the Spindletop, Texas, oil strike of 1901 and leaves a vast fortune to his two sons J. (John) Howard Pew, now 30, Joseph N., Jr., now 25, and two daughters.
Turkish Petroleum Co. is founded to exploit reserves discovered in Mesopotamia.
Henry M. Flagler's Florida East Coast Railway opens January 21 to link New York with Key West, Florida, the closest deep-water port to the Panama Canal now under construction. Some 3,000 men have worked for 7 years to complete the 153-mile rail link from the mainland to Florida's largest city; Flagler and his third wife, Mary Lily, are on the train that arrives at 10:43 in the morning of January 22; he has paid close $50 million for its construction; yellow fever has killed hundreds of men; a hurricane in 1906 took 125 lives, and hurricanes will destroy the line in 1926 and 1935.
Brazil's Madeira-Mamoré Railway opens July 15 after less than 5 years of construction that has cost at least 3,600 lives (6,000 by some accounts) and $33 million U.S., the equivalent of three tons of gold. Rubber barons have financed the 367-mile road to circumvent 19 major waterfalls. The road permits resumption of Bolivian rubber shipments, but malaria, yellow fever, beriberi, snake bites, wild animals, and curare-tipped arrows from hostile natives have taken a heavy toll, and the Amazon Basin rubber boom will soon collapse as East Indian and African plantations undercut the price of wild rubber, making the railroad uneconomic (although it will continue to operate until 1972).
Automatic railcar coupler inventor Eli H. Janney dies at Alexandria, Virginia, June 16 at age 80.
The U.S. Supreme Court rules December 2 that a merger of the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific railroads violates the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and must be dissolved.
The Spanish steamship Principe de Asturias strikes a rock off Sebastien Point March 5; some 500 passengers and crewmen are drowned.
R.M.S. Titanic of the White Star Line scrapes an iceberg in the North Atlantic on her maiden voyage, her hull is punctured, and she sinks in 2½ hours on the night of April 14, going down 12,200 feet into the icy waters 375 miles southeast of Newfoundland. Built at a cost of $10 million, the three-screw passenger liner displaced 46,329 tons and was 883 feet in length overall, making it the world's largest passenger liner and the largest moving object ever made by man, although her operating speed of 21 knots made her slower than the Cunard Line's R.M.S. Mauretania. The Titanic was outfitted with a Turkish bath, a squash court, and the first heated swimming pool aboard any vessel. She was called "unsinkable" when she left port April 10, but her wreck will be discovered in 1985, scattered across a square mile of sea bottom, and it will later be found that the rivets in her steel hull contained too much sulfur and were brittle. She had a capacity of 1,343 passengers, 885 in crew, but only 711 of the 2,224 aboard survive, including 60 percent of first-cabin passengers, 44 percent of second-cabin, and just 25 percent of steerage passengers. There was never a lifeboat drill, the Titanic's lifeboats had enough places for only about half the people aboard (French law requires that every ship carry enough boats for all on board with food and water stored in each boat), many were launched when less than half full (the first six carried only 192 people when they could have carried 390), the total number of empty lifeboat seats was at least 500, and despite hearing moans and cries for help the women in the boats did not insist after the ship went down that they return to look for life-jacketed survivors in the numbingly cold water. While 31 percent of first-cabin men survive (a higher percentage than among children in the third class), only 10 percent of men in second class and 14 percent of men in steerage come out alive. The S.S. Carpathia arrives within 7 hours to pick up survivors, who include White Star managing director J. Bruce Ismay (he will claim he entered the last boat when no other passengers responded to the call).
The Cunard Line's R.M.S. Mauretania arrives at New York April 19, having taken longer than planned because her captain chose a less direct course in order to avoid ice in the North Atlantic; the Carpathia leaves that day to resume her voyage to the Mediterranean.
Furness, Withy & Co. cofounder Sir Christopher Furness, Lord Furness of Grantley, dies at London November 10 at age 60.
German-born engineer Grover Loening, 24, designs and builds the world's first amphibious aircraft. He graduated 2 years ago from Columbia University with the first U.S. master's degree in aeronautics and his "aeroboat" brings him to the attention of Orville Wright, who will hire him next year as his assistant and manager of Wright Aircraft's Dayton, Ohio, factory.
Dutch aircraft designer A. H. G. (Anthony Herman Gerard) Fokker, 22, introduces the Fokker aeroplane, opens a factory at Johannesthal, Germany, and will build another next year at Schwerin (see 1916; 1922).
English aeronaut T. O. M. (Thomas Octave Murdoch) Sopwith, 24, founds Sopwith Aviation at Kingston-on-Thames (see Sopwith Camel, 1914; Hawker, 1921).
Aviation pioneer Wilbur Wright dies of typhoid fever at Dayton, Ohio, May 30 at age 45; French aviator Hubert Latham is killed by a buffalo June 7 at age 28 while hunting in Sudan.
Bendix Brake Co. is founded by Vincent Bendix, who has begun production of his Bendix starter drive (see 1907). His new firm will be the first mass producer of four-wheel brakes for motorcars (see Bendix Aviation, 1929).
The first modern electric traffic light is installed at Salt Lake City, where the head of the local police department's traffic detail has devised the light (see Cleveland, 1914).
Buick Division chief Charles W. (William) Nash, 48, becomes president of General Motors and brings in American Locomotive Works manager Walter P. (Percy) Chrysler, 37, to head Buick (see Durant, 1910). A railroad man's son, the Kansas-born Chrysler was a crack locomotive repairman in his youth and spent nearly 20 years in railroading, becoming a hard-driving boss as well as one of the boys, but he will make his fortune and reputation in the motorcar business (see 1923).
Seven companies produce half of all U.S. automobiles (see 1923) More than 22 percent of the cars are Fords, which come out of Ford factories at the rate of 26,000 per month (see 1911; assembly line, 1913).
Britain's Morris Oxford motorcar is introduced by former bicycle repairman William R. (Richard) Morris, 35, of Cowley and will continue production until 1984, rivaling Austin in popularity. Morris is the first British manufacturer to employ mass production that makes motorcars cheap enough for working-class people (see MG, 1929; Nuffield Foundation, 1943).
The Nissan automobile has its beginnings in the Kaishinsha Motor Car Works founded at Tokyo. The company will produce its first vehicle in 1917, merge in 1926 with Jitsuyojidosha Seizo of Osaka, make only trucks until 1930, and enter the U.S. market in 1960 under the name Datsun.
Toledo, Ohio, glassmaker E. D. Libby buys the patents of Toledo plate-glass maker Irving Wightman Colburn and supports Colburn while he develops the process that by 1916 will be turning out hundreds of yards of plate glass per day in a continuous operation at a plant that Libby-Owens-Ford will build at Charlestown, W. Va. Libby has just merged his operations with those of Owens Bottle Machine Co. to create Libby-Owens (see Owens, 1895; 1903).
J. E. Brandenberger perfects the cellophane material he patented in 1908. He will found Société de Cellophane in 1915 and in 1924 will sell U.S. rights to E. I. du Pont de Nemours, whose new management has been diversifying from explosives to lacquers, paints, and other products (see DuPont, 1926).
German physicist Max (Theodor Felix) von Laue, 32, and two of his students at the University of Zürich conduct experiments that verify his theory that if an X-ray beam is passed through a crystal, the resulting diffraction will form a pattern on a photographic plate placed at a right angle to the direction of the ray, and this pattern will mark out the symmetrical arrangements of the atoms in the crystal (see Barkla, 1903). The discovery enables scientists to study the structure of crystals and marks the beginning of solid-state physics, which will prove essential to the development of modern electronics (see Bragg, Moseley, 1913).
Piltdown Man promises to be the "missing link" between man and ape in Darwin's theory of evolution. The Manchester Guardian reports November 21 that solicitor Charles Dawson, 48, an amateur geologist, has unearthed evidence at Barkham Manor in East Sussex of fossil skull fragments (they will later will be named Eoanthropus Dawsoni, "Dawson's Dawn Man") and gained the support of British Museum geologist Arthur S. (Smith) Woodward, also 48. But many paleontologists have doubts about the find (see 1953).
Biologist-geneticist Nettie Maria Stevens dies at Baltimore May 4 at age 50; plant cytologist Eduard Adolf Strasburger at Bonn May 18 at age 68; chemist Paul-Emile Lecoq de Boisbaudran at Paris May 28 at age 74; mathematician Jules-Henri Poincaré at Paris July 7 at age 58.
The Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen withdraws its support from medical missionary Wilfred Grenfell, now 47, who founds the International Grenfell Association, which will soon have branches in Britain, the United States, Newfoundland, and other parts of Canada (see 1892). Grenfell will be knighted in 1927 and by the time he retires in 1932 Labrador will have six Grenfell Association hospitals, four hospital ships, seven nursing stations, two orphanages, two large schools, 14 industrial centers, and a cooperative lumber mill.
Antiseptic surgery pioneer Joseph Lister, Baron Lister of Lyme Regis, dies at Walmer, Kent February 10 at age 84.
Congress enacts legislation August 14 changing the name of the Public Health and Marine Hospital Services to the Public Health Service and authorizing it to pursue investigations into sanitation, sewage disposal, and water supplies as well as hookworm, leprosy, malaria, tuberculosis, and other human diseases (see 1902; 1939).
The Sherley Amendment to the U.S. Pure Food and Drug Law of 1906 prohibits farfetched declarations of therapeutic or curative effects (see 1911). Chairman of the House Committee on Appropriations Swager Sherley (D. Ky.) has sponsored the amendment, enacted August 23; it requires that the patent medicine Cuforhedake Brane-Fude be labeled 30 percent alcohol, brings therapeutic claims within the jurisdiction of the 1906 law, but requires that the Bureau of Food and Drugs prove claims to be false and fraudulent before they can be judged illegal. Promoters push cocaine as a cure for hay fever, sinusitis, and alcohol and opium abuse; patent medicines containing opium and its derivatives remain freely available, as do hypodermic needles, and many physicians continue to prescribe heroin as a treatment for morphine addiction even though heroin addiction is more deadly (see Harrison Act, 1914).
The Pituitary Body and Its Disorders by Boston surgeon Harvey Cushing, 43, advances knowledge of the pituitary gland and its relation to diabetes.
The drug MDMA introduced in Europe as a potential appetite suppressant has euphoria-producing psychedelic effects and toward the end of the century will come into widespread (if illegal) use under the name Ecstasy.
The first diagnosis of a heart attack in a living patient appears in the December 7 Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Chicago physician James B. Herrick points out that what may seem to be acute indigestion, food poisoning, angina pectoris, or something else may in fact be due to a blood clot (thrombosis) in the coronary artery, which is what generally destroys a segment of the heart muscle to produce a myocardial infarction, considered until now merely a curiosity seen on autopsy as an inevitable consequence of aging. Herrick's patient (a 55-year-old banker) has survived only 52 hours, but Herrick shows that heart attacks need not be fatal. Further work will show that clots generally occur in coronary arteries damaged by arteriosclerosis (or atherosclerosis), but heart disease remains a relatively minor cause of death among Americans as compared with tuberculosis and pneumonia (see Anichkov, 1913; Herrick, 1910; 1921).
Pentecostal preacher William H. Durham visits Chicago in February, catches cold, returns to Los Angeles, and dies there of complications July 7 at age 39, having made the first major theological breakin Pentacostalism (see 1911; Assemblies of God, 1914).
Hadassah (Hebrew for myrtle) is founded by Baltimore-born activist Henrietta Szold, 52, who will make the sisterhood of U.S. Jewish women a Zionist organization beginning in 1916 and head the group until 1926. Szold has been disappointed in love by Talmudic scholar Louis Ginzberg, 39, whose first books she translated but who 4 years ago met Adele Katzenstein in Berlin and married her.
The Islamic reform movement Muhammadiyah is founded in the Dutch East Indies in May with the intention of returning to the precepts of the Koran and giving up the four different schools of interpreting Islamic law on the premise that they are unsuited to modern society. Jogjakarta-born Javanese merchant Kijai Hadji Ahmad Dachlan, now 43, made a pilgrimage to Mecca more than a decade ago and has become active in efforts to reform not only Islamic rituals but basic laws. Modeling itself on those of Christian missionary societies, his program emphasizes education and social work; the Dutch colonial administration will grant Dachlan's schools a government subsidy in 1915, and after 1920 Muhammadiyah will spread throughout Java and to the outer Indonesian islands as the rising middle class sends its children to learn in a Muslim rather than a Christian environment.
Rice University is founded at Houston under the name Rice Institute with a bequest from the late Texas merchant William Marsh Rice, who was chloroformed to death by his valet in his New York hotel suite 12 years ago at age 84 (see retail trade, 1838). Boston architect Ralph Adams Cram has designed the campus buildings.
The Montessori Method by educator Maria Montessori describes her success at teaching slum children between the ages of 3 and 6 how to read (see 1909). Now 42, she begins a movement of Montessori schools for teachers, and the first U.S. Montessori school opens at Tarrytown, N.Y., under the direction of Anne George, who has studied under Montessori.
The Kallikak Family by Maine-born psychologist Henry Herbert Goddard, 46, relates feeblemindedness to crime and creates a sensation. Goddard coined the word moron in 1910 after visiting at Paris with the late Alfred Binet; last year he tested the school population of a New Jersey town and revised the Binet-Simon I.Q. test of 1905 for U.S. use. German psychologist Louis William Stern, now 40, will propose in 1914 that dividing the mental age of a child by his or her chronological age will make it easy to understand "Intelligence Quotient" (see Terman, 1916).
The wireless message "SS Titanic RAN INTO ICEBERG. SINKING FAST" is picked up accidentally by Russian-born wireless operator David Sarnoff, 20, who will later say that he was manning a station set up by John Wanamaker in his New York store window, ostensibly to keep in touch with the Philadelphia Wanamaker's but actually as a publicity stunt (skeptics will raise doubts about the story, since the store is closed at night, certainly on Sunday). Sarnoff relays the message from R.M.S. Titanic to another steamer, whose radio operator reports that the liner has sunk but that some survivors have been picked up. Marconi Co. employee Clair L. (Loring) Farrand, 17, mans the radio at the Philadelphia Wanamaker's and, like Sarnoff, stays up all night recording the names of survivors aboard the Carpathia, supplying them to the Philadelphia newspapers. President Taft orders other stations to remain silent and Sarnoff remains at his post for 72 hours, taking the names of survivors and making his own name familiar to millions of newspaper readers (see 1917; Farrand, 1918).
An SOS in Morse code—three dots, three dashes, three dots—gains acceptance as a universal distress signal (see 1906). The CQD signal will no longer be used.
Connecticut-born Bell Laboratories physicist Harold DeForest Arnold, 28, produces the first effective high-vacuum tube for amplifying electric currents (see Edison, 1883; transistor, 1947). Irving Langmuir's work on vacuums will be applied to the development of an improved radio tube whose patents will be major assets of Radio Corp. of America (RCA) (see 1919). Bell Labs physicist Lee de Forest modifies his Audion receiver vacuum tube of 1909 to make it more sensitive and finds, instead, that he has created an audio amplifier. Western Electric will acquire it and use it as a repeater (inline booster) to improve telephone transmissions.
London physicist William H. (Henry) Eccles, 37, suggests that solar radiation may account for the differences in wave propagation during day and night. He will study atmospheric disturbances of radio reception and experiment with detectors and amplifiers designed to improve reception.
AT&T's Western Union buys U.S. rights to a multiplex device that permits up to four messages to be sent at once over the same circuit. The multiplex takes advantage of the difference between the speed of mechanical impulses and the speed of electrical impulses.
Parliament nationalizes Britain's telephone system (see 1911). The action follows that of most European countries and brings demands for the nationalization of American Telephone and Telegraph (see 1910; Burleson, 1913).
Literary Digest publisher Isaac K. Funk of Funk & Wagnalls dies at Montclair, N.J., April 4 at age 72.
Pravda begins publication May 5 to voice the ideas of Russia's underground Communist Party (see 1905) with Vyacheslav Molotov (Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Skryabin), 22, as editor. V. I. Lenin uses the Russian word for truth, and while Pravda will publish only one version of the truth in his tabloid, the newspaper's circulation will grow to become the world's largest.
The Associated Advertising Clubs of America adopts a Truth in Advertising code.
A new U.S. postal regulation requires all advertising in the media to be labeled "advt."
New York Tribune publisher Whitelaw Reid dies at London December 15 at age 75 while serving as U.S. ambassador to Britain (see 1872). His son Ogden Mills Reid, 30, who last year married his mother's social secretary, Helen Rogers (née Miles), now 29, will take over management of the paper; its circulation and advertising have declined, young Ogden will not be able to rebuild it even with the help of his capable wife, but they will reject offers to buy it (seeHerald-Tribune, 1924).
Nonfiction: Essays in Radical Empiricism by the late William James; The Meaning of God in Human Experience by Cleveland-born philosopher William Ernest Hocking, 39, who has studied under William James and Josiah Royce at Harvard; Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt by J. H. Breasted; A History of the Roman Empire from the Fall of Irene to the Accession of Basil I by J. B. Bury; Journal by English baroness Lady Alice Hillingdon, now 55, who has written, "I am happy now that Charles calls on my bedchamber less frequently than of old. As it is, I now endure but two calls a week and when I hear his steps outside my door I lie down on my bed, close my eyes, open my legs, and think of England"; The Four Men by Hilaire Belloc describes a walk through Sussex; The Yosemite by John Muir; Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town by Stephen Leacock; The Day of the Saxon by Homer Lea, who warns of attacks by Oriental peoples upon the British Empire.
Soldier and author Homer Lea is stricken with paralysis and dies at Ocean Park outside Los Angeles November 1 at age 35.
Fiction: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by poet-essayist James Weldon Johnson of 1899 "Lift Every Voice and Sing" fame (he will not acknowledge authorship until 1927); Jean-Christophe by French novelist-playwright Romain Rolland, 46; The Sea and the Jungle by London Morning Leader staff writer H. M. (Henry Major) Tomlinson, 39; Twixt Land and Sea (stories) by Joseph Conrad includes "The Secret Sharer" and "The Inn of the Two Witches"; The Unbearable Bassington and The Chronicles of Clovis by Saki (H. H. Munro); The Financier by Theodore Dreiser is based on the life of the late Charles T. Yerkes; Riders of the Purple Sage by former New York dentist Zane Grey, 37; The Serious Game (Den allvarsamma leken) by Hjalmar Soderberg; Daddy Long-Legs by Fredonia, N.Y.-born novelist Jean (née Alice Jane Chandler) Webster, 36; "Tarzan, Lord of the Apes" by Chicago-born writer Edgar Rice Burroughs, 37, takes up almost the entire October issue of All-Story magazine and creates a sensation. Burroughs has worked as a cowboy, gold miner, railroad policeman, and Seventh Cavalry trooper in Arizona; his story about a young English noblemen raised by apes is only the third piece that he has ever submitted for publication, but he is able to turn out words at a fast pace and his writing will give him the wherewithal to support his wife and family in comfort.
Novelist Bram Stoker dies at London April 20 at age 64.
Poetry: Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke, who will say that the wind dictated the first lines to him in January of this year on the terrace of the castle of Duino near Trieste. He enters a period of existential self-revelation and will not complete the Elegies until 1922 after "wrestling" it to the ground in 3 "hurricane" days in his tower at Muzot, Switzerland; Ripostes by Idaho-born émigré poet Ezra (Loomis) Pound, 27, who went abroad to live 4 years ago and published his first book at Venice a year later under the title A lume spento. Pound pioneers an antipoetical imagism but will abandon it in 2 years for a vorticism that will relate to painting and sculpture (see 1925); A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass by Boston poet Amy Lowell, 36, sister of Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell. Barely five feet tall and weighing 250 pounds, the poet defies convention by smoking cigars, cursing in public, and taking another woman into her life and home; "Les Blesseurs" by French-language Canadian poet Jean Charbonneau, 37; The Magic Lantern (Volshebnyi fonar': Vtororaia knige stikhov) by Marina Tsvetaeva; Evening (Vecher) by Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (Anna Andreyevna Gorenko), 24; Lis Oulivado by Frédéric Mistral, now 81; Constab Ballads by Claude McKay, who emigrates to the United States.
Poetry magazine begins publication in October. Founder Harriet Monroe, 51, received a $1,000 commission 20 years ago to write the "Columbian Ode" for the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, has found backers and solicited work from more than 50 poets, and will continue publication until her death in 1936.
Juvenile: The Tale of Mr. Tod by Beatrix Potter.
Painting: The Violin, Ma Jolie, and Still Life with Chair Caning by Pablo Picasso; Homage à Picasso by Spanish painter Juan Gris (José Victoriano Gonzalez), 25; Woman in Blue (La Femme en bleu) by Fernand Léger, who has a one-man show at the Galerie Kahnweiler; The Cattle Dealer by Marc Chagall; The Life of Christ and St. Mary of Egypt Among Sinners by Emil Nolde; Women Harvesting by Russian painter Kasimir Severinovich Malevich, 34; Painting with Black Arch by Wassily Kandinsky; Portrait of Wally and Self-Portrait as Prisoner (drawing) by Egon Schiele, now 21, who has been imprisoned at Neulengbach, Austria, after complaints in April about his pornographic works and licentious living arrangements. He is released after 24 days and his paintings are exhibited at Vienna as he continues to shock with Cardinal and Nun, The Hermits, and other works; Soda by Georges Braque; September Morn (Matinée de Septembre) by French painter Paul Emile Chabas, 43 (see 1913); Street Scene in Tuscany and Bedroom, Gordon Square by English painter Vanessa Bell (née Stephen), 28; McSorley's Bar and Sunday, Women Drying Their Hair by John Sloan; Movement, Fifth Avenue and Woolworth Building by watercolorist John Marin (see architecture, 1913); Summer, New England by Maurice Prendergast; Team of Horses and Plant Forms by Arthur Dove. Georges Braque invents collage.
Sculpture: Walking Woman by Kiev-born sculptor Alexander Archipenko, 32, who has studied at Paris, been influenced by cubism, and introduces holes and voids into his work; Mother and Child by Sussex-born sculptor (and former tombstone carver) (Arthur) Eric (Rowton) Gill, 30.
Theater: The Marchioness Rosalind (La Marquesa Rosalinda) by Ramon del Valle Inclan in January at Madrid's Teatro de la Princess; The Greyhound by Paul Armstrong and Wilson Mizner 2/29 at New York's Astor Theater, with David Burton in a melodrama about oceangoing confidence men (Armstrong has taken Mizner on a transatlantic voyage and pumped him for stories of larceny on the high seas), 108 perfs. (the sinking of the Titanic April 15 horrifies prospective playgoers, forcing the show to close); Death and Damnation (Tod und Teufel) by Frank Wedekind 4/29 at Berlin's Künstlerhaus Werkstatt der Werdenden; Epic Voices (Voces de gesta) by Ramon del Valle Inclan 5/26 at Madrid's Teatro de la Princess; Gabriel Schilling's Flight (Gabriel Schillings Flucht) by Gerhart Hauptmann 6/14 at Bad Lauchstadt's Goethe Theater; Hindle Wakes by English playwright (William) Stanley Houghton, 30, 6/16 at London's Aldwych Theatre; Within the Law by playwright Bayard Veiller 9/11 at New York's Eltinge Theater, with John Willard, Jane Cowl, 541 perfs.; Rosalind by James M. Barrie 10/14 at the Duke of York's Theatre, London (moved later to the Haymarket), with Irene Vanbrugh, Donald Calthorp, 138 perfs.; The Yellow Jacket by George C. Hazelton and actor-turned playwright J. Harry Benrimo 11/4 at New York's Fulton Theater (formerly the Folies Bèrgere), 80 perfs.; The High Road by Edward Sheldon 11/9 at New York's Hudson Theater, with Minnie Maddern Fiske, Waterford, N.Y.-born actor Charles Waldron, 37, 71 perfs.; The Wolf (A farkas) by Ferenc Molnár 11/9 at Budapest's Magyar Szinhaz; Never Say Die by William H. Post and William Collier 11/12 at New York's 48th Street Theater, with Collier, Grant Stewart, 151 perfs.; The Tidings Brought to Mary (L'Annonce faite à Marie) by Paul Claudel 12/20 at the Théâtre de l'oeuvre, Paris; Peg O' My Heart by J. Hartley Manners 12/20 at New York's Cort Theater, with the playwright's bride, Laurette Taylor, now 28, who has divorced her first husband, 605 perfs.; The Beggar (Der Bettler) by German playwright Reinhold Sorge 12/23 at Berlin's Deutsches Theater; Years of Discretion by Illinois-born playwright Frederic Hatton, 32, and his wife, Fanny, 42, 12/25 at New York's Belasco Theater, with Grant Mitchell, Effie Shannon, 190 perfs.
Illusionist Harry Houdini charters a tugboat, is told that New York law makes it illegal to hold a public performance on a Sunday, and instructs Capt. J. P. McAlester July 7 to make for Governors Island, where New York laws do not apply; he has himself shackled, nailed into a pine crate that is sealed with steel bands, weighted down with two sewer pipes, and dropped into the harbor (see 1894). Within 1 minute he is spotted bobbing up and down in the water. Now 38, he repeats the "miraculous escape" nightly in a 5,500-gallon tank on Hammerstein's Roof, earning $1,000 per week (see 1914).
The Minsky brothers—Abe, 31, Billy (Michael William), 21, Herbert Kay, 20, and Morton, 10—take over New York's National Winter Garden Theater in East Houston Street, owned by their father, for bawdy burlesque productions, beginning a chain that will continue until 1937.
Harlem's Lafayette Theater opens in November on Seventh Avenue between 131st and 132nd streets. Financed by Canal Street banker Meyer Jarmulovsky and designed by architect V. Hugo Koehler, the 1,500-seat house has a white director, A. C. Winn (although buildings in 132nd Street are now occupied by blacks, those in 131st Street are still mostly white). Winn will begin admitting blacks to the orchestra in August of next year, making the Lafayette the first theater to integrate, but he will initially charge blacks twice the normal admission price of 10¢ (5¢ for children). Actor Charles Gilpin will found the Lafayette Players—Harlem's first legitimate theater black group—in 1916, and the house will become an important venue for black stock companies presenting one-act plays and adaptations of Broadway hits.
Playwright August Strindberg dies of stomach cancer at Stockholm May 14 at age 63.
Film: Queen Elizabeth with Sarah Bernhardt, now 57, opens July 12 at New York's Lyceum Theater and is the first "feature"-length motion picture seen in America. U.S. rights to the four-reel, 40-minute French film have been acquired by nickelodeon-chain operator Adolph Zukor, now 39, who has persuaded theatrical producer Charles Frohman to join him in investing $35,000 in the venture. Zukor and Frohman earn $200,000 showing the film on a reserved-seat basis in theaters across the country, and they form Famous Players Co. to produce films of their own (see Lasky, 1913); Winsor McCay's The Story of a Mosquito (animated).
Other films: D. W. Griffith's Her First Biscuit with Mary Pickford, now 20, and Lillian Gish (originally Lillian Diana de Guiche), 15; Griffith's The Musketeers of Pig Alley with Gish.
Universal Pictures Corp. (initially Universal Film Manufacturing Co.) is created at Hollywood, California, by a merger of independent U.S. film producers who include cinema pioneer Carl Laemmle, now 45 (see 1909), who has pioneered in promoting the personalities of his performers as "movie stars." Thriving on the "star system" that he has introduced, Laemmle and his colleagues will produce multi-reel but mostly undistinguished films starring Lon Chaney, Warren Kerrigan, Wallace Reid, Ben Turpin, Rudolph Valentino, Pearl White, and others; Laemmle will have sole control of Universal from 1920 to 1936.
Independent film makers such as Universal spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees to defend themselves against the General Film Co. (Motion Picture Patents Co.) monopoly (see 1908). The Movie Trust files patent-infringement suits, but the U.S. Department of Justice files suit against the MPPC in August, charging that it has violated the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890. The trust will cease to operate after 1914, the government will ultimately prevail in its lawsuit, and the MPPC will be formally dissolved by court order in 1917 (see Hollywood, 1913).
Survivors of R.M.S. Titanic disagree as to whether the band was playing "Autumn" or "Nearer My God to Thee" when the ship went down April 15. Wireless operator Harold McBride insists it was the hymn "Autumn," containing the lines, "Hold me up, mighty waters,/ Keep my eye on things above."
Opera: Giovanni Martinelli makes his Covent Garden debut 4/22 singing the role of Cavaradoss in the 1900 Puccini opera Tosca; Spanish soprano Lucrezia Bori (Lucrecia Borja y Gonzalez), 24, makes her Metropolitan Opera debut 11/11 singing opposite Enrico Caruso in the 1893 Puccini opera Manon Lescaut; German soprano Frieda Hempel, 27, makes her Metropolitan Opera debut 12/27 singing the role of the Queen in the 1836 Meyerbeer opera Les Huguenots (she is considered the natural successor to Sembrich and will remain with the company for 20 years).
Savoyard veteran George Grossmith dies at Folkestone March 1 at age 64; composer Jules Massenet at Paris August 13 at age 70.
Ballet: Daphnis et Chloe 6/8 at the Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris, with Waslaw Nijinsky in the role of Daphnis, Tamara Karsavina as Chloe, music by Maurice Ravel, choreography by Michel Fokine.
First performances: Symphony No. 9 in D flat major by the late Gustav Mahler 6/26 at Vienna; Shepherd's Key by Australian-born English composer Percy Aldridge Grainger, 30, 8/19 at Queen's Hall, London; Five Pieces for Orchestra (Fünf Orchesterstücke) by Arnold Schoenberg 9/3 at a London Promenade Concert; Two Pictures (Két Kép) for Orchestra by Béla Bartók 10/5 at Budapest; Pierrot Lunaire: Three Times Seven Melodies for Reciter, Piano, Piccolo, Bass Clarinet, Viola, and Cello by Arnold Schoenberg 10/16 at Berlin's Choralionsaal.
Composer Gustav Mahler dies at Vienna May 18 at age 50; Samuel Coleridge-Taylor at Croydon, Surrey, September 1 at age 37.
Stage musicals: The Isle o' Dreams 1/27 at New York's Grand Opera House, with Chauncey Olcott, music by Ernest R. Ball, lyrics by Olcott and George Graf Jr., 26 (who has never been to Ireland), songs that include "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling," 32 perfs.; The Lilac Domino 2/3 at Leipzig's Stadttheater, with book by Emmerich von Gatti and Béla Jenbach, music by Charles Cuvillier; The Passing Show 7/22 at the Winter Garden Theater, with Willie and Eugene Howard, Trixie Friganza, Philadelphia-born ingénue Charlotte Greenwood, 22, music by Louis A. Hirsch, lyrics by Harold Atteridge, 136 perfs.; Under Many Flags 8/31 at New York's Hippodrome, with music and lyrics by Manuel Klein, 445 perfs.; The Dancing Mistress 10/19 at London's Adelphi Theatre, with Gertie Millar, Joseph Coyne, music by Lionel Monckton, 241 perfs.; The Ziegfeld Follies 10/21 at New York's Moulin Rouge, with Leon Errol, Vera Maxwell, 77 perfs.; The Lady of the Slipper 10/28 at New York's Globe Theater, with Vernon Castle, Elsie Janis, Dave Montgomery, Fred Stone, music by Victor Herbert, book by Boston-born writer Anne Caldwell, 45, and Lawrence McCarty, lyrics by James O'Dea, 232 perfs.; The Firefly 12/12 at New York's Lyric Theater, with music by Prague-born composer Rudolf Friml, 32, lyrics by Otto Harbach, songs that include "Giannina Mia," 120 perfs.
Lancashire comedienne-singer Gracie Fields (Grace Stansfield), 12, makes her debut in August at the Hippodrome in Rochdale.
Hymn: "(He Walks With Me) In the Garden" by U.S. Methodist songwriter C. Austin Miles, 44.
Popular songs: "Waiting for the Robert E. Lee" by Lewis F. Muir, lyrics by L. Wolfe Gilbert; "When the Midnight Choo Choo Leaves for Alabam" by Irving Berlin; "Moonlight Bay" by Percy Wenrich, lyrics by Edward Madden; "That Old Gal of Mine" by Egbert Van Alstyne, lyrics by Earle C. Jones; "The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi" by Albion College sophomores F. Dudleigh Vernor, 20, and Byron D. Stokes, 26, who wrote the song last year; "Bulldog" and "Bingo Eli Yale" by Peru, Ind.-born Yale sophomore Cole Porter, 20.
Instrument maker Rudolph Wurlitzer retires at age 81 and is succeeded by his eldest son, Howard E., who has been mainly responsible for expanding into automatic and coin-operated instruments (see 1890). Wurlitzer's third son, Farny R., now 28, has moved to North Tonawanda, N.Y., 3 years ago to head the manufacturing division after Wurlitzer acquired barrel-organ maker DeKleist & Co. It acquired the Hope-Jones Organ Co. of Elmira, N.Y., 2 years ago (see 1889) and moved its operations to North Tonawanda, where the "Unit Orchestra" pipe organ will be developed with the capability to produce the sounds of brass trumpets, chimes, clarinets, drums, oboes, tubas, xylophones, and other instruments.
Tony Wilding wins in men's singles at Wimbledon, Mrs. D. R. Larombe (née Ethel Warneford Thomson), 33, in women's singles; Maurice Evans McLoughlin, 22, wins in U.S. men's singles, Mary K. Browne, 15, in women's singles.
English golfer Harry Vardon, 42, wins the British PGA 12 years after winning the U.S. Open. He has invented the overlapping "Vardon grip" and will be among the top five players in the British Open 16 times in 21 years.
The Olympic Games at Stockholm attract 4,742 contestants from 27 countries. Oklahoma-born athlete James Francis "Jim" Thorpe, 24, wins both the pentathlon and decathlon at the fifth Olympiad, scoring 8,412 points out of a possible 10,000 in the decathlon and winning four firsts in the pentathlon. Thorpe returns to score 25 touchdowns and 198 points for the Carlisle Indian School at Carlisle, Pa.. The team beats Army 27 to 6, and Thorpe is named halfback for the second year on Walter Camp's All-America team. Of Sac and Fox ancestry, Thorpe played semi-professional baseball during his summer vacation last year, as did other team members who took jobs obtained for them by their 41-year-old coach Glenn S. "Pop" Warner; this has technically lost him his amateur status, he will lose his Olympic gold medals when he admits to the fact, and his name will be stricken from the Olympic record books at the insistence of the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), but many will rate him the greatest athlete and football player of the first half of the twentieth century.
Detroit's Tiger Stadium opens at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull avenues under the name Navin Field; it will be the city's major league baseball venue through the 1999 season.
The Rawlings "Sure Catch" baseball glove introduced by the 25-year-old St. Louis sporting-goods company is the first one-piece glove with individual finger channels (see Waite, 1875). Looking very much like a duck's foot, it wins endorsement from professional players nationwide (see 1920).
The Boston Red Sox win the World Series, defeating the New York Giants 4 games to 3.
U.S. football gets a fourth down and a touchdown receives a value of six points, up from the five-point value established in 1898. The field is standardized at 360 feet by 160 including end zones 10 feet deep, a pass completed to the end zone is scored as a touchdown, and the football is reduced in girth from 27 inches at the middle to between 22½ and 23 inches (see 1929).
Use of 12-man teams becomes common in Canadian football after years of playing with 15-man rugby-style teams (see 1874). The move was suggested as early as 1900; former Notre Dame player and coach Frank "Shag" Shaugnessy has taken over as football coach at McGill University and in the next 10 years will totally transform the Canadian game, bringing motion into the backfield and creating the notion of a secondary on defense.
The first commercially successful electric flatiron is introduced by the German firm Rowenta founded by Robert Weintraud in 1884 (see 1882; Hotpoint, 1906). Laundries that employ vast numbers of women worldwide are Rowenta's major customers.
Paris dressmaker-turned-couturière Madeleine Vionnet, 36, opens the Maison Vionnet that she will operate until 1914 and reopen in 1919, attracting a distinguished clientele with her bias-cut designs. She worked from 1905 until last year for Doucet, where she discarded the underdress layer, and in her own designs she will eliminate interfacing, employ few darts, use cowl necklines, and allow her clothes to show a woman's natural silhouette (see 1939).
Paris couturier Paul Poiret tours Europe and introduces harem pants at what may well be the world's first fashion show (see 1911). Having promoted agrettes, the kimono shape, and turbans, he has borrowed ideas from Sergei Diaghalev's Ballets Russes to create Russian, Near Eastern, and Far Eastern designs to supplement his line of traditional Western clothes, and last year was the first designer to launch his own line of cosmetics, perfumes, and toiletries (see 1913).
L'Heure Bleue is introduced by the 84-year-old Paris perfumer Guerlain, now headed by the founder's grandson Aimé Guerlain (see Mitsouko, 1919)
Lysol production begins at New York, where the 38-year-old firm Lehn & Fink manufactures the household disinfectant that it has been importing from Germany (see 1994).
The Girl Scouts of America has its beginnings March 12 at Savannah, Georgia, where local widow Juliette Low (née Juliette Magill Kinzie Gordon), 52, enrolls 18 girls in the first troop of Girl Guides in America (see Girl Guides, 1910). The Girl Guides will call themselves Girl Scouts next year and establish headquarters at New York; their initial uniform (wide black bloomers, white middy blouses, and black stockings) will change to blue serge and, later, to green.
The Schuco toy empire has its beginnings in the Nüremberg firm Schuco, Bing & Co. founded in November by Bing model maker Heinrich Müller, 25, who has developed a reputation for inventing not only toys but also the machinery and tooling needed to make them. Schuco model cars and stuffed animals will be sold worldwide.
Prague's Municipal House opens at 5 Namesti Eepubliky, next door to the 500-year-old Powder Tower on the edge of the Old Town. Designed in art nouveau style, it is a pleasure palace with restaurants, bars, art exhibits, fountains, and a concert hall as well as government reception rooms.
New York's 998 Fifth Avenue luxury apartment house opens opposite the Metropolitan Museum of Art at 81st Street; designed in Italian Renaissance style by W. S. Richardson of McKim, Mead and White with one apartment per floor, it is the avenue's first apartment building.
The Beverly Hills Hotel opens on a hilltop outside Los Angeles, where it will be a favorite haunt of motion picture people. Surrounded by 12 acres of what used to be lima-bean fields, the pink stucco Spanish colonial "palace" at what later will be 9561 Sunset Boulevard has been put up by oil prospectors who paid $670,000 in 1905 for the large Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas tract of land, drilled 30 dry holes, decided to turn the land into a planned development, hired landscape architect Wilbur D. Cook to create wide, curving streets that hugged the hills, and have built the hotel (and a miniature railroad) to attract prospective lot buyers (who will make the hotel their community center and church).
Ottawa's Château Laurier opens July 12 near Parliament Hill with festivities hosted by Canada's former prime minister Sir Wilfred Laurier. Designed in French Renaissance style by Henry Janeway Hardenbergh for the Grand Trunk Railroad, it resembles the Plaza Hotel that opened at New York 5 years ago, with a base of granite blocks, walls of buff Indiana limestone, and a copper roof.
The Manila Hotel opens formally July 4. A dance for 500 waltzers inaugurates the five-story 265-room hotel on Manila Bay.
France's Normandy and Golf Hotels open with a gambling casino at Deauville.
The Suvretta House opens outside St. Moritz, Switzerland, on Silvaplana Lake with views of the Corvatsch and the valley stretching south to Italy. It will grow to have 220 rooms and its kitchen will rival those of the Palace (see 1896), the Kulm, and the Carlton.
Boston's Copley Plaza Hotel opens August 19 on Copley Square, occupying a Back Bay site formerly occupied by the Museum of Fine Arts. Henry Janeway Hardenbergh has designed the seven-story structure, which has a gala inaugural ball and will survive into the 21st century.
Montréal's Ritz Carlton Hotel opens New Year's Eve with 267 rooms. The Ritz is in the heart of Montréal's Golden Square Mile, whose residents include the few hundred people who control an estimated 70 percent of Canada's wealth.
Chicago architect Daniel H. Burnham dies at Heidelberg, Germany, June 1 at age 65; Frank H. Furness at Media, Pa., June 27 at age 71; British open-space movement leader Octavia Hill at London August 13 at age 73; architect Norman Shaw at London November 17 at age 81.
Japanese cherry trees given to the United States as a goodwill gesture are destroyed when found to be infected with insects and disease (see 1904) chestnut blight. Yukio Ozaki, 53, has been a member of the Diet since its formation in 1890 and donated 2,000 of the trees 3 years ago in gratitude for U.S. mediation in the Russo-Japanese War. Viscountess Chinda, wife of the Japanese ambassador, joins with First Lady Helen Taft (née Herron) March 27 in planting two of the 3,020 Yoshino cherry trees on the northern bank of the Potomac River Tidal Basin, where the trees will blossom each spring to make the Tidal Basin a perennial tourist attraction. A second shipment of trees will be planted on the grounds of the Washington Monument in 1965.
Alaska's 6,715-foot Novarupta volcano erupts June 6, spewing six cubic miles of earth into the air, darkening skies over most of Alaska with a dense ash cloud, and burying Kodiak Island 100 miles away under nearly two feet of ashes.
An earthquake in the Marmara Sea region of northern Anatolia August 9 leaves an estimated 1,950 dead.
New York's state legislature bans the sale of oysters in state restaurants and fish houses from May 15 through August 31 as a conservation measure. The idea that it is safe to eat oysters only in "R" months is based solely on the lack of refrigeration to keep shellfish from spoiling in warm weather, and oysters from New York waters will continue to be shipped to buyers in states where the myth is disregarded, but New York's ban will remain in effect until 1971.
A new Homestead Act reduces from 5 years to 3 years the residence requirement of U.S. homesteaders (see 1909; 1916).
Tokyo University agricultural chemist Umetaro Suzuki, 38, extracts an antiberiberi compound from rice hulls (see 1906; R.R. Williams, 1933).
"Feeding Experiments Illustrating the Importance of Accessory Food Factors in Normal Dietaries" by biochemist Frederick Gowland Hopkins, now 51, establishes his reputation.
Die Vitamine by Casimir Funk suggests that beriberi, rickets, pellagra, and sprue may all be caused by "vitamine" deficiencies (see 1911).
Kansas-born University of Wisconsin biochemist E. V. (Elmer Verner) McCollum, 33, and his Racine-born colleague Marguerite Davis, 24, discover in butter and egg yolks the fat-soluble nutrient that will later be called vitamin A. They establish that it was a lack of this nutrient that caused C. A. Pekelharing's Dutch mice to die prematurely in 1905 when given no milk. New Haven-born Yale biochemist Thomas B. Osborne, 53, and his New York-born colleague Lafayette B. (Benedict) Mendel, 40 (a onetime assistant to Russell H. Chittenden) make a similar discovery.
Chemist Harvey W. Wiley resigns from the Agriculture Department in March, having championed pure food legislation (see Wheeler-Lea Act, 1938).
Ocean Spray Cranberry Sauce is introduced by the Cape Cod Cannery Co., whose management buys berries from farmers who cultivate 26,000 acres (see 1930; Hall, 1816).
The A&P begins an expansion program under John Hartford, a son of the founder (see 1880). From its present base of nearly 500 stores, the chain will open a new A&P store every 3 days for the next 3 years as it stops providing charge accounts and free delivery, basing its growth on one-man "economy" stores that operate on a cash-and-carry basis.
The first self-service grocery stores open independently in California. The Alpha Beta Food Market at Pomona and Ward's Groceteria at Ocean Park are soon followed by Bay Cities Mercantile's Humpty Dumpty Stores (see Piggly Wiggly, 1916).
U.S. food prices rise sharply, causing widespread distress. They will rise further next year (see 1916).
Former miller, political leader, and industrialist W. D. Washburn dies at Minneapolis July 29 at age 81.
Prince Macaroni Co. is founded on Prince Street in Boston's North End by three Italian-Americans. The firm will outgrow its Prince Street quarters as it expands in the next 20 years and will move to Lowell, but it will remain Prince Macaroni.
Oreo Biscuits are introduced by National Biscuit Co., whose two chocolate-flavored wafers with a cream filling compete with the Hydrox "biscuit bon bons" introduced in 1910. Nabisco will change the name of the English-style biscuit to Oreo Cream Sandwich in 1958. Nabisco also introduces Lorna Doone shortcake cookies, naming them for the 1869 Richard Doddridge Blackmore novel that is still required reading in many schools.
Morton's Table Salt is introduced in a blue and white asphalt-laminated paper canister with an aluminum pouring spout (see 1885). Beginning in 1914 the canister will bear the slogan, "When It Rains It Pours," together with a trademark depicting a little girl holding an umbrella in the rain while holding a Morton's Salt canister upside down in her other hand with salt pouring from its open spout.
New York's Grand Central Oyster Bar opens at the new railroad terminal, whose lower level begins commuter-train service in October (its upper level, for long-distance trains, will be inaugurated early next year). Union News Company, the concessionaire, will serve bluepoints, Cape Cods, Chincoteagues from Maryland's Eastern Shore, Gardiners Bays from eastern Long Island Sound, Lynnhavens, Mattitucks, Saddle Rocks, and other varieties, as well as fish and other seafood, for 62 years.
The first New York Horn & Hardart Automat opens at 1557 Broadway, between 46th and 47th streets (see Philadelphia, 1902). The Automat has tiled floors, patrons sit at plain, circular tables, each with four chairs, the surrounding banks of food compartments are set in Victorian-style wooden frames surmounted by cut-glass mirrors. A second Automat will open in 1914 at 250 West 42nd Street, and by 1922 there will be 21, but they will not gain the height of their success until the 1920s, when steam tables are introduced to provide hot food. The last will close in 1991.
Mory's Temple Bar at New Haven, Conn., relocates after 37 years in Temple Street to 300 York Street, where the taproom opened in Wooster Street by Frank and Jane Moriarty in the 1860s will continue to serve Yale University students and professors.
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