1872: Information and Much More from Answers.com
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The Spanish pretender Don Carlos, 24, enters Navarre in May (see 1871), but the new king Amadeo I routs his forces at Oroquista and forces him to take refuge in the Pyrenees. Spanish voters elect a cortes (see 1873).
The Ballot Act passed by Parliament July 18 provides for secret ballots in all British parliamentary and municipal elections (see Australian ballot, 1856). Conservatives have generally opposed the measure but will soon support it with enthusiasm (see New York State, 1889).
Anarchist followers of Mikhail Bakunin virtually end the First International (Workingmen's Association) by splitting off from Marxists at the Hague Conference. Bakunin is outvoted and expelled, but the 8-year-old First International founders over the issue of whether communism's classless society can be achieved only by what Bakunin calls a "withering away" of the state.
Sweden's Karl IV dies at Malmö September 18 at age 46 after a 13-year reign. His 43-year-old brother succeeds to the throne and will reign until 1907 as Oskar II.
Theological students at Constantinople stage demonstrations against the reactionary rule of the new grand vizier Mahmud Nedim (see 1871). The 49-year-old official Midhat who serves as Ottoman governor of Baghdad secures an interview with the sultan Abdul Aziz, expresses opposition to Nedim's policies, and is appointed grand vizier in Nedim's place, but Midhat proves too independent for the court and holds power for only 3 months (see 1875).
A fanatic Muslim convict stabs the viceroy of India Richard Southwell Bourke, 6th earl of Mayo, February 8 while he is visiting a penal colony at Port Blair in the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. The earl dies at age 49.
Chinese military leader and administrator Zeng Guofan (Tseng Kuo-fan) dies at Nanjing (Nanking) March 12 at age 60 after a career in which he has delayed the collapse of China's imperial regime by suppressing both the Taiping and Nian rebellions.
Japan institutes universal military service despite objections from those who favor continuing the monopoly enjoyed for centuries by the samurai class (see 1871); members of the government who have visited Europe have insisted that universal military training is essential, and they have received at least tacit support from General Takamori Saigo (see 1874).
British diplomat-author Sir John Bowring dies at Claremont, near Exeter, November 23 at age 79.
Ethiopia's late emperor Theodore is succeeded by the ruler of Tigre, who will reign until 1889 as the king of kings Johannes IV.
British diplomat Frederick Temple, earl of Dufferin, arrives at Ottawa to begin 6 years as governor-general of Canada.
Mexico's president Benito Juárez dies of a heart attack at Mexico City July 18 at age 66 after a career in which he has tried to save his nation from foreign enemies, suppress feudalism, and turn Mexico into a democratic, federal republic free of Church control; revolts that have raged since his election to a fourth term last year after an acrimonious campaign are finally suppressed, and Juárez's vice president, Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, now 45, succeeds to the presidency, which he will hold until 1876 despite opposition from the Church, progressives (who criticize his failure to undertake public works), and provincial chiefs, who resent his centralized government (see 1876).
General Henry W. Halleck dies at Louisville, Kentucky, January 9 at age 66; former secretary of state William H. Seward at his Auburn, New York, home October 10 at age 71; former Union Army general George G. Meade of his old battle wounds complicated by pneumonia at Philadelphia November 6 at age 56.
Radical Republicans renominate President Grant despite the manifest corruption of his administration; liberal Republicans nominate New York publisher Horace Greeley of the Tribune. Greeley gains support from civil service reformer Carl Schurz, from Republican malcontents who have not shared in the spoils of war and of politics, and from Democrats, but Grant wins reelection with 56 percent of the popular vote (and 286 electoral votes to Greeley's 66). Greeley, exhausted, dies at Pleasantville, New York, November 29 at age 61.
Kamehameha V dies December 11, ending an Hawaiian dynasty. His kinsman William Charles Lanalilo, 37, will be elected early next year to succeed him (see 1874).
Chiricahua Apache in Arizona Territory give up their resistance to the whites on the promise of a reservation separate from that of the Mescalero Apache. Cochise, now 60, signs a treaty with the Indian commissioner General Oliver O. Howard and retires to the new Arizona reservation, where he will die in June 1874.
Victoria Claflin Woodhull announces that she will be a candidate for the U.S. presidency on the People's Party ticket with freedman Frederick Douglass as her running mate. She calls on all activist women to register and vote, contending that the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, actually enfranchised women, since it made no mention of gender in its provision asserting the rights of citizenship, and that there is therefore no necessity for a Sixteenth Amendment that would specifically grant woman suffrage. Woodhull has made a fortune in Wall Street but is unable to get on the ballot (the cause of women's rights suffers from editorials in Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly that defend abortion, advocate free love, and recommend licensing and medical inspection of prostitutes. The Weekly publishes the first English translation of "The Communist Manifesto").
Susan B. Anthony and her two sisters go to the barbershop registrar's office at Rochester, New York, November 1 with the expectation of being denied permission to register as voters in the upcoming election and seeking a favorable court judgment for what they have been unable to accomplish in state legislatures. Like Victoria Woodhull, Anthony insists that the Fourteenth amendment enfranchised women as well as black males; the registrars permit the Anthony sisters and some other women to register, and they cast their votes November 5, but a United States Marshall comes to Anthony's house 2 weeks later and arrests her for breaking the law (see 1873). President Grant has the support of Stanton and of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whose husband, Henry, has supported New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, an early supporter of the woman's movement.
A ship carrying Chinese slaves bound for Peru stops at Yokohama and is denied clearance. When the Japanese government insists that the slaves be returned to China, the ship's captain replies that Japan's houses of prostitution also involve the selling of people (see 1869). The Meiji government thereupon enacts a law October 2 forbidding people to sell their daughters as prostitutes or geishas and decrees that existing prostitutes are free to leave without having to pay for their freedom. According to the law, the women have no rights as human beings, but since horses and cows do not have to repay debts neither do the prostitutes. The law is flexible and will prove unenforceable: since a poor farmer may, in bad times, have no choice but to sell his daughter, the government may give approval after looking into the case.
Keio University founder Yukichi Fukuzawa publishes a book that criticizes Japan's 1870 law permitting mistresses to belong to a man's household and have rights comparable to those of his wife. Fukuda's followers are called Meirokusha (see 1880).
Portland, Oregon, newspaper publisher Abigail Duniway (née Scott) addresses a joint session of the Oregon legislature and persuades the men to pass a law allowing married women to go into business for themselves and protecting their property if their husbands leave them. Now 37, Duniway began publishing the weekly New Northwest last year, having come west with her family in 1852 (her invalid mother died of cholera in the Black Hills of Wyoming Territory, leaving young Abigail and eight other children to proceed with their father on the Oregon Trail (her baby brother Willie died 10 weeks later). She herself became a schoolteacher, got married, and has had six children. She will later win Oregon women the right to sue and to control their own earnings (see 1883).
The Erie Ring of Wall Street speculators James Fisk and Jay Gould collapses following the January 6 shooting of Fisk by Edward S. Stokes, a business rival and a rival for the favors of Fisk's mistress, the actress Josie Mansfield. Fisk and Gould have been looting the Erie Railroad's treasury, and Fisk's death draws attention to the corruption that has flourished under the Grant administration. Gould resigns from the board of the Erie March 15.
Congress abolishes the federal income tax imposed during the Civil War (see 1861; 1881).
Congress passes a law guaranteeing equal pay for equal work in U.S. federal employment after lobbying by feminist lawyer Belva Ann Lockwood, 42, who has spoken at New York's Cooper Union in behalf of Victoria Woodhull but has then stumped the South to gain votes for Horace Greeley.
Vermont-born Chicago lawyer Myra Bradwell secures passage of a state law making it illegal to discriminate in employment on the basis of sex. Now 41, she lost her law books in last year's fire but has taken the Illinois bar examination and passed with distinction; being a woman has kept her from entering practice, and the new law opens the profession to women lawyers. Although Bradwell herself will not be admitted to the Illinois bar until 1890, the Legal News she has published since 1868 will become a major force in effecting the retirement (and pensioning) of superannuated judges, better treatment of witnesses at trials, codification of professional standards, and other legal reforms.
Charles A. Dana's New York Sun begins an exposure of the Crédit Mobilier September 4: "THE KING OF FRAUDS/ How the Credit Mobilier Bought Its Way Through Congress/ COLOSSAL BRIBERY/ Congressmen who Have Robbed the/ People, and who now Support/ The National Robber/ HOW SOME MEN GET FORTUNES." Congress votes December 2 to appoint a committee to investigate the Crédit Mobilier that was set up by Union Pacific Railroad directors in 1864 (see 1873).
An Australian miner in New South Wales discovers the world's largest gold nugget (215 kilograms) October 19.
A Geneva court of arbitration holds Britain responsible for Civil War depredations by the Alabama and other Confederate cruisers in a September 14 ruling that awards the U.S. government $15.5 million in damages (see Treaty of Washington, 1871). Former minister to Britain Charles Francis Adams, now 70, has been the U.S. member of the five-man tribunal.
A Gunpowder Trade Association organized by E. I. du Pont de Nemours controls prices of blasting and hunting powder in a market glutted with war surplus powder. Du Pont supplied the Union armies with 4 million pounds of explosives (see 1861). The company is rich with profits gained in the war, it undersells competitors who do not join the association, and it forces them to yield or go out of business (see 1899; Repauno Chemical Co., 1880).
Japan's first silk-reeling factory begins operation in Gunma Prefecture with young female workers (most of them daughters of former samurai) who include the manager's 13-year-old daughter. He has put her to work to set an example and facilitate recruitment, which has initially proved difficult. The government has imported equipment and engineers from France to start the operation; it will soon be run mostly by poor farmers' daughters, aged 12 to 20, working 12-hour days on 3- to 5-year contracts to help their families financially and prepare for marriage (see 1904).
Bloomingdale's has its beginnings in the Great East Side Store opened April 17 at 938 Third Avenue, near 56th Street, by New York-born merchant Lyman G. Bloomingdale, 31, with help from his brothers Joseph B. (Bernard), 29, and Gustave. Lyman has worked as a salesman at the Newark department store Beetlebeck & Company; his small "bazaar" is located far to the north of the city's main shopping district, its surrounding population is made up largely of immigrants and working-class people, sales for the first day amount to only $3.68, but Lyman is convinced that the new Central Park and Metropolitan Museum of Art will attract more people to live uptown (see 1886).
Simpson's opens in Toronto's Yonge Street, where Scottish-born Canadian merchant Robert Simpson, now 38, will have 13 clerks by 1880, rivaling T. Eaton Company and the much older Hudson's Bay Company. Simpson came to Toronto at age 21, has worked in another dry-goods store, and will turn his pioneer department store into a national chain that will issue catalogues beginning in 1894.
Montgomery Ward Company is founded by Chicago mail-order pioneer (Aaron) Montgomery Ward, 29, whose savings were nearly consumed by last year's fire. He scrapes together $1,600 and goes into business with George R. Thorne, who puts up $800. Setting up shop in a 12- by 14-foot loft over a livery stable at 825 North Clark Street, Ward and Thorne call themselves "The Original Grange Supply House" and prepare a one-sheet "catalogue" to test Ward's idea that farmers hurt by low commodity prices will respond to bargain offerings that can be shipped by rail. The catalog issued October 9 is the world's first mail-order catalog; it lists some 50 dry goods items, all priced at $1 or less, with savings of 40 percent. Ward will offer 10 days' grace on orders from Grange officials or countersigned with the National Grange seal (see 1884; Sears, 1886; agriculture [Grange], 1868).
Standard Oil's executive committee adopts a resolution January 1 to acquire "certain refining properties in Cleveland and elsewhere." John D. Rockefeller and his associates take over 22 of their 26 competitors in less than 6 weeks, creating a near-monopoly to shore up the price of oil, which has dropped to less than $3 per barrel, down from as high as $12 in 1864 (see 1871). The Rockefeller monopoly has conspired with the eastern railroads; in addition to paying rebates on every barrel that Standard Oil ships, they pay Standard drawbacks—fixed rates for every barrel of oil that they carry for a Rockefeller competitor—and competitors pay five times the freight rate enjoyed by Standard. The "Cleveland Massacre" forces rivals either to sell out or be crushed, and the resulting colossus refines 10,000 barrels of kerosene per day, making it the largest operation of its kind in the world (see 1877).
An oil well drilled 30 miles west southwest of Cheribon in the Dutch East Indies is the first in Indonesia. General store owner Jan Reerink, 36, abandons the well at 125 feet after his drill becomes stuck in an oil-soaked clay formation, a second effort goes no deeper than 80 feet, but Reerink sets up a hose and pumps out 6,000 liters of crude oil. He will obtain the first oil concession in Indonesia next year and build a refinery in 1874 to supply his customers with lamp oil. His subsequent wells will all be dry (but see Zijker, 1880).
Belgian electrician Zenobe Theophile Gramme, 46, perfects the world's first industrial dynamo, employing a ring winding of the same type invented independently by Italian physicist Antonio Pacinotti in 1860 (see Faraday, 1831).
British-born Boston engineer George B. Brayton receives a patent April 2 on a streetcar powered by an internal-combustion engine that uses kerosene and air compressed by separate pumps. The car will go into operation at Providence, Rhode Island, November 13 of next year and Brayton's two-cycle hot-air engine will attract wide attention (see Selden, 1873).
Boston radiates out from its City Hall to a distance of 2½ miles, half a mile farther than in 1850, as a consequence of horsecar transportation that by 1887 will extend the congested urban area another 1.5 miles from City Hall (see 1852; subway, 1897).
The New York Elevated Railroad Company created by a reorganization of the West Side and Yonkers Patent Railway Company extends the line from South Ferry north to 9th Street, (see 1868). The new company adds stations and introduces steam locomotives ("dummies") in place of cables to pull the wooden cars (see 1878).
The Gilbert Electric Railway Company incorporated June 17 by Guilford, New York-born New York surgeon and transit expert Rufus H. (Henry) Gilbert, 40, proposes to build elevated lines using cars that are to be propelled by air pressure from pneumatic tubes mounted on elevated structures (see 1878).
The Compagnie International des Wagons-Lits et des Grands Express Européens is founded by Belgian engineer Georges (Lambert) Nagelmackers, 27, whose family's bank at Brussels dates to 1747. Sent to look at U.S. railroads last year, Nagelmackers crossed the country in Pullman cars and was impressed; he will run some demonstration sleeping-car trains next year between Paris and Vienna, Paris and Cologne, and Berlin and Ostend (see Train Bleu, 1876).
Russians complete a railroad linking the Georgian capital of Tiflis (Tbilisi) to Poti on the Black Sea; they will extend the line to Baku on the Caspian Sea in 1883.
Japan gets her first railroad. The 18-mile line between Tokyo and Yokohama opens October 14 with ceremonies at the Shimbashi and Yokohama terminals. Financed by the Oriental Bank of England, it has been built by 16 English engineers.
Canadian railroads convert their lines to the standard-gauge width of four feet eight-and-a-half inches.
A system of automatic electric signaling for railroads patented by Irish-born U.S. engineer William Robinson, 32, will be the basis for all modern automatic railroad block signaling systems.
Commodore Vanderbilt and his allies buy enough shares in the Union Pacific to control it and install Vanderbilt's Southbury, Connecticut-born son-in-law Horace F. (Francis) Clark, 56, as president. A former congressman who has served as a director of the New York & Harlem, Clark has acquired stock in many other railroads and been president of some (but see 1873).
The New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad Company, created by a merger of the New York and New Haven with the Hartford and New Haven, ends a competitive struggle that has ensued for nearly 20 years; the new entity's 188 miles of track will grow to 1,800 miles (see Shore Line route, 1893).
The Chicago & Rock Island Railroad wins a government contract for all mail west of Chicago by beating the Chicago and North Western in a race between Chicago and Council Bluffs. The Rock Island 3 years ago bought an eight-wheel locomotive built for the 1867 Paris International Exposition by the Grant Locomotive Works of Paterson, New Jersey, and the much-publicized steam engine with her boiler encased in German silver, with solid silver headlights, handles, whistles, and pumps, steams the distance in 27 hours with a 19-year-old engineer in the cab and flagmen at every crossing to keep livestock from blocking the rail bed.
Steam ferries between Brooklyn and Manhattan make 1,200 crossings per day.
The 103-foot, 282-ton, Canadian-built brigantine Mary Celeste leaves her pier on New York's East River November 5 under the command of Captain Benjamin S. (Spooner) Briggs, 37, whose wife, Sarah, and 2-year-old daughter Sophia Matilda accompany him along with a crew of seven. Bound for Genoa, the brigantine has a cargo of 1,701 barrels of alcohol used for fortifying Italian wines (Meissner Ackermann & Co. has valued the shipment at about $35,000 and insured it in Europe). A friend of Briggs leaves New York November 15 in command of the sailing vessel Dei Gratia with 1,735 barrels of petroleum in her hold. Captain Morehouse of the Dei Gratia sights the Mary Celeste off the Azores December 5, observes that she is sailing erratically on a starboard tack, boards her, and finds her cargo and stores intact but without a soul aboard, a "ghost" ship whose mystery will never be solved.
The Farquharson Rifle patented by English gunsmith John Farquharson is a single-shot rifle with a falling-block action. George Gibbs of Bristol begins production of the rifle that will be produced in numerous variations by Webley, Bland, Westley Richards, and various European firms.
Borax ore (calcium borate) deposits discovered near Columbus, Nevada, will be called colemanite after prospector William Tell Coleman, 48, who makes the find with Francis Marion Smith, 26. They will organize Pacific Coast Borax Company and gain virtually a world monopoly in the material used to tan leather and make glass, porcelain, enamel, and soap. Smith will acquire additional deposits in California's Death Valley and haul out ore in huge wagons that will inspire the trademark "Twenty-Mule Team Borax."
Commercial production of celluloid begins under a patent obtained in 1869 by Albany, New York, printer John Wesley Hyatt, now 35, and Rockford, Illinois, inventor Isaiah Smith Hyatt (see Parkes, 1855). A growing shortage of ivory has led to an offer of $10,000 in gold to anyone who could come up with a substitute; the Hyatts have organized a manufacturing company, deriving the word celluloid from cellulose and oid (meaning like). They will obtain a trademark for the word next year, and they will sell their celluloid as a substitute for ivory, horn, amber, tortoise-shell, and the like for use in billiard balls (although celluloid balls often explode on impact), piano keys, buttons, men's collars, dental plates, combs, and other items (see photography, 1889; Bakelite, 1909).
Pirelli and Company has its beginnings at Milan, where Italian entrepreneur Giovanni Battista Pirelli, 23, opens a small rubber factory, the first such factory in Italy. It will grow to become a global concern with large plantations in Java and factories worldwide. Pirelli will pioneer in manufacturing electric cable in 1884 (see tires, 1899).
A machine patented February 20 by Wellfleet, Massachusetts, inventor Luther Childs Crowell, 31, makes square-bottomed paper bags (see Wolle, 1852). Inventor "Mattie" Knight, now 34, obtained a patent 2 years ago for an attachment to bag-folding machines and produced the first square-bottom bags and established the Eastern Paper Bag Company; she rejects an offer of $50,000 for her rights, will assign most of her patents to her employers for spot cash in lieu of royalties, and will die in 1914 leaving an estate of only $275. Crowell's machine will be improved in 1883 by one that will make the automatic, or "flick," bag—a self-opening bag with a flat bottom and side pleats.
Kimberly-Clark Company has its beginnings in a Neenah, Wisconsin, paper mill started inside the Menominee Reservation by four entrepreneurs whose firm will become a major manufacturer of paper products. John A. Kimberly is a part owner of Neenah's general store, while Charles B. (Benjamin) Clark, 28, is a New York greenhorn who has persuaded Kimberly and two other partners to join him in building the paper mill (see everyday life [Kotex], 1918).
German botanist Ferdinand J. (Julius) Cohn, 44, publishes the first major work on bacteriology, founding a new science. His Ueber Bakterien discusses the role of microorganisms in the cycling of elements in nature (see 1875).
Botanist Hugo von Mohl dies at Tubingen April 1 at age 66, having coined the word protoplasm.
Louis Pasteur publishes a classic paper on fermentation showing that it is caused by microorganisms.
Stetigkeit und irrationale Zahlen by German mathematician Julius (Wilhelm Richard) Dedekind, 41, presents a theory of real numbers.
Düsseldorf-born mathematician (Christian) Felix Klein, 23, at the University of Erlangen publishes what will be called the Erlanger Program, the first significant attempt to reorganize the study of geometry; having collaborated with the Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie on the concept of contact transformations (see 1870), he systematizes Lie's work and proposes that Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry be viewed as special cases of projected geometry, each having a set of points (Klein calls it a "space") and a group of transformations permitting figures to be moved around in the space without altering their basic properties.
A cuneiform tablet deciphered by British Museum assistant George Smith, 32, bears the Gilgamesh legend of 3000 B.C. with an Assyrian account of a great flood that conforms closely with the biblical account. Smith announces his discovery in December at a meeting of British archaeologists (see Grotofend, 1837; 1846).
Viennese surgeon Theodor Billroth becomes the first person to remove a section of the esophagus and join the remaining parts together. He will perform the first complete excision of a larynx next year.
The Ebers papyrus discovered at Thebes by German Egyptologist Georg Moritz Ebers, 35, is the oldest known compendium of ancient Egyptian medical writings.
Fletcher's Castoria is introduced by New York entrepreneur Charles H. Fletcher, 34, who has purchased a physician's formula for a root-beer-flavored children's laxative; he opens a shop at 80 Varick Street and starts advertising the elixir that will make him a fortune, using slogans that will include, "Children Cry for Castoria."
Dresden, New York-born Chicago lawyer Robert Green Ingersoll, 38, gives a public address January 29 at a ceremony observing the 135th birthday of Thomas Paine. "An honest God," agnostic Ingersoll begins, "is the noblest work of man"; he not only echoes Paine by observing that scripture showed a supposedly all-perfect God behaving in an ill-tempered and self-centered manner but goes beyond Paine by suggesting that all world religions tend to picture their divine beings as ill-behaved humans (see 1874).
"The Object and Manner of Our Lord's Return" by Pittsburgh evangelist Charles Taze Russell, 20, announces that the second coming of Christ will occur in the fall of 1874 without the awareness of mankind. Russell founds the International Bible Students' Association (see 1878).
Prussian bureaucrat (Paul Ludwig) Adalbert Falk, 44, wins appointment in January as minister of ecclesiastical affairs, and Chancellor Bismarck commissions him to direct the Kulturkampf against Roman Catholics launched May 14 "to reestablish the rights of the state in relation to the Church" (see 1871). Germany expels her Jesuits June 25 by an imperial law (see 1873).
Spanish authorities in the Philippines execute three Roman Catholic priests in public at Manila February 17: José Burgos, 35, and his fellow priests Mariano Gómez and Jacinto Zamora have favored reform of Spanish rule in the islands, and they become martyrs to the cause of revolution (see politics, 1896).
British authorities in India recognize the marriage rites of the 6-year-old Brahmo Society of India (Bharatrvarshiya Brahmo Samaj), whose founder Keshab Chunder Sen has condemned child marriage, advocated the remarriage of widows, and even supported intercaste marriage. Sen lectured in England 2 years ago and was presented to Queen Victoria, but he has allowed his 14-year-old daughter to marry the son of the maharajah of Cooch Behar and some of his followers have broken away.
Japan permits Buddhist priests to take wives and eat meat.
An Encouragement of Learning (Gakumon no susume) by Keio University founder Yukichi Fukuzawa begins, "Heaven created no man above another, and no man below another"; he thereby contradicts Confucian philosophy and includes a chapter on women, saying of women's education that the world cannot exist without both men and women and that women are just as human as men.
Compulsory education for Japanese children begins in August, but relatively few girls show up. Monthly tuition is 15 to 25 sen (100 sen can buy about 57 quarts of rice), and girls are generally considered better off without education, which many believe actually to be harmful to women. Poor families sometimes send their daughters off to work as maids in respectable households where they can learn how to behave in polite society and prepare themselves for marriage and motherhood (see 1873).
Vanderbilt University is founded at Nashville, Tennessee, with a gift of $1 million from Commodore Vanderbilt of the New York Central.
Russia begins opening institutions of higher learning to women, partly to keep young women from going off to Zürich and other cities where they may become radicalized.
The University of Wisconsin gives women full access to a college curriculum for the first time but allows female students to register for a course only if it does not have enough males and requires female students to use the library on different days from male students.
Cornell University becomes coeducational 4 years after opening at Ithaca, New York.
Former West Point superintendent Sylvanus Thayer dies at his native Braintree, Massachusetts, September 7 at age 87.
The Boston Daily Globe begins publication March 4 with an eight-page edition that is twice the size of any of the city's other 10 dailies. Four Boston papers have morning and evening editions, most sell for 4¢ per copy, combined circulation is less than 170,000 in a metropolitan area of 500,000. Even the 26-year-old Boston Herald at 2¢ has a circulation of no more than 17,000.
The Toronto Mail begins publication March 30 (seeGlobe, 1844; Globe and Mail, 1936).
The Winnipeg Free Press has its beginnings in the eight-page Manitoba Free Press published November 30 by English-born journalist William F. Luxton, 29, with backing from his upstairs neighbor John A. Kenny; the daily paper will change its name in 1931 (see Dafoe, 1901).
The 51-year-old Manchester Guardian elevates journalist Charles Prestwich Scott, 26, to the editor's chair in the fall (see 1855). He will edit the paper for 57 years, making it one of the world's most respected dailies by introducing new ideas while holding fast to the principle, "Comment is free, but the facts are sacred" (see 1905).
Electromagnetic telegraphy pioneer and painter Samuel F. B. Morse dies at Poughkeepsie, New York, April 2 at age 80. Telegraph operators drape their instruments in black.
Western Electric Company is founded at Chicago April 2 to sell telegraph equipment and pursue experiments on an electric telephone devised by Ohio-born inventor Elisha Gray, 37, who 5 years ago received his first patent (for an improved telegraph relay that adapted itself to the varying insulation of the telegraph line). Company president Anson Stager gets sales support from Adams, New York-born entrepreneur Enos (Melancthon) Barton, 29, who went into partnership with Gray in 1869 after borrowing $400 from his widowed mother (who mortgaged the Jefferson County, N.Y., family home to raise the money) to buy out Gray's former partner in a firm that made parts and models for other inventors (see 1874; Bell, 1876).
Pony Express founder William Hepburn Russell dies at Washington, D.C., September 10 at age 60.
The Eastern Telegraph Company is founded through an amalgamation of smaller British companies under the chairmanship of John Pender (see 1869). Capitalized at £3,397,000, its general manager is Sir James Anderson, who skippered the Great Eastern when she laid the Atlantic cable 6 years ago. It owns 8,860 miles of cable, owns or rents 1,200 miles of landline, has 24 stations and two repair ships, and will absorb other companies to give it a total of 22,400 miles of owned cable and 64 stations by 1887 as its capital increases to £5.9 million (see Imperial and International Communications, 1929).
An Australian telegraph line opens November 23 to connect Adelaide with Port Darwin and is soon extended to link Australia with Java, India, and Europe.
Congress enacts the first U.S. consumer protection law, making it a federal offense to use the U.S. mails for fraudulent purposes. Post Office Chief Special Agent P. A. Woodward proceeds under the new law to prosecute "professional cheats" who are working the most barefaced operations, mostly through the mails, without fear of punishment.
The "Comstock Law" enacted by Congress November 1 makes it illegal to send through the mails such items as the Aristophanes play Lysistra, Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, various editions of The Arabian Nights, and Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. The law takes its name from that of New York moralist Anthony Comstock, 28, who heads the Society for the Suppression of Vice, and although rarely enforced it will not be entirely repealed for more than 125 years.
Chinese Without a Teacher by English scholar H. A. (Herbert Allen) Giles, 26, will help to establish the Wade (Wade-Giles) style of romanizing Chinese characters pioneered by Thomas F. Wade in 1859. Giles has been in the consular service in various Chinese posts since 1867 (see 1892).
Nonfiction: Physics and Politics by Walter Bagehot, who applies Darwin's theory of evolution to politics; Roughing It by Mark Twain.
Philosopher-moralist Ludwig Feuerbach dies at Rechenberg, Germany, September 13 at age 68.
Fiction: Middlemarch by George Eliot; Under the Greenwood Tree by English novelist-architect Thomas Hardy, 32; Erewhon by English satirist Samuel Butler, 37, is a utopian novel about a country devoid of machinery (the work is issued anonymously); The Prodigious Adventures of Tartarin de Tarascon (Les Aventures prodigieuses de Tartarin de Tarascon) by Alphonse Daudet; In a Glass Darkly (ghost stories) by Joseph S. Le Fanu; Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll; The Fiend's Delight and Nuggets and Dust Panned Out in California by former San Francisco News Letter editor Ambrose (Gwinnett) Bierce, 30, who has left for a 3-year stay at London.
Novelist-poet-dance critic Théophile Gautier dies at Neuilly, outside Paris, October 23 at age 61.
Juvenile: The Hunting of the Snark, An Agony in Eight Fits by Lewis Carroll;What Katy Did by Cleveland-born author Susan Coolidge (Sarah Chauncy Woolsey), 37.
Painting: The Artist's Mother (Mrs. George Washington Whistler, or Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 3) by James A. McNeill Whistler; Le Foyer de la Danse and Races at the Bois de Boulogne by Edgar Degas, who voyages to New Orleans via New York for a 5-month visit with his two younger brothers René and Achille and other relatives, some of them black; The Cradle (Le Berceau) and Paris Seen from the Trocadero by Berthe Morisot; Violets and Fan by Edouard Manet; Black Rocks by Gustave Courbet; London scenes by Gustave Doré; The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone by English-born U.S. landscape painter Thomas Moran, 35, who has gone west with John Wesley Powell after obtaining financial help from Northern Pacific Railroad financier Jay Cooke and Scribner's Monthly (Congress buys the oil for display at the Capitol); Portrait of Helena De Kay by Winslow Homer, whose subject presides over a sophisticated Manhattan salon; The Pair-Oared Shell and The Biglin Brothers Racing by Thomas Eakins. Thomas Sully dies at Philadelphia November 5 at age 89; John F. Kensett at New York December 14 at age 56; George Catlin at Jersey City, New Jersey, December 23 at age 76.
Theater: A Month in the Country (Mesyats v Derevne) by Ivan Turgenev 1/13 at Moscow's Maly Theater; Family Strife in Hapsburg (Ein Bruderzwist in Habsburg) by the late Franz Grillparzer 9/24 at Vienna's Burgtheater; The Woman of Arles (L'Arlésienne) by Alphonse Daudet 10/1 at the Vaudeville Théâtre, Paris; The Jewess of Toledo (Die Jüdin von Toledo) by the late Franz Grillparzer 11/22 at Prague.
Sarah Bernhardt (née Rosine Bernard) begins a 10-year career with the Comédie-Française at Paris. Now 28, "The Divine Sarah" will gain world renown and continue acting even after having a leg amputated in 1914.
Italian actress Eleanora Duse, 13, begins a 27-year career by appearing at Verona as Juliet in the Shakespeare tragedy of 1595.
Playwright Franz Grillparzer dies at his native Vienna January 21 at age 81; character actor Prov Sadovsky at Moscow July 28 (July 16 Old Style) at age 53; actor Edwin Forrest at his native Philadelphia December 12 at age 66. His large house becomes a home for retired actors.
Opera: Canadian soprano Emma Albani (originally Marie Louise Emma Cécile Lajeunesse), 20, makes her London debut 4/2 at Covent Garden singing the role of Amina in the 1831 Bellini opera La Sonnambula. Albani will perform at Covent Garden nearly every season until 1896, notably as Elsa of Brabant in the 1870 Wagner opera Lohengrin (1875) and Elisabeth in the 1845 Wagner opera Tannhäuser (1876); Djamileh 5/22 at the Opéra-Comique, Paris, with music by Georges Bizet, libretto from the Alfred de Musset poem Namouna; La Princess Jaune 6/12 at the Opéra-Comique, Paris, with music by Camille Saint-Saëns.
First performances: La Rouet d'Omphale (Omphale's Spinning Wheel) symphonic poem by Camille Saint-Saëns 4/14 at Paris; Mass in F minor by Anton Bruckner 6/16 at Vienna; Incidental Music to L'Arlésienne by Georges Bizet 10/1 at the Vaudeville Théâtre, Paris.
Composer-educator Lowell Mason dies at Orange, New Jersey, August 11 at age 80.
Clergyman and alleged rugby football inventor William Webb Ellis dies in the south of France January 24 at age 65. The claim that he invented the game in 1823 will not surface until 1876.
The Bohemian Club founded by five bored San Francisco Examiner reporters proposes "to help elevate journalism to that place in the popular estimation to which it is entitled." Its real purpose is simply to provide an excuse for male socializing. The club will soon admit men from the theater and literary worlds, businessmen will take over by paying the initiation fees and dues of writers who cannot afford membership, and beginning in 1878 the exclusive club will hold annual festivals at the 2,200-acre Bohemian Grove 75 miles north of the city, where members will engage in cult ceremonies while ignoring the Grove's motto ("Weaving spiders come not here") to work out business and political deals.
New York society matron Caroline (Mrs. William) Astor meets Savannah-born Ward McAllister, 45, who failed in a San Francisco law practice, traveled east to Newport, Rhode Island, at age 22 to marry the heiress to a steamboat fortune, and aspires to be a social arbiter. Mrs. Astor's mother-in-law, Margaret Armstrong Astor, has just died, and her sister-in-law Charlotte Augusta Astor has refused to follow the convention of letting wealth and lineage determine who shall receive invitations; now 41, Caroline wants to bring her elder daughter into society, and she backs McAllister in starting a series of exclusive subscription dances under the auspices of The Patriarchs, a group comprised of the heads of the city's oldest families on whose approval social aspirants depend (see 1853; 1883).
Blackjack licorice-flavored chewing gum goes on sale at New York (see Semple, 1869). Former Mexican president Antonio de Santa Anna, now 77, talked Staten Island, New York, photographer Thomas Adams, Jr., now 26, into buying a ton of chicle in 1869; Adams experimented in vain with a project to make a rubber substitute from the latex of tropical trees such as the sapodilla; he recalled that Indians used to chew chicle, has now added licorice flavor to the gray gum, produces the first chewing gum to be sold in stick form, and goes into competition with State of Maine Pure Spruce gum magnate John B. Curtis, who has been selling his gum since 1848. Adams obtains a patent for a gum-making machine and will sell his Tutti-Frutti gum on station platforms of the New York El beginning in 1888, employing the first vending machines for chewing gum (see 1880; Wrigley, 1892).
An unprecedented shooting in London's notorious Lambeth Marsh section early on the morning of February 17 leads to the arrest of Connecticut-born U.S. Army surgeon William Chester Minor, 37, who has murdered one George Merrett, a young brewery worker with a large family. The incident shocks Londoners, funds are raised in England and America to support the widow and her children, a jury finds Minor legally innocent on grounds of insanity April 6, and he is confined at the Asylum for the criminally Insane, Broadmoor, where he will remain until 1910, when he will be sent back to America for confinement in an asylum at Washington, D.C. (see Nonfiction, 1915).
The Jesse James gang robs its first passenger train in June after hearing that the Rock Island's eastbound train from Council Bluffs, Iowa, will be carrying $75,000 in gold (see 1865; Quantrill's Raiders, 1863). The robbers part the rails in front of the oncoming train just west of Adair on the main line between Council Bluffs and Des Moines. Engineer John Rafferty is unable to stop the train in time and is killed when his locomotive is derailed, but the gold has been delayed for another train and the James gang gets away with a mere $3,000 from the express messenger plus $3,000 taken from passengers (see Northfield, Minn., 1876).
Romanesque architecture arrives in America through the influence of Louisiana-born architect Henry Hobson Richardson, 34, who designed Boston's Brattle Street Church in 1870 and this year designs Trinity Church.
Olana is completed on the Hudson River just south of Hudson, New York, for painter Frederick Edwin Church, who 4 years ago traveled to Constantinople and has commissioned architect Calvert Vaux of Central Park fame to draw up an Islamicized version of a plan made by Beaux Arts architect Richard Morris Hunt in 1867. A studio will be added in 1888 to the massive building of Persian-patterned bricks.
Congress creates Yellowstone National Park March 1 with an act that sets aside a 2.2-million-acre tract of wilderness preserve on the fast-developing frontier in Wyoming Territory. Photographs taken last year by upstate New York-born photographer William Henry Jackson, 29, as offical photographer of the U.S. Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories have been instrumental in persuading Congress to act. Superintendent of the world's first national park and the first effective wildlife sanctuary (bison, deer, grizzly bears, moose, and many other species) is explorer Nathaniel Pitt Langford, 39, who 2 years ago made an expedition into the area, which has more natural hot springs than any other place in the world, to say nothing of geysers, waterfalls, and other natural wonders. The United States will have five national parks by 1900.
The General Mining Act signed into law by President Grant May 10 has as its stated purpose to "promote the Development of the mining Resources of the United States"; it gives miners and mining companies free access to mineral-rich federal lands on payment of almost nothing. It leaves them free to pollute the lands without penalty and will later come under attack from environmentalists.
Upstate New York lumbering operations reach their peak as private companies strip mountains in the Catskills and Adirondacks of their timber for cheap fuel, building supplies, and wood pulp for paper to fill domestic and foreign orders. Albany alone ships 660 million board feet down the Hudson, and the New York State Forest Commission halts sales of forest lands to commercial interests (see Forest Preserve Act, 1885).
Boston suffers a $75 million fire that begins November 9 with an explosion in a four-story warehouse stocked with hoop skirts at the corner of Summer and Kingston Streets. The fire destroys the richest part of the city, burning 776 buildings that include granite and brick warehouses filled with merchandise and consuming 65 acres bounded by Milk and Washington Streets and Atlantic Avenue before burning itself out November 11. By 1876 the area will have been rebuilt more substantially than ever.
Production of the Appleby binder patented 3 years ago begins at Beloit, Wisconsin, where a local firm produces the wire binding machine, but many farmers object to using metal wire lest it kill their livestock and the enterprise fails (see Appleby reaper, 1874; twine binder, 1880).
The Chicago Board of Trade moves into a building of its own at LaSalle and Washington (see 1865; 1930; hedging, 1879).
U.S. Grangers form cooperative ventures to purchase farm implements, machinery, feed, seed, clothing, and other necessities. Some local Granges adopt the English Rochedale plan of 1844 and in Iowa one-third of all grain elevators and warehouses are Granger-owned or controlled (see 1867; 1873).
The California state legislature passes a "no-fence law" that effectively repeals the 1850 Trespass Act and makes ranchers responsible for fencing their stock in rather than obliging farmers to fence cattle out. The new law will lead to widespread use of barbed wire (which is much cheaper than stone walls, rail fences, or hedges) but is not applicable uniformly in all California counties and will be flouted in counties that depend heavily on stock raising.
A bumper U.S. corn crop leads to the start of a stock feeder cattle industry in the Midwest. The opening of new cattle lands in the west is beginning to have the effect of lowering beef prices.
Montpellier University scientist Gaston Fouex observes that grape phylloxerae must have come from abroad, arguing that if they were native to Europe they would long ago have wiped out European vines (see 1868). The parasite must be native to a country where it can live without destroying its host, he says. U.S. agronomist Charles Riley confirms that the aphid must have been carried across the Atlantic inadvertently from the U.S. East Coast on roots of native American vines (Vitis labrusca) intended for collectors and experimental use in Europe. Although the Catawba has no resistance, exposure over thousands of years has made most other U.S. vine roots immune to the phylloxerae (which cause leaf galls and weaken roots), but they do attack the European species Vitas vinifera. Enterprising growers have brought diseased cuttings and rootstock of Vitas vinifera to California, and the aphid will take its toll in that state's vineyards, but the destruction wrought on Europe's vineyards will be far worse. Roots from New York State vineyards will be used to revive the European industry, and California's devastated vineyards will recover with help from European grape varieties grafted onto phylloxera-resistant American rootstocks (see 1876).
The Burbank potato developed by Massachusetts horticulturist Luther Burbank, 23, from a chance seedling is an improved variety that will come to be known as the Idaho potato (although it will also be widely grown in Washington State and Maine) and will eclipse such New England varieties as Green Mountain, Irish Cobbler, and Katahdin. It will provide Burbank with funds for developing not only new potato varieties but also new tomatoes, asparagus, sweet and field corn, peas, squash, apples, cherries, nectarines, peaches, quinces, ornamental flowers, and (most especially) plums, prunes, and berries (see 1875).
A tropical hurricane sweeps across Zanzibar, uprooting most of the island's full-grown clove trees (see 1818); less than 15 percent of the trees are undamaged. The island of Pemba is not touched and continues to export the spice, but Zanzibar's exports of cloves and clove oil will be minimal for the next decade (see 1955).
A strict Adulteration of Food, Drink and Drugs Act amends Britain's pure food laws of 1860, making sale of adulterated drugs punishable and making it an offense to sell a mixture containing ingredients added to increase weight or bulk without advising the consumer (chicory in coffee is a case in point) (see 1875).
British sugar consumption reaches 47 pounds per capita, up from 12 pounds per year in 1780.
Liverpool sugar-refinery head Henry Tate, 53, obtains a patent for an invention that he has been shown that cuts sugar loaves into small pieces for household use. He puts the device into production, and the fortune he will soon make from Tate's Cubed Sugar will go in part to found the University Library at Liverpool and the Tate Gallery, Millbank, London, that will open in 1897 to house his extensive art collection.
Porcelain rollers are installed in a new flour mill built at Glasgow, Scotland (see 1870; Minneapolis, 1874).
Pillsbury's Best XXXX Flour is introduced by C. A. Pillsbury Co. at Minneapolis (see 1871; 1878).
Armour & Company installs the world's largest chill room in a new plant at Chicago's Union Stock Yards (see 1865; 1869). Salt curing has been the chief way to keep perishable meats from spoiling, and meat processing has been a seasonal business, but Armour employs a new method that uses natural ice to maintain operations year round (see refrigerated railcars, 1869).
Japan's Meiji emperor Mutsuhito sets an example of "civilization and enlightenment" by eating beef, formerly taboo in Japan, and starts a fad for beef eating among his more affluent countrymen (see Townsend Harris, 1856). Shops open to sell beef, which is pot boiled and flavored with miso paste or soy sauce, but most Japanese cannot bear the smell of people who have eaten animal fats (they are called butakusai) and few can afford beef.
Britain's Parliament passes a Licensing Act that sets strict limits on the number and kinds of places where alcoholic beverages may be sold and the hours such places may be open in an effort to curb excessive drunkenness. Riots occur in some areas, the Liberal Party legislation rallies publicans and brewers to the Conservative party, and the unpopularity of the new law will help topple the Gladstone government in the general elections of 1874.
The Café de la Paix opens at Paris in the Grand Hotel on the Boulevard des Capucines with carved pillars and landscaped ceilings.
India's first census indicates that the country has a population of about 200 million. The late viceroy Lord Mayo conducted the census, whose numbers probably err on the low side by at least several million.
Mennonite farmers in the Crimea send four young men on a scouting expedition to America after learning that Czar Aleksandr II plans to cancel their exemption from military service, freedom of worship, and right to have their own schools and speak their German language—rights granted by Catherine the Great in 1783. The youths are from well-to-do families in the Molotschna (Milk River) district and are led by Bernard Warkentin, Jr., 23, a miller's son from the village of Tjerpenije. He establishes a base at Summerfield, Ill., near East St. Louis, where some Mennonite families have settled earlier, and attends a local college for a year to improve his English. After traveling with his colleagues through Pennsylvania and west to Wyoming, and from Texas through the Dakotas into Manitoba, Warkentin will write letters home persuading many of his countrymen to resettle, and while most will go to Manitoba because of liberal laws regarding military service many will settle in Kansas (see agriculture, 1874).
The Ebers papyrus discovered at Thebes contains an ancient Egyptian formula for a tampon medicated to prevent conception.
The new Comstock Law that censors distribution of "obscene" reading material also makes it a criminal offense to import, mail, or transport in U.S. interstate commerce "any article of medicine for the prevention of conception or for causing abortion" (see Mme. Restell, 1878).
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