1915: Information and Much More from Answers.com
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The Great War in Europe intensifies; casualty lists mount for both sides on the Eastern and Western fronts. Kaiser Wilhelm permits Field Marshal von Hindenburg and Gen. Ludendorff to launch an offensive on the Eastern Front February 7, despite opposition to the plan by Gen. Falkenhayn, who declines to provide adequate reinforcements. Flamethrowers and grenades are introduced in February as the British abandon public-school notions of sportsmanship, and a German U-boat (submarine) blockade of Britain begins February 18.
British naval forces attack the Dardanelles beginning February 19 to prevent the Germans from blocking supplies to Russia via the Bosphorus and the Black Sea. Germany has gained the support of the Ottoman Turks, Russia has requested the British action to relieve pressure on her defenses in the oil-rich Caucasus, and the British have agreed January 2 to stage a demonstration against the Turks. A naval bombardment has begun February 16 and it resumes February 25 after being halted by bad weather; the weather forces another interruption that continues until March 18. Three British battleships trying to force the Narrows are sunk by mines March 18, three others are damaged, and British admiral John de Robeck withdraws, thereby losing an opportunity to seize the Dardanelles at a time when the Turks have no supplies and are practically defenseless. Ottoman authorities at Constantinople say that Armenians side with Russia and begin April 24 to deport them, putting to death all who resist in an operation commanded by the Ottoman minister of the interior Mehmed Talat, 40, and the viceroy for Syria Gen. Ahmed Cemal, 42. Some 1.75 million Armenians will be deported, some 600,000 will starve to death in the Mesopotamian desert, one-third will survive.
British, French, and Australian-New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) land from transports on the Gallipoli Peninsula beginning April 25 (the date will be revered in Australian and Kiwi history), but Turkish artillery pins down the Allied units, whose trenches are often no more than 10 yards from those of the Ottoman Turks. Reverses suffered during the Balkan Wars have diminished the effectiveness of Turkish forces, but German general Liman von Sanders, 60, has built up their capabilities; he commands the 5th Turkish Army, and his Turkish officer Mustafa Kemal, 34, says to his 19th Division troops, "I do not order you to attack. I order you to die." (Kemal himself is hit by a piece of shrapnel, but it is stopped by the watch he wears in his breast pocket and he is promoted to colonel June 1.) First Sea Lord John A. Fisher, Baron Fisher of Kilverstone, now 74, had proposed the Gallipoli campaign as a way to cut the Turks off from Europe, open the disputed Dardanelles straits to British warships, and supply the Russians, but he has turned against the idea and resigned in May, saying, "Damn the Dardanelles. They will be our grave," and leaving his closest friend, Winston Churchill, to take blame for the failure as political head of the Admiralty.
Corfu-born Boer War veteran Gen. Sir Ian (Standish Monteith) Hamilton, 62, and other cavalrymen command the Allied forces in Gallipoli but remain 15 miles behind the lines; their troops are mostly inexperienced and inadequately equipped, there is an acute shortage of artillery shells, the Allies do not have the benefit of surprise, the contested area covers only a few square miles but there are no reliable maps, and intelligence on the Turks is virtually nil. Gen. Hamilton is recalled October 16 and will be given no further command; Lieut. Gen. Sir Charles Munro replaces Hamilton and recommends a withdrawal, Secretary of State for War Lord Kitchener visits Gallipoli in November and agrees that the campaign must be abandoned; Gen. Julian H. G. (Hedworth George) Byng, 53, has taken command of the IX Corps in August and under his direction the British finally evacuate the peninsula beginning in December after terrible carnage on both sides (the Turks take no prisoners, and Allied casualties total 213,980, not counting severe losses sustained among old naval vessels).
The British Admiralty enlists the aid of Middle East expert Gertrude Lowthian Bell, now 47, who 2 years ago pushed south from Damascus into the Nejd area of central Arabia. Traveling with only one servant, Bell copied ancient inscriptions, took photographs, made notes, dealt with wild tribespeople, collected valuable information, and met T. E. (Thomas Edward) Lawrence, now 26, a Welsh-born Orientalist and archaeologist with whom she now works briefly at Cairo before being sent to Delhi. There she serves for a few weeks as a liaison between the government of India and the newly-formed Arab Intelligence Bureau, preparing a gazeteer, or geographical dictionary. Bell is then sent to Basra, where she compares her information on the desert tribes with that being received by the British Expeditionary Force in Mesopotamia. The illegitimate son of Sir Thomas Chapman by Sarah Junner (the family's former governess), Lawrence has worked in Syria as foreman to some 200 Arab workmen, learned two of their dialects, adopted their attire, and discussed with his friends the possibility of creating an Arab revolt against Turkish rule (see 1916). British forces advance 90 miles up the Tigris River from May to June and push on toward Baghdad (see 1914); 7,000 men under the command of Gen. Charles Townsend occupy al-Kut in September, extending their penetration 500 miles from Basra, but Ottoman troops mount a strong resistance at Ctesiphon November 22 just 18 miles from Baghdad, the British retreat to al-Kut, and the Turks lay siege beginning December 7 (see 1916).
A British artillery barrage on the Western Front in March raises the scale of warfare to new heights: 342 guns fire for 35 minutes, using more shells than were fired in the entire Boer War.
Former Russian prime minister Count Sergei Yulevich Witte dies at Petrograd March 13 at age 65.
The Germans use chlorine gas April 22 at the Second Battle of Ypres in the first use of poison gas by any warring power (chemist Fritz Haber has persuaded the German high command to use the weapon; his wife is so horrified that she takes his revolver out to the garden and shoots herself). Clouds of greenish-yellow phosgene (chlorine mixed with carbon monoxide) choke French colonial troops, who flee in panic, but Canadians plug the 4½-mile gap left by the routed Algerians (see mustard gas, 1917). The British finally issue steel helmets to their troops in the field; Germany has a monopoly on binoculars, so the British obtain 32,000 pairs of German binoculars through Swiss sources.
A torpedo from the German submarine U-20 hits the Cunard Line passenger ship R.M.S. Lusitania at 2:10 in the afternoon of May 7 off the coast of Ireland, and the huge vessel sinks in 18 minutes, killing 1,198 who include 100 children and 128 U.S. citizens. It will turn out that the 8-year-old Lusitania carried 173 tons of rifle ammunition, shrapnel casings, fuses, and contraband food from the United States but had no escort and remained on course despite recent U-boat sightings in the area. When U-boat commanders sighted merchant ships heretofore they have surfaced, inspected the ships' papers, and blown them up if they were carrying cargoes that would help the Allies, but only after making sure that all passengers had been safely debarked in lifeboats. The Lusitania's casualties include railroad magnate Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, 38, and New York theatrical magnate Charles Frohman, 75; U.S. Ambassador to Britain Walter Hines Page calls for a declaration of war on Germany.
"There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight," says President Wilson May 10. "There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right." But the sinking of the Lusitania with so many women and children fires anti-German sentiment. "We have come to a parting of the ways," says presidential aide Col. Edward M. House, 57, a formal protest is sent to Berlin May 13, and pacifist Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan resigns June 8.
Rear Admiral Bradley A. Fiske, U.S. Navy, resigns at age 61, having invented an electric range finder, electric ammunition hoists, electric gun-turret motors, a naval telescope mount and sight, radio systems for torpedo control, electrical control systems that keep naval batteries aimed at their targets while maintaining continuous fire, and other inventions (see Battle of Manila Bay, 1898). Fiske has for years argued the need for a naval general staff to prepare adequately for a possible war, and the navy finally creates an Office of the Chief of Naval Operations. Former navy chief engineer Benjamin F. Isherwood of Civil War fame dies at his native New York June 19 at age 92.
Italy declares war on Austria-Hungary May 23, turning against her former ally in hopes of obtaining territory along the Adriatic and in the Alps. Nobel Peace Prize recipient Ernesto T. Moneta, now 81, has advocated Italian entry into the war to thwart the imperialist designs of the Central Powers; Britain, France, and Russia have induced the Italians to abandon the Triple Alliance and join the Allies under terms of the secret Treaty of London signed April 26. The Austrians have fortified the mountains flanking the Isonzo River, and Gen. Luigi Cadorna, 64, has completely reorganized the Italian army, but his men are unable to cross the river and scale the heights beyond when he launches an attack June 23. Fighting continues for 14 days, resumes from July 18 to August 3, resumes again from October 18 to November 3 and from November 10 to December 2, but the Italians are unable to penetrate the Austrian lines for more than a few miles and only at the cost of many lives (see 1916).
Prime Minister Asquith forms a wartime coalition ministry May 25, with former prime minister Arthur J. Balfour, now 66, replacing Winston Churchill as first lord of the Admiralty (blame for the costly failure in Gallipoli has fallen on Churchill, who was the chief proponent of the assault and now takes command of an infantry battalion in France).
The German Navy zeppelin LZ 38 drops a bomb on London's East End May 31, killing a 3-year-old girl in the first "strategic bombing" of a civilian target.
France gives the 59-year-old Gen. Henri (Philippe Benoni Omer Joseph) Pétain command of an army June 15.
German forces on the Eastern Front make a major breakthrough in June against the Russians in Poland's Godice-Tarnów region. Gen. August von Mackenson, 65, is promoted to field marshal June 20. Warsaw falls to the Germans August 7, and by September the Russians have lost all of Poland, Lithuania, and Courland, along with nearly 1 million men.
Hampshire-born Royal Flying Corps pilot Lanoe (George) Hawker, 24, brings down two German aircraft over Ypres July 25 and forces a third to land; he has mounted a variant of the Lewis gun on the starboard side of his Bristol Scout, and his feat wins him the Victoria Cross, but the Germans have superiority in the air over Britain and France (see 1916). Major General Hugh Trenchard becomes general officer commander in the field of the Flying Corps in August.
German authorities in occupied Brussels arrest British Red Cross nurse Edith Louisa Cavell, 50, August 4 on charges of having assisted Allied military prisoners to escape. Tried and convicted, she is executed by a firing squad October 12 along with a Belgian who has provided guides; British propagandists use her death to inflame public sentiment against the savage Boche and ignore the fact that the French have shot a woman for a similar offense.
Gen. Pétain launches a great attack in Champagne September 25 and follows it with a report containing principles of a new tactical doctrine.
Italy declares war on the Ottoman Empire August 21, Germany sends reinforcements to southern Austria, the Central Powers conclude a treaty with Bulgaria September 6 by promising territory to be taken from Serbia, French troops under the command of Gen. Maurice Serrail reach Salonika October 5 just as the Greek premier Vinizélos falls from power, Austro-German forces launch an attack south of the Danube October 6, and Bulgaria defies a Russian ultimatum and attacks eastern Serbia October 11. Britain declares war on Bulgaria October 13 and is joined by Montenegro, Bulgaria declares war on Serbia October 14 and attacks Serbian Montenegro, France declares war on Bulgaria October 16, Russia and Italy follow suit October 19, Allied forces fall back across the Greek border to the Salonika region, and Serbian forces retreat across the Albanian mountains to the island of Corfu (see 1916).
British field marshal William R. (Robert) Robertson, 55, is appointed chief of the Imperial General Staff in December, having been appointed chief of staff to Sir John French in January.
The 21 demands presented by Tokyo to Beijing (Peking) January 18 include the demands that Japan take over German rights in Shandong (Shantung) Province, that Japanese leases in southern Manchuria be extended to 99 years with commercial freedom for the Japanese in Manchuria; that China give Japan a half-interest in the Han-yehping Co., which operates iron and steel mills at Han-yang, iron mines at Ta-yeh, and a colliery at P'ingshan; and that China declare her determination not to lease or cede any part of her coast to any power. The Chinese have given modified acceptance to these four demands but have set aside others calling for railway concessions in the Yangtze River Valley, which is within Britain's sphere of influence, and for Japanese advisers in Chinese political, financial, and military affairs. Vietnamese prince Cuong De returns to Japan after a 6-year absence spent in vain efforts to obtain Asian or European support for his cause against French rule in his country; he is given a stipend and assurance that if France is defeated in the war the Japanese will guarantee Vietnam's autonomy (see 1945; Korea, 1919).
Japan's prime minister Shigenobu Okuma comes under attack from Yukio Ozaki, now 56, who supported Okuma in the early 1880s but now accuses him of having used bribery to win the March elections. Foreign Minister Takaaki Kato, now 55, resigns in protest against Okuma's corrupt tactics, Japan enjoys an economic boom as a result of the Great War, but Okuma will resign next year, announcing that it is for reasons of health.
The Defence of India Act approved by Parliament March 18 gives the British colonial government special powers to deal with revolutionary threats, especially in the Punjab, where German agents have been fomenting trouble. The wartime measure is to expire 6 months after the end of hostilities; meanwhile, it allows internment of suspects and provides for a special tribunal where defendants will have no appeal. Some 800 persons will be in custody by 1918 (but see 1919).
Malay leader To Janggut (originally Mummad Hasan bin Munas) organizes a tax revolt in April and then leads a peasant rebellion against British colonial rule (700 men of the 5th light infantry have mutinied at Singapore February 15 and seized control of a fort before Gora platoons could subdue them). The British have to bring in troops from nearby Singapore to quell the uprising by nearly 2,000 farmers, they attack the white-bearded To Janggut's stronghold at Pasir Putch, and he is killed there May 24 at age 62, but relatively few other lives are lost.
London-born Australian attorney general William M. (Morris) Hughes, 53, succeeds Andrew Fisher as Australia's prime minister, a position he will retain until 1923. When his Labor Party and the electorate reject his proposal for conscription next year, he will help to form the Nationalist Party and continue as prime minister.
The army of Mexico's provisional president Venustiano Carranza defeats the forces of Pancho Villa and Gen. Alvaro Obregón at the bloody Battle of Celaya in Guanajuáto state in April (see 1914). Protected by barbed wire and firing from trenches, Carranza's machine gunners cut down Villa's cavalry and he retreats northward, where he will continue to make bandit raids while Carranza consolidates his control of the country (see 1916). Former Mexican president Porfirio Díaz dies in poverty at Paris July 2 at age 84.
U.S. Marines land in Haiti (see 1859). Washington claims that the move has been made for humanitarian reasons and is justified under the Monroe Doctrine, but many Haitians believe that the purpose is to protect American business interests and establish a base for guarding the approaches to the Panama Canal. Lieut. Col. Smedley Darlington Butler, 34, storms the stronghold of a guerilla resistance group at Fort Rivière November 17, crushes the uprising, and organizes a native constabulary. Haiti signs a treaty providing for U.S. occupation until 1925 (see constitution, 1918). A veteran of the Spanish-American War who saw service in the Philippine insurrection and Boxer Rebellion, the Pennsylvania-born Butler will soon go to France and eventually become commandant of the Marine Corps (see commerce ["bonus marchers"], 1932).
Henry Ford charters the Scandinavian-American liner Oskar II to carry a group of Americans to Europe on an unofficial mission of mediation. The ship leaves Hoboken, N.J., December 4 with more than 160 aboard, including social reformers, students, and reporters (most of whom ridicule Ford's "Peace Ship") in a vain but much-publicized attempt to "get the boys out of the trenches by Christmas." Ford becomes ill, and when the ship arrives at Christiana, Norway, he turns about for home.
Mississippi voters elect demagogue Theodore G. (Gilmore) Bilbo, 38, governor. Scarcely five feet tall, Bilbo makes up in promises what he lacks in stature; the state senate censured him for accepting a bribe; he persuaded white backwoods voters that he championed their interests against aristocratic Delta planters, the railroads, and blacks; he has served as lieutenant governor since 1912; and although he was tried last year on charges of accepting a bribe he won acquittal and will obtain some significant reforms in the state during his term as governor, demonstrating genuine concern for disadvantaged whites and using government to help them. Bilbo will put through a tax equalization law empowering a central board to revise assessments on property that has been undervalued by county officials beholden to corporations or large planters, while at the same time using vituperative race baiting to maintain his political base (see human rights, 1927).
President Wilson, now 58, remarries at Washington December 18. His second wife, Edith Bolling Galt, 43, will wield greater power than any previous first lady (see 1919).
D. W. Griffith's full-length motion picture The Birth of a Nation heightens U.S. racial tensions.
A Georgia lynch mob seizes Leo Frank from a state prison August 16 and hangs him at Marietta (see 1913). Former Populist presidential candidate Thomas E. Watson, now 58, has run anti-Semitic articles in his Weekly Jeffersonian and takes pleasure in the lynching. His racist views will help him gain election to the U.S. Senate in 1920.
Christabel Pankhurst tells an audience at New York's Carnegie Hall October 25, "What we suffragettes aspire to be when we are enfranchised is ambassadors of freedom to women in other parts of the world, who are not so free as we are." Socialite Blanche Oelrichs Thomas leads a women's rights march on Fifth Avenue.
A new Ku Klux Klan takes root Thanksgiving night on Stone Mountain near Atlanta, where William Joseph Simmons revives the name from the KKK of the 1860s. A former preacher, traveling salesman, and promoter of fraternal organizations, Simmons obtains a legal charter from the state of Georgia, calls his KKK a "high-class, mystic, social, patriotic, benevolent association" dedicated to "white supremacy," the protection of Southern womanhood, but most of all "Americanism," and will promote his "invisible empire" of Kleagles and Grand Dragons through advertising developed by Edward Young Clark. It finds its greatest strength initially in Indiana, where it focuses its hatred against foreigners, but it will attract a membership of nearly 100,000 throughout the country within 6 years, concentrating political power to elect sympathetic U.S. senators, congressmen, and state officials as it employs terrorist tactics against Roman Catholics, Jews, and blacks, most especially in the Midwest and, later, the South (see 1925).
The first Kiwanis Club is organized at Detroit January 21, continuing the growth in men's philanthropic groups (see Rotary Clubs, 1905). Taking its name from a Native American term (Nunc Kee-wanis) meaning "We trade" or "We share our talents," Kiwanis International will establish headquarters at Indianapolis and grow to have more than 500,000 members in 79 countries (see Lions Clubs, 1917).
Ice floes in the Weddell Sea trap Sir Ernest H. Shackleton's ship the Endurance January 18 just 80 miles (1 day's sail) short of her destination on the coast of Antarctica (see 1914); Shackleton and his 27 men weather 9 months of blizzards and -35° temperatures as the shifting ice pack moves them farther north; the Endurance is crushed October 27, she sinks November 21, and the party is obliged to abandon her, taking along her three lifeboats. Hauling the boats over thin, cracking ice while their dogs pull sledges bearing supplies, the men move northward through slush two feet deep and over high ridges created by colliding ice floes; they grow mutinous, the prospect of reaching land appears hopeless, most of the dogs are killed for food after other supplies give out and the men survive largely on penguin meat, but Shackleton takes the leading troublemaker into his own tent and maintains morale (see 1916).
The U.S. Supreme Court rules 6 to 3 January 25 that a Kansas law banning "yellow dog contracts" that bar employees from joining labor unions violates the Due Process clause in the 14th Amendment (Coppage v. Kansas). A Kansas employer fired a worker for refusing to sign such a contract, he was convicted of violating the law but appealed, and Chief Justice Edward D. White is part of the majority that says the law was arbitrary (Justice Holmes is one of the three dissenters).
The U.S. Coast Guard created January 28 by an amalgamation of the Revenue-Cutter Service established in 1789 and the Life-Saving Service established in 1878 will be transferred to the Navy Department in April 1917 but revert to Treasury Department control in August 1919.
E. I. du Pont de Nemours president T. Coleman du Pont resigns after selling his holdings in the company for $14 million to a syndicate headed by his cousin Pierre, now 45, who helped develop smokeless shotgun powder in 1893 (see 1902). Coleman has consolidated all du Pont companies into one corporation and developed it into one of the largest U.S. trusts (the war in Europe is earning it huge profits from gunpowder sales). Alfred I. (Irénée) du Pont, now 51, protests the sale and tries to have it set aside (he has married a second cousin and built a 100-room house called Nemours), five other du Ponts join him in filing suit, and although Alfred is ousted from the company he remains its largest stockholder and buys the Wilmington Morning News to advance his cause; it will take 3 years of litigation before courts rule against Alfred and uphold the sale, and by that time the value of the stock will have increased to $50 million as a result of war orders (see 1919).
The state of Delaware begins revising its corporation laws to adopt "suggestions" forwarded by New York lawyers. New Jersey has had the lion's share of corporate charters and has been called "the Mother of Trusts," but President Wilson has persuaded New Jersey legislators to outlaw a series of abusive practices. The New York lawyers recognize that corporate franchise taxes will be valuable to a state as tiny as Delaware, and that state's legislators adopt measures that will soon make Delaware the leading charterer of the largest industrial corporations.
The Wealth and Income of the People of the United States by economist Wilford Isbell King points out the increasing concentration of income in the hands of the few, an indication of the need for a graduated income tax (see 1913). In 1910, King observes, the richest 1.6 percent of U.S. families received 19 percent of the national income, up from 10.8 percent in 1890. While the richest 2 percent of the population received 20.4 percent of the national income and averaged $3,386 per capita in income, the poorest 65 percent received 38.6 percent and averaged $197.
Metropolitan Life Insurance becomes a mutual company with profits going to policyholders instead of stockholders (see 1879).
New York's Brooks Brothers moves in August from Broadway and 22nd Street into a large new Madison Avenue store at 44th Street that it will occupy into the 21st century (see 1909).
Inventor Harry Ward Leonard drops dead at New York February 18 at age 54 while attending the annual dinner of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.
Tokyo Denki (Tokyo Electric Co.) manufactures Japan's first X-ray tubes and will produce her first radio transmission tubes in 1919 (see 1890). The company will manufacture Japan's first radio receivers in 1924, produce Japan's first washing machines and refrigerators in 1930, and her first vacuum cleaners in 1931.
Congress passes a Naval Appropriations Act March 3 with a rider establishing the Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (later the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) "to supervise and direct the scientific study of the problems of flight, with a view to their practical solution," appropriating $5,000 of the total $1 million budget for that purpose (see exploration [NASA], 1958).
Lemberg-born astrophysicist-mathematician Richard von Mises, 32, builds a 600-horsepower airplane for the Austro-Hungarian Army and serves as a pilot. A professor of applied mathematics at the University of Strasburg since 1909, von Mises will move to the Institute of Applied Mathematics at Berlin in 1920 and remain in Germany until 1933.
Fairey Aviation Co. is founded in Britain by entrepreneur Richard Fairey, 28, who produces fighter planes in some wooden buildings at what later will be London Airport.
Aviation pioneer Lawrence Hargrave dies of peritonitis outside Sydney July 6 at age 65, having built box kites whose design influenced the Wright brothers and others before the turn of the century. He has opposed use of flying machines for any but peaceful purposes.
The worst train wreck in British history kills 227 and injures 246 as a Scottish express plows into an earlier minor wreck May 22 at Gretna Junction north of Carlisle at Quintinshill. A Scottish regiment of 500 men en route to Gallipoli suffers 214 dead and is reduced to 72 effectives.
The Pennsylvania Railroad electrifies 20 miles of main line track between Philadelphia and Paoli (which becomes a switching point for steam engines to and from the west).
The Tunkhamnock Viaduct completed across a valley in Pennsylvania cuts 39 miles off the route of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad. The 2,375-foot concrete bridge has cost $12 million.
Canadian Pacific (CP) Railroad surveyor (and international time-zone pioneer) Sir Sandford Fleming dies at Halifax, N.S., July 22 at age 88; CP builder Sir William Van Horne at Montreal September 11 at age 72.
The Fruehauf tractor trailer has its beginnings at Detroit, where local blacksmith-wagon maker August Fruehauf, 47, and his associate Otto Neumann create the first trailer for the Model T Ford of local lumber dealer Frederick M. Sibley Jr., who wants to transport a boat to his new summer place on an upstate Michigan lake. Fruehauf Trailer Co. will be founded early in 1918 and become the world's largest maker of tractor trailers pulled by sawed-off trucks (tractors) to compete with railroads.
New York's Fifth Avenue Coach Co. starts designing and assembling its own buses to replace the French DeDions and English Daimlers imported since 1907. The new 34-seat double-decker coaches are powered by 40-horsepower 4-cylinder Knight sleeve-valve engines (see 1936).
The 1,000,000th Ford automobile rolls off the assembly line (see 1913); Ford produces more than 500,000 Model T cars, up from 300,000 last year (see Model A, 1927).
Willys-Overland produces 91,780 automobiles, up from 18,200 in 1910, and is the world's second largest automaker. Willys has absorbed several other firms and its sales are helped by the patented Willys-Knight sleeve-valve engine that employs two simple sleeves in each cylinder, moving silently up and down on a film of oil without springs, valves, or camshafts (see 1936).
Chevrolet Motor Co. is incorporated in Delaware by W. C. Durant, who has sold 16,000 motorcars since 1911. Cofounder Louis Chevrolet has sold his holdings to Durant, who offers General Motors stockholders five shares of Chevrolet stock for every share of GM, whose stock is being acquired in the open market by Pierre S. du Pont on the advice of his Lockport, N.Y.-born treasurer John Jakob Raskob, 36; GM stock climbs from 82 January 2 to a high for the year of 558 as du Pont becomes chairman of the board and Raskob a board member (see 1916).
Chicago's Yellow Cab Co. is founded by Czech-born livery-service owner John D. (Daniel) Hertz, 36, who will expand to more than 1,000 other cities and be a millionaire before he reaches 40. Having dropped out of school after the fifth grade, Hertz managed prizefighters, became a sportswriter, bought a partnership in a motorcar agency, decided to use some of the cars for a chauffeured livery business, and has organized the nation's first dependable taxicab service, painting his cabs an orange-yellow color that gives them maximum visibility (see car rental, 1923).
General Tire and Rubber Co. is founded at Akron, Ohio, by entrepreneur William F. (Francis) O'Neill, 30, and his father, each of whom puts up $50,000 of the initial $200,000 in capital. The younger O'Neill will make General the fifth largest tire producer (after Goodyear, Goodrich, Firestone, and U.S. Rubber) and a major player in the aerospace, communications, and entertainment industries.
The excursion boat Eastland suddenly turns over July 24 in the Chicago River while carrying 2,000 picnickers bound for a Western Electric Co. outing; 812 drown.
The Swedish American Line ship S.S. Stockholm leaves Gotebörg for New York December 11 (see 1914). Built at Hamburg by Blohm & Voss in 1900 for the Holland-American Line and originally called the Potsdam, she has been acquired by the new Swedish company and renamed. British authorities force her to stop at Kirkwall in the Orkney Islands and confiscate all her mail, but she finally arrives at New York December 26.
The Thompson submachine gun ("Tommy gun") developed by Newport, Ky.-born U.S. Brig. Gen. John Taliaferro Thompson, 54, will soon be available at hardware stores or by mail order. Thompson organizes the Auto-Ordnance Co. to build the lightweight, semiautomatic infantry shoulder rifle.
Engineer Pierre-Emile Martin of Siemens-Martin open-hearth steelmaking fame dies at Fourchambault May 23 at age 90. Reduced to virtual poverty by the costs of defending his patents in court, he has been supported since age 83 by a fund that was financed by the world's chief steelmaking countries.
Physicist Henry G. J. Moseley is killed at the Battle of Suvla Bay in Gallipoli August 10 at age 27; anthropologist Frederic Ward Putnam dies at Cambridge, Mass., August 14 at age 76; cytologist Theodor H. Boveri at Würzburg October 15 at age 53.
Coal tar's cancer-causing properties are demonstrated by Japanese chemists Katsusaburo Yamagiwa and Koichi Ichikawa, who paint laboratory rabbits' ears with coal tar in some of the earliest experiments that produce cancer in animals (see Fibiger, 1913; Kennaway, 1933). Johannes Fibiger at Copenhagen will soon adopt their procedures for his own work.
Medics on both sides of the European conflict control tetanus infections by injecting a prophylactic antitoxin into all wounded men, using a serum prepared in the early 1890s by Emil von Behring and Shibasaburo Kitasato; the first large-scale trial of the serum confirms its efficacy, but no efficient vaccine will be developed until the 1930s.
British bacteriologist Frederick (William) Twort, 38, discovers a virus that attacks certain bacteria (it will soon be called a bacteriophage). Twort does not follow up on his discovery, but Montreal-born microbiologist Félix d'Hérelle, 44, at the Institut Pasteur in Paris noticed the viruses in the stools of locusts 5 years ago while working in the Yucatán, concluded that the insects were suffering from septicemia caused by coccobacilli bacteria, smeared some of the stool onto agar plates to grow cultures, and observed clear circular spots developing in the agar, an indication that something was eating the coccobacilli. Hérelle takes stools from a Paris-based cavalry squadron suffering from dysentery and observes the same phenomenon (see 1917).
A typhus epidemic in Serbia kills 150,000, but British troops have been inoculated against the disease and this will be the first war in which British losses from disease will be smaller than those from enemy fire (see 1909; Russia, 1917).
Austrian otologist Robert Bárány, 39, receives the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine. His work on the physiology and pathology of the inner ear's balancing (vestibular) apparatus have won international recognition, but Bárány is now a Russian prisoner of war (he has served in the Austrian Army).
Bacteriologist Friedrich Löffler dies at Berlin April 19 at age 62; bacteriologist and chemotherapy pioneer Paul Ehrlich at Bad Homburg August 20 at age 61; yellow fever pioneer Carlos J. Finlay at Havana August 20 at age 81 (the Cuban government establishes the Finlay Institute for Investigations in Tropical Medicine); bacteriologist-physician George M. Sternberg dies at Washington, D.C., November 3 at age 77.
Emory University is founded at Atlanta under the name Methodist College with support from Coca-Cola's Candler family. The university is an outgrowth of Emory College, founded as a manual labor school at Oxford, Georgia, in 1836.
Harvard University's Harry Elkins Widener Library opens in the Yard, where it replaces Gore Hall. A memorial to the bibliophile who went down with R.M.S. Titanic in 1912, the world's largest college library (with more than 750,000 books) has been erected with $2 million contributed by Widener's mother, Eleanor (née Elkins), 54.
Industrial chemist Arthur D. Little persuades MIT president Richard C. McLaurin to create a school of creative engineering (see Little, 1893). Now 51, Little was forced to drop out of MIT for financial reasons in 1884 but has lectured there on paper making since 1893 and will continue to do so through next year before undertaking assignments from the U.S. Army Signal Corps and Chemical Warfare Service. Photography pioneer George Eastman sends a check in June for $300,000 to fund the new school, and it will be in operation by 1919.
Fisk University inaugurates its fourth (white) president in November (see 1876). His predecessor George Augustus Gates raised hackles in June 1911 by dismissing six of the university's 12 black teachers for financial reasons; Fayette Avery McKenzie, 43, will serve until 1925, but while his philosophy of emphasizing vocational training will follow ideas promoted by Booker T. Washington, it will antagonize many students (see 1924).
Educator-reformer Booker T. Washington dies at Tuskegee, Alabama, November 14 at age 59, exhausted by overwork.
Long-distance telephone service between New York and San Francisco begins January 25 (see De Forest, 1907). Alexander Graham Bell, now 68, repeats the words allegedly spoken in 1876 ("Mr. Watson, come here") to Thomas Watson in San Francisco, the call takes 23 minutes to go through, it costs $20.70, but although frequency multiplexing makes it possible for a single pair of copper wires to carry three simultaneous conversations at what later will be computed as 30,000 bits per second (up from 2,000 in 1876), unrelayed calls across more than 40 miles are almost inaudible (see coaxial circuit, 1940).
A group of Australian newspapers sends reporter Keith Murdoch, 29, to London in August with instructions to stop at Cairo and report on postal arrangements for Australian troops. He asks Gen. Sir Ian Hamilton for permission to visit the front in Gallipoli, the general agrees on condition that Murdoch sign a war correspondent's pledge "not to attempt to correspond by any other route than that officially sanctioned" for the duration and not "impart to anyone military information of a confidential nature . . . unless first submitted to the Chief Field Censor." Murdoch arrives at the front September 2, declines Gen. Hamilton's offer of transport, returns to the island of Imbros where the general has his headquarters and where he meets Daily Telegraph correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, 34, who persuades him that a major disaster is imminent unless the British public can learn the truth of what is happening. Ashmead-Bartlett writes a letter September 15 to Prime Minister Asquith, Murdoch sets out for London with it, but Gen. Hamilton has learned of it and alerted the War Office, Murdoch is detained by British authorities at Marseilles and told to hand over the letter or be placed in custody, Murdoch complies but proceeds to London and dictates a letter to Australia's prime minister Andrew Fisher September 23 giving all the information he can remember from Ashmead-Bartlett's letter and calling for the recall of Gen. Hamilton and his chief of staff. Former prime minister David Lloyd George has opposed the Gallipoli campaign and urges Murdoch to send a copy of the letter to Prime Minister Asquith, Ashmead-Bartlett arrives and writes an article for the Sunday edition of the Times substantiating the charges in his letter, the Dardanelles Committee convenes October 14, it deputizes Lord Kitchener to inform Gen. Hamilton that his active career is over, evacuation of Gallipoli begins December 15, and Murdoch becomes a hero back in Australia (see 1921).
London publishers William E. and J. Gomer Berry (later Viscounts Camrose and Kemsley) acquire the 93-year-old Sunday Times, whose circulation they will increase enormously (see 1901; Allied Newspapers, 1924).
"Adventures of Teddy Tail—Diary of the Mouse in Your House" by English cartoonist Charles Folkard appears in the London Daily Mail April 5; the mouse ties a knot in its tail April 9 to rescue a beetle that has fallen down a hole. This first British newspaper comic strip will continue for more than 40 years.
Kansas City Evening Star and Kansas City Times publisher William Rockhill Nelson dies at Kansas City April 13 at age 74, leaving a fortune estimated at $6 million to his wife and daughter, with what remains after the death of the survivor to be used to found an art museum (see art [Nelson-Atkins Gallery], 1933). Ownership of the papers passes to the paper's employees under a plan devised by Nelson's son-in-law Irwin R. Kirkwood. Seattle Times publisher Alden J. Blethen dies at Seattle July 12 at age 69.
Direct wireless communication between the United States and Japan begins July 27.
Spectators at a San Francisco football game hear the first demonstration of a dynamic loudspeaker developed by Peter Laurits Jensen and Edwin Pridham (see 1913). While working to develop a better telephone receiver, Jensen has used a coil of copper wire in an electromagnetic field to connect telephone ear tubes to the diaphragm of a 22-inch Edison horn. He names it the Magnavox. A crowd at San Francisco's Civic Center hears a demonstration Christmas Eve, and Sonora Phonograph Co. CEO Frank M. Steers is so impressed that he agrees to invest capital in Jensen and Pridham's company.
Japanese engineer Tokuji Hayakawa, 20, invents the first mechanical pencil and markets it under the brand name Ever-Ready Sharp. Proceeds will enable the inventor to start a Tokyo metalworking shop that will be renamed Hayakawa Electric Industry Co. in 1942, become Sharp Corp. in 1970, and market a wide range of products under the Sharp name.
The weekly Italian news magazine Epoca begins publication at Verona, where Arnoldo Mondadori, 25, bought a printing shop in 1912 and founded an empire that will grow to publish books as well as magazines (seeGrazia, 1938).
Condé Nast takes over House and Garden magazine, which has only 10,000 readers and little advertising (seeVogue, 1909).
Nonfiction: The Beginnings of the American People by Iowa-born University of Kansas historian Carl (Lotus) Becker, 42, who wrote 6 years ago that the American Revolution was not just about "home rule" but also about "who shall rule at home"; The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent by New York-born Columbia English teacher John Erskine, 35; Chaucer and His Poetry by George Lyman Kittredge; Old Calabria by Norman Douglas; Travels in Alaska by the late John Muir; Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy by Stephen Leacock includes "Afternoons at My Club," "Aristocratic Anecdotes," "Truthful Oratory," and "In the Good Time after the War."
Author-publisher Elbert Hubbard goes down with R.M.S. Lusitania May 7 at age 58; historian Charles Francis Adams, Jr. dies at Washington, D.C., May 20 at age 79.
Lexicographer Sir James Murray dies of pleurisy at Oxford July 26 at age 78 with the Oxford English Dictionary still unfinished after 27 years of work (he completed the letter T 2 years ago and has filled in literally millions of index cards) (see 1928). The Sunday Star at Washington, D.C., carries a story in July headlined "American Murderer Helped Write Oxford Dictionary/ Mysterious Contributor to English Dictionary Proved to Be Rich American Surgeon Confined in Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum" (see crime, 1872). The Strand magazine at London runs a similar story in September, and newspapers worldwide pick it up, riling Henry Bradley, Murray's successor as OED editor-in-chief, who calls it fiction, but former Broadmoor inmate William C. Minor did, in fact, supply Murray with at least 12,000 quotations and was his most prolific contributor. Now 81, Minor is an inmate of the Government Hospital for the Insane (St. Elizabeth's) at Washington.
Fiction: "The Metamorphosis" ("Der Verwandlung") (story) by Czech writer Franz Kafka, 32; The Good Soldier by Surrey-born former English Review editor Ford Madox Ford (originally Ford Hermann Hueffer), 41; Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham; The 'Genius' by Theodore Dreiser; Wood and Stone by English novelist John Cowper Powys, 43; The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence, whose book is suppressed in November, 2 months after publication; The Voyage Out by English novelist Virginia Woolf (née Stephen), now 33, who belongs with her husband, Leonard, to London's Bloomsbury Group (other members include philosopher G. E. Moore, economist John Maynard Keynes, and novelist E. M. Forster); "Rashomon" by Japanese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa (Chōkōdō Shugin, or Gata), 23, who gives a cynical, psychological twist to an old folktale; "The Gentleman from San Francisco" ("Gospodin iz San-Frantsisco") by Ivan Bunin satirizes Western bourgeois civilization; The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan; The Sea-Hawk by Italian-born novelist Rafael Sabatini, 39, who has been publishing novels since he was 27, works in the War Office for British Inteligence, and will become a British subject in 1918; The Star Rover by Jack London; Gino Bianchi by Italian poet Piero Jahier, 31 (prose satire); The Three Leaps of Wang-lun (Die drei Sprünge des Wang-Lun) by Berlin psychiatrist-novelist Alfred Döblin, 37; The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather; Mountain Blood by Philadelphia-born novelist Joseph Hergesheimer, 35; The Bent Twig by Vermont novelist Dorothy (Dorothea Frances) Canfield Fisher, 36; Ruggles of Red Gap by Harry Leon Wilson; In Mr. Knox's Country by Somerville and Ross (Edith Somerville and Violet Martin, who dies at age 53. Her cousin Edith, now 57, is Master of Foxhounds for the West Carberry Pack and carries on alone).
Poetry: "Prufrock, and Other Observations" by St. Louis-born London poet and teacher T. S. (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, 26, appears in the June issue of Poetry magazine with 11 poems and a prose piece ("Hysteria"). Eliot has married dancer Vivienne Haigh Haigh-Wood in January; "In Flanders Fields" by Canadian Army field surgeon John McCrae, 42, whose poem appears in Punch. A shell burst killed McCrae's friend Alexis Helmer May 2 during the Second Battle of Ypres and McCrae wrote the poem May 3: "In Flanders Fields the poppies blow/ Between the crosses row on row . . . If ye break faith with us who die/ We shall not sleep, though poppies grow/ In Flanders fields" (disabled veterans will sell paper poppies after the war to raise money); Chicago Poems by Chicago Daily News writer Carl Sandburg, 37, who calls his city "Hog Butcher for the World/ Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,/ Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;/ Stormy, husky, brawling,/ City of the Big Shoulders"; A Spoon River Anthology by Kansas-born Chicago lawyer-poet Edgar Lee Masters, 46, whose somber free-verse ficitious monologues are written as if spoken from the graves by former residents of Lewiston, Illinois, in a cemetery in which Masters will himself be buried in 1950; Rivers to the Sea by Sara Teasdale; "To the Soul of Progress" by St. Louis-born poet Marianne Craig Moore, 27 (Bryn Mawr '09), whose brief satire on war appears in the Egoist, a London journal dedicated to the new imagist movement in poetry; War the Only Hygiene of the World (Guerra sola igiene del mundo) by futurist Filippo Marinetti, who urges Italian involvement in the conflict that has engulfed Europe.
English poet Rupert Brooke dies of blood poisoning April 23 at age 27 after having been weakened by sunstroke while serving in the Royal Navy. Buried on the Aegean island of Skyros, Brooke has written, "If I should die, think only this of me:/ That there's some corner of a foreign field/ That is forever England." English poet Charles Hamilton Sorley dies October 13 at age 20, having been shot in the head by a sniper at the Battle of Loos.
Juvenile: Polyanna Grows Up by Eleanor Porter; Anne of the Island by L. M. (Lucy Maud) Montgomery.
Painting: Harlequin by Pablo Picasso; Birthday by Marc Chagall; Suprematism: Nonobjective Composition by Kasimir Malevich; Evil Genius of a King by Giorgio de Chirico; Self-Portrait as a Soldier by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner; Death and the Maiden, Sick Russian Soldier, Two Women, and Edith Harms by Egon Schiele, who marries Edith June 17 over her family's objections (they are Protestant; he is, nominally, a Roman Catholic).
Sculpture: Woman Combing Hair by Aleksandr Archipenko.
The United Daughters of the Confederacy invites sculptor Gutzon Borglum to carve a bust of Robert E. Lee on Stone Mountain outside Atlanta. Carving of the gigantic granite work will begin in June 1923, the head will be unveiled on Lee's birthday in January 1924, but Borglum will have a falling out with the Stone Mountain Confederate Monumental Association in 1925 and will have his models destroyed (see 1925).
Theater: Inside the Lines by Earl Derr Biggers 2/9 at New York's Longacre Theater, with Lewis Stone, English-born actor H. Cooper Cliffe (originally Henry Cooper), 52, Philadelphia-born ingénu William Keighley, 25, 103 perfs.; The Case of the Student Vehgesack (Der Fall de Scülers Vehgesack) by German expressionist playwright Georg Kaiser, 36, 2/11 at Vienna's Neue Bütine; The Boomerang by Winchell Smith and New York-born playwright Victor Mapes, 45, 8/10 at New York's Belasco Theater, with Arthur Byron, Wallace Eddinger, 522 perfs.; Cousin Lucy by the late Charles Klein 8/27 at New York's Cohan Theater, with female impersonator Julian Eltinge, musical numbers by Jerome Kern, 43 perfs.; The House of Glass by Prussian-born playwright Max Marcin, 36, 9/1 at New York's Candler Theater, with Thomas B. Findlay, Mary Ryan, 245 perfs.; The Unchastened Woman by Louis Kaufman Anspacher 10/9 at New York's 39th Street Theater, 193 perfs.; He Who Gets Slapped (Tot, kto poluchayet poshchychiny) by Leonid Andreyev 10/27 at Moscow's Dramatic Theater; Hobson's Choice by Lancashire-born playwright Harold Brighouse, 33, 11/2 at London's Princess Theatre, with London-born actor Harold De Becker, 26, 135 perfs.; Fair and Warmer by Avery Hopwood 11/6 at New York's Eltinge Theater (to Harris Theater 7/24/1916), with Chicago-born actress Madge Kennedy, 24, 377 perfs.; The Great Lover by Leo Ditrichstein, Frederic Hatton, and Fanny Hatton 11/10 at New York's Longacre Theater, with Ditrichstein, Cora Witherspoon, Lee Millar, Zürich-born actor Alfred Kappeler, 39, 245 perfs.; David und Goliath and Prominent Citizen Möller (Grossbürger Möller) by Georg Kaiser 11/20 at Düsseldorf's Schauspielhaus; John Ferguson by St. John Ervine 11/30 at Dublin's Abbey Theatre.
The Provincetown Players is founded in a converted fish warehouse at Provincetown, Mass., by novelist-playwright Susan Glaspell, now 33, and her novelist-poet-playwright husband, George Cram Cook, now 41, who have started the theater group to stage their one-act play Suppressed Desires satirizing psychoanalysis. They stage their productions in the homes of friends such as Hutchins Hapgood, Robert Edmond Jones, Wilbur Steele, and Mary Heaton Vorse but will move the company to New York next year.
Playwright-librettist Charles Klein goes down with R.M.S. Lusitania May 7 at age 48; playwright Paul Armstrong dies of heart failure at his Park Avenue, New York, home August 30 at age 46.
Films: D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation with Lillian Gish, Mae Marsh, Henry B. Walthall has such cinematic innovations (obtained with help from cameraman Billy Bitzer) as the close-up, pan (panoramic shot), flashback, and use of a moving camera in addition to its element of racism (it is based on the 1905 novel The Clansman by Griffith's friend Thomas Dixon). Also William Cristy Cabanne's The Absentee with Indianapolis-born actor Monte Blue, 25; Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat with Fannie Ward, Sessue Hayakawa; Frank Powell's A Fool There Was with Theda Bara (Theodosia Goodman), 25, who is billed as "the vamp" ("Kiss me, my fool"); Raoul Walsh's Regeneration with Rockliffe Fellowes, Anna Q. Nilsson.
Fox Film Corp. is created by Hungarian-born entrepreneur William Fox (originally Wilhelm Fried), 36, who started his career as a New York penny arcade manager in 1904, added nickelodeons, joined with Sol Brill and B. S. Moss in 1908 to start an exhibition firm, and 2 years ago founded Box Office Attraction Co. to produce his own films. He soon has stars such as Theda Bara, William Farnum, and Annette Kellerman under contract (see Twentieth Century Fox, 1935).
Opera: Madame Sans Gêne 1/25 at New York's Metropolitan Opera House, with Geraldine Farrar, now 32, as Catherine Huebscher, music by Umberto Giordano, libretto from a play by Victorian Sardou and E. Moreau.
Ballet: El Amor Brujo 4/15 at Madrid's Teatro Lara with music by Manuel de Falla. English ballerina Alicia Markova (Lilian Alicia Marks) makes her debut at age 14.
First performance: Symphony No. 5 in E flat major by Jean Sibelius 12/8 at Helsinki.
Composer Aleksandr Scriabin dies of septicemia at Moscow April 27 at age 43.
Stage musicals: Betty 4/24 at Daly's Theatre, London, with Gabrielle Ray, book by Frederick Lonsdale, music by Paul A. Rubens, lyrics by Adrian Ross and Rubens, 391 perfs.; The Passing Show 5/29 at New York's Winter Garden Theater, with Marilyn Miller, Meyersdale, Pa.-born baritone John Charles Thomas, 25, in his Broadway debut, music chiefly by Leo Edwards and W. F. Peter, lyrics by Harold Atteridge, 145 perfs.; The Ziegfeld Follies (revue) 6/21 at the New Amsterdam Theater, with W. C. Fields, Ed Wynn, George White, Ann Pennington, book by Washington, D.C.-born playwright Channing Pollock, 35, music by Louis A. Hirsch, Dave Stamper, and others, songs that include "Hello, Frisco" by Hirsch and Gene Buck, 104 perfs.; The Blue Paradise 8/5 at New York's Casino Theater, with Vivienne Segal, music by Edmund Eysler, book by Edgar Smith based on a Viennese opera, lyrics by M. E. Rourke, 356 perfs.; The Princess Pat 9/29 at the Cort Theater, with Al Shean, music by Victor Herbert, book and lyrics by Henry Blossom, 158 perfs.; Hip! Hip! Hooray! 9/30 at the New York Hippodrome, with book by Glasgow-born writer-choreographer R. H. Burnside, 42, music by Raymond Hubbell, lyrics by John L. Golden, 425 perfs.; Her Soldier Boy 12/6 at New York's Astor Theater (to Lyric Theater 4/30/1917, to Shubert Theater 5/14/1917), with John Charles Thomas, Louise Galloway, book by Leon Victor (adapted by Rida Johnson Young), music by Emmerich Kálmán, 198 perfs.; Very Good Eddie 12/23 at New York's Princess Theater, with John Willard, music by Jerome Kern, lyrics by Schuyler Greene, 341 perfs.; Stop! Look! Listen! 12/25 at New York's Globe Theater, with music and lyrics by Irving Berlin, book by Harry B. Smith, 105 perfs.
Librettist James T. Tanner dies at his native London June 18 at age 56; producer George Edwardes at London October 4 at age 59, having pioneered the musical comedy form in the West End with more than 70 shows at the Gaiety Theater.
Popular songs: "Pack up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag" by Welsh-born London composer Felix Powell and his brother George Asaf (George Henry Powell), 35; "I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier" by Al Piantadosi (who has plagiarized a melody by Harry Haas), lyrics by Alfred Bryan; "Paper Doll" by Johnny Black; "There's a Broken Heart for Every Light on Broadway" by Fred Fisher, lyrics by Howard Johnson; "M-O-T-H-E-R, a Word that Means the World to Me" by Theodore Morse, lyrics by Howard Johnson; "Nola" by Tin Pan Alley pianist-composer Felix Arndt, 26.
Player piano inventor John McTammany dies penniless in a Stamford, Conn., military hospital March 26 at age 69 and receives a public funeral where music is performed by a grand player piano. He has long since spent the income generated by the piano to defend his patent rights against violators.
Instrument maker Charles G. Conn sells his 39-year-old company to an investment group headed by Carl D. (Diamond) Greenleaf and it becomes C. G. Conn & Co. Ltd. (see Sousaphone, 1898). A fire in 1910 caused up to $500,000 in losses, and although Conn quickly rebuilt he has struggled to survive. Greenleaf is a self-taught alto horn player who was in the University of Chicago band and founds the Conn National School of Music to train high school band directors. By 1917 the company will have 550 workers turning out 2,500 brass instruments per month, nearly 75 percent of them saxophones.
Kansas-born prizefighter Jess Willard, 33, wins the world heavyweight title April 15 at Havana with a 26th-round knockout over Jack Johnson. Willard will hold the title until 1919. Convicted in 1912 of violating the Mann Act of 1910, Johnson skipped bond and has been living abroad with his wife; his marriage to a white woman and his lavish life style have inflamed prejudice, Willard has been called "the great white hope," and the fight has been held at Havana because Johnson is a fugitive from U.S. justice.
Wimbledon tennis is canceled for the duration; William M. Johnston, 20, wins in U.S. men's singles, Norwegian-born Molla Bjurstedt, 23, in women's singles.
The New York Yankees and the American League franchise purchased for $18,000 in 1903 by Frank Farrell and William Deveny is purchased January 11 for $460,000 by local brewer Jacob Ruppert, 73, and engineer Tillinghast l'Hommedieu Houston. The Highlanders changed their name to Yankees 2 years ago (see Babe Ruth, 1920).
Rogers Hornsby signs with the St. Louis Cardinals and makes his major league debut late in the season at age 19. The Texas-born athlete will lead the National League in batting, home runs, and runs batted in (the triple crown) in 1922 and 1925, will set a league record batting average of .424 in 1924, and by 1937 will have a lifetime batting average of .358, surpassed only by Ty Cobb's .367.
The Boston Red Sox win their second World Series, defeating the Philadelphia Phillies 4 games to 1.
Sporting-goods manufacturer A. G. Spalding dies at Point Loma, near San Diego, September 19 at age 65; cricket legend William Gilbert Grace at London October 23 at age 67, having played as recently as late July of last year.
Harvard beats Yale 41 to 0 in the final gridiron appearance of Harvard star athlete Edward W. "Eddie" Mahan, 23, who has been an All-American halfback in 1913 and 1914 and whom Walter Camp selects again this year for his All-America team. Except for a loss to Cornell this year, Harvard has won all its games for the past 3 years, and Mahan crowns his career by scoring four touchdowns and kicking five extra points. Only 165 pounds, Mahan is also a star baseball player and will pitch the first five innings of an exhibition game next spring to win a 1-to-0 victory for Harvard over the world champion Boston Red Sox.
Ipana toothpaste is introduced by the 28-year-old Clinton, N.Y., firm Bristol-Myers Co., whose laxative Sal Hepatica has become a huge success and whose dentifrice is the first such product to include a disinfectant in its formula and thereby protect against the effects of bleeding gums. Demand for the two products will propel Bristol-Myers from a regional firm to one with international distribution.
Permanent wave pioneer Charles Nessler (he uses Nestle as his professional name) opens a New York shop (see 1906). He now employs a machine for heating and waving hair, applying hot alkali after the hair is porous enough to hold moisture so that it will hold its curl. Patrons who will soon include President Wilson's second wife, Edith, pay up to $120 for a wave (see 1926).
The Panama-California Exposition opens in San Diego's new Balboa Park to celebrate the opening last year of the Panama Canal and will continue until next year. Architect Bertram D. Goodhue has designed structures in a mixture of Spanish Renaissance and Mexican colonial styles for the exposition.
San Francisco's Clift Hotel opens in time to receive visitors to the city's Panama-Pacific International Exposition.
New York's Equitable building is completed at 120 Broadway between Pine and Cedar Streets (see 1913). The new office building contains 1.2 million square feet of floor space on a plot of just under one acre, has nearly 30 times as much floor space as was contained in its site, exploits its site as no building has ever done before, and raises demands for a zoning law that will prohibit such buildings (see 1916).
Carrier Corp. is founded under the name Carrier Engineering by air-conditioning pioneer Willis H. Carrier and six other young engineers who pool $32,600 to start the company (see 1911; theater [Empire Theater], 1917).
An earthquake in the Avezzano area east of Rome January 13 leaves 29,980 dead.
A drought in northeastern Brazil forces thousands of people to abandon their homes.
Rocky Mountain National Park is created by an act of Congress on 262,000 acres of Colorado wilderness land that includes 107 named peaks above 10,000 feet in elevation.
The Nature Conservancy has its beginnings in the Ecological Society of America founded by conservationists, some of whom want simply to support ecologists while others favor preservation of nature (see 1946).
The U.S. wheat crop totals 1 billion bushels for the first time as American farmers respond to high wartime wheat prices by plowing and planting millions of acres never before planted (see 1921; 1934). The Hessian fly introduced in 1776 causes $100 million worth of damage to the crop, which breaks all records nevertheless.
Boll weevils infest Alabama cotton fields, causing serious damage to the state's one-crop agricultural economy (see 1899); the devastation forces an emigration of farm workers, most of them poor and black, to Northern cities, where the supply of cheap foreign labor has dried up as a result of hostilities in Europe (see 1916).
Cattleman Joseph G. McCoy dies at Kansas City October 19 at age 77; seed merchant W. Atlee Burpee on his Fordhook estate at Doylestown, Pa., November 26 at age 57. His son David, 22, takes over the company.
Germany's War Grain Association confiscates all stocks of wheat, corn, and flour at fixed prices, suspends private transactions in grain, fixes a bread ration, and orders municipalities to lay up stores of preserved meat as Britain blockades German ports.
A German cruiser sinks a U.S. vessel with a cargo of wheat for Britain, whose own annual wheat crop is large enough to feed the nation only for 8 weeks. British flour mills at Bristol, Hull, Liverpool, and other port cities have long depended on shiploads of wheat arriving from Argentina in March, Australia in April, Africa and India in June, Russia and America in August, and Canada in November.
The German warship Kronprinz Wilhelm puts into Newport News, Virginia, with 50 sailors suffering from beriberi (see Suzuki, 1912; R.R. Williams, 1933).
Joseph Goldberger of the U.S. Public Health Service shows that pellagra is the product of diets based largely on corn and not a disease spread by any bacteria (see 1913). He has conducted tests using inmates of Mississippi's Rankin Prison who have volunteered to go on corn-product diets in return for sentence reductions (see Elvehejm, 1936).
Connecticut-born Mayo Foundation researcher Edward Calvin Kendall, 29, isolates the thyroid hormone thyroxine. Deficiencies produce goiters that Mayo Clinic cofounder Charles H. Mayo, now 50, has made a career of removing surgically (see 1889; Marine, 1905; Akron, 1916).
U.S. dairy interests establish the National Dairy Council, partly at the suggestion of E. V. McCollum (see 1912). One purpose of the council is to fund nutrition research.
France outlaws the sale of absinthe March 16, and other countries quickly follow suit (the United States banned it in 1912). It has accounted for one-fourth of the 129 million liters of distilled spirits sold each year in France, and high taxes on absinthe have produced 1 percent of the French national operating budget; the government has used the excuse that alcohol is needed for gunpowder production to halt sale of the liqueur following 10 years of agitation triggered by the murder of his wife and two daughters by a delirious man who regularly consumed six quarts of wine, six brandies, and two absinthes each day.
Cookbook author Fannie Merritt Farmer dies at Boston January 15 at age 57.
Kraft processed cheese is introduced by Chicago's 5-year-old J. L. Kraft & Bros., whose chemists have developed a process that arrests the bacterial curing of cheese without subjecting it to such high temperatures as to cause oil separation (see 1909). James L. Kraft's four brothers have joined him as active partners in a business whose sales will jump from $5,000 this year to $150,000 next. Made from ground bits of pasteurized cheddar or other natural cheese that have been stirred with an emulsifier and water into a smooth, homogeneous fluid and packed initially in tins, processed, or "American," cheese will hereafter constitute a growing part of Kraft's cheese business (see 1917; Kraft-Phenix, 1928).
Kellogg's 40% Bran Flakes are introduced by the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Co. (see 1911; 1919).
Joseph Campbell Co. is incorporated as the Campbell Soup Co. under John T. Dorrance (see 1905; 1922). The new company acquires Franco-American Co. and will market its canned spaghetti, canned soups, and other products. Started at Jersey City, N.J., in 1887 by émigré French soup maker Alphonse Biardot and his sons Ernest and Octave, Franco-American cans a wide variety of specialty items, including six kinds of Truffled Game Pâté.
American Falls, Idaho, merchant Marion B. Skaggs, 27, buys his father's grocery store for $1,089 and enlists the help of his five brothers to start a network of stores that will get help from Merrill Lynch at New York and by 1926 will have become the Safeway chain, covering 10 states with 428 retail outlets.
U.S. per-capita consumption of white granulated sugar reaches a level twice what it was in 1880 as Americans give up molasses and brown sugar in favor of white sugar.
Corning Glass researchers Eugene C. Sullivan and William C. Taylor develop Pyrex brand cookware. Based on the NoNex low expansion glass introduced in 1909 for lantern globes, the heat-resistant and shock-resistant borosilicate glass will be used in oven dishes and coffeemakers. A Massachusetts firm introduces the Silex coffeemaker; made from the new Pyrex glass, it has a patented European design and employs the vacuum-drip principle (see Chemex, 1942).
Coca-Cola bottlers adopt a contoured glass bottle created by the Root Glass Co. of Terre Haute, Indiana, for the Atlanta-based company's 29-year-old soft drink (see 1899). The bottlers have been using packages of various shapes and colors, the company's legal counsel has written that a distinctive package would "help us fight substitutions . . . we need a bottle which a person will recognize as a Coca-Cola bottle even when he feels it in the dark," and he has urged management to develop packaging that could be protected by trademark and patent laws. Management in Atlanta has asked the Indiana company for a design suggestive of the African kola nut, a librarian at Terre Haute has been unable to find any picture of the nut, so the curvaceous new bottle with fluted sides and bulging middle has been inspired by the shape of the cacao bean; it will be a familiar sight worldwide for decades (see Supreme Court decision, 1916).
Black tea still represents only about 30 percent of the tea consumed in America (see 1904).
Reformer Anthony Comstock dies at New York September 21 at age 71. The 1872 Comstock Law remains in force nationwide, making it illegal to sell contraceptive devices.
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