1874: Information and Much More from Answers.com
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Britain's first Gladstone ministry ends February 17 as the Tories regain power. A second Disraeli ministry begins February 21 and will continue until 1880.
Spain's president Emilia Castelar y Ripoli is defeated in the Cortes (National Assembly) January 3 and forced to resign, ending the first Spanish republic. General Manuel Pavía y Rodríguez de Alburquerque, 46, uses force to dissolve the cortes in a coup d'état designed to block a return of more radical republicans to power, and he summons former prime minister Francisco Serrano y Domínguez to head a new government. Alfonso XII, now 17, declares a constitutional monarchy November 24 and issues a manifesto from England's Sandhurst military school December 1 in response to a birthday greeting from his followers, who include generals disillusioned with the republic (see 1873). General Arsenio Martínez Campos, 43, issues a pronunciamento December 29 restoring the Bourbon monarchy. No Alfonso has ever reigned over a united Spain, but Alfonso XII, son of the deposed queen Isabella II, proclaims himself the sole representative of the Spanish monarchy and begins a reign that will continue until his death in 1885. The fourth Carlist pretender, Carlos María de los Dolores de Borbón y Austria-este, duque de Madrid (Don Carlos), now 26, flees the country, as does Francisco Serrano y Domínguez (who will not recognize Alfonso until 1881), and Martínez Campos takes command of Alfonso's forces (see 1876).
The Hawaiian king Lanalilo dies February 3 at age 39. His political opponent David Kalakaua, 37, wins election to succeed him and will reign until his death in 1891.
Lyme, Connecticut-born lawyer-politician Morrison R. (Remick) Waite, 57, wins unanimous Senate confirmation January 21 as chief justice of the Supreme Court to succeed the late Salmon P. Chase. Waite has had no judicial experience, has never argued a case before the high court, but served ably as a counsel in the Alabama proceedings at Geneva and will preside over the court until his death in 1888.
Former U.S. diplomat Nicholas P. Trist dies at Alexandria, Virginia, February 11 at age 73; former president Millard Fillmore at Buffalo, New York, March 8 at age 74; Sen. Charles Sumner (R. Mass.) of a heart attack at Washington, D.C., March 11 at age 63.
President Grant appoints former solicitor general Benjamin H. Bristow secretary of the treasury July 3, and Bristow will effect drastic reforms in the department (see 1873; Whiskey Ring breakup, 1875).
A Cuban revolutionary tribunal deposes President Carlos de Céspedes in absentia (he has been criticized for his ambivalence on the slavery issue), and he is forced into hiding (see 1873). Spanish troops discover the rebellion leader and shoot him at San Lorenzo on or about March 22 at age 54, but the insurrection that started in 1868 continues (see 1876).
British troops under Sir Garnet Joseph Wolseley enter the Ashanti capital Kumasi (Coomassie) February 4, ending the second Ashanti War (see 1826). Now 41, Wolseley lost an eye at Sevastopol in 1855, served in the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, and commanded an expedition to put down the Red River Rebellion in Canada 4 years ago. He sets Kumasi afire before withdrawing, but hostilities will continue (see 1896).
Britain annexes the Fiji Islands in the Pacific.
Japanese leader Issei Maebara helps to suppress a great rebellion at Saga led by his former associate Eto Shimpei (but see 1876).
Japanese troops invade Taiwan in July despite opposition from officials who include Takayoshi Kido, who resigns in protest (see Korea, 1873). Tokyo excuses the invasion by citing the deaths of 54 Okinawan seamen who were killed in 1871 after a shipwreck. The Japanese send delegates to China to assure the Chinese that no offense is intended, but they reassert claims to Okinawa (see 1873) and agree to recall the expedition from Taiwan in October only after China agrees to pay an indemnity and recognize Japan's right to Okinawa. Takayoshi Kido resumes office (see 1895; Korea, 1876).
Local feminists organize the Dublin Women's Suffrage Society, but the suffrage movement will be slow to spread in Ireland.
The 29-year-old Comanche chief Quanah Parker forges an alliance with the Kiowa and Cheyenne to rid the Texas bison range of white hunters. Illinois-born hunter William Barclay "Bat" Masterson, 20, joins an expedition that penetrates Indian-held lands and sets up camp near an abandoned trading post called Adobe Walls; Parker attacks the camp with 200 warriors, but the Cheyenne, Comanche, and Kiowa bullets cannot penetrate the earthen walls of the sodhouses, rifles fired by the 28 men and one woman inside take a deadly toll of attackers, and Parker retires after 2 hours to seek easier targets (see crime [Masterson], 1878). Colonel Ranald S. (Slidell) Mackenzie, now 35, of the U.S. 4th Cavalry captures and destroys Quanah Parker's herd of 1,400 horses in the fall. Called "Bad Hand" by the Comanche, the New York-born Mackenzie was promoted to the rank of major general before he was 25, sustained battle wounds in three encounters, and lost some fingers as a result (see Parker, 1875).
Nashville-born cabinet maker Benjamin "Pap" Singleton, 65, helps lead a migration of "Exodusters" from the cotton states westward to Kansas. Sold into slavery several times in his youth, he always managed to escape and helped others to do likewise; he has tried to help blacks buy farmland in Tennessee, whites refused to sell at reasonable prices, and in the next 5 years some 50,000 sharecroppers will respond to his appeal, moving to the colony that Singleton and his partner Columbus Johnson establish against the wishes of whites, who patrol rivers and roads to prevent blacks from leaving (see 1881).
Federal troops at New Orleans put down a revolt by the White League against the black state government September 17.
Former anti-slavery activist David Lee Child dies at Wayland, Massachusetts, September 18 at age 80. His widow, Lydia, will survive until 1880.
A race riot at Vicksburg, Mississippi, December 7 leaves some 75 blacks dead and many injured.
American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals founder Henry Bergh receives an appeal in the spring from New York charity worker Etta Angel Wheeler to help rescue a little girl wandering naked through a city slum after being beaten, slashed, and turned out by her drunken foster mother. Bergh decides that the child deserves shelter as much as an animal, the 8-year-old American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) prosecutes the foster mother for starving and abusing the 9-year-old girl, and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (ASPCC) is organized.
Reformer-philanthropist Gerrit Smith dies at New York December 28 at age 77.
Journalist-explorer Henry M. Stanley, now 33, sets out in late November from Zanzibar to cross the African continent from east to west with three European aides and more than 340 natives, hoping to find the sources of the Nile and Congo rivers (see 1871). Some of his bearers have been supplied by the king of Zanzibar and arrive in chains, but Stanley does not ask questions. By Christmas he has crossed the desert, endured temperatures as high as 140° F., and slogged through torrential downpours, his weight has dropped from 180 pounds to 134 as food supplies dwindled, and he writes to his teen-aged U.S. fiancée, heiress Alice Pike, "The camp is in the extreme of misery and the people appear as if they were making up their minds to commit suicide or to sit still inert until death relieves them" (see 1875).
The U.S. economic recession that began last year continues, leaving tens of thousands of city dwellers without means of support. German-born socialists hold a mass meeting of workers in New York's Tompkins Square January 13 to bring public attention to widespread poverty following last year's Wall Street collapse; a small force of mounted police headed by Commissioner Abram Duryée charges the crowd and drives it from the square, capturing its flags; hundreds are injured, some of them severely, and although no one is killed the incident will be remembered as the Tompkins Square "Massacre."
Massachusetts enacts the first effective 10-hour day law for women and children May 8. The Bureau of Labor Statistics created 4 years ago has been largely responsible for passage of the measure (see Supreme Court decision, 1908).
Elements of Pure Economics (Eléments d'économique politique pure) (first volume) by Lausanne economist Léon Walras, now 39, assumes "a regime of perfectly free competition" and applies techniques used for treating systems of simultaneous equations to construct a mathematical model in which productive factors, products, and prices automatically adjust themselves in an economic equilbrium (see Walras, 1865); his final volume will appear in 1874, giving one of the first comprehensive mathematical analyses of general economic equilibrium.
A silver prospector strikes it rich at Oro City (Leadville) in Colorado Territory, where the placer gold found in 1859 has long since been exhausted. Metallurgist A. B. Wood recognizes silver-lead ores in material that gold miners have regarded merely as obstructions to their sluices. Active prospecting will begin in the spring of 1877 at Oro City, 10,152 feet high in the Rocky Mountains, and it will be renamed Leadville in 1878 (see 1879; Tabor, 1878).
New York merchants L. Straus & Sons open a china department in Macy's basement in March and within a few months advertise that they have the "most extensive assortment" of its kind ever displayed in America—majolica, plates, saucers, tureens, glassware of every size and shape, cut-glass vases, and the like (see 1873). R. H. Macy follows Margaret Getchell LaForge's suggestion and displays its doll collection in the world's first Christmas windows, beginning a tradition that other stores will follow (see 1877).
London's Liverpool Street Station opens February 2 on a site once occupied by the city's Bethlehem (Bedlam) Hospital. Built for Great Eastern Railway, it has 10 platforms.
Sen. William Windom, 47, (R. Minn.) heads a committee that proposes a government-built, government-operated double-track freight line between the Mississippi Valley and the eastern seaboard that will prevent railroad companies from charging exorbitant freight rates (see 1877; farmers, 1873).
A patent on a "water closet for railway cars" is issued February 10 to Chelsea, Massachusetts-born inventor Lewis H. (Howard) Latimer, 25, whose father was a slave who fled to Boston from Virginia in the 1830s. Young Latimer joined the Union Navy at age 16, returned to Boston in 1865, and has learned mechanical drawing while employed as a draftsman by the patent attorney firm Crosby and Gould (see communications [telephone], 1876; energy [carbon filament for incandescent bulb], 1881).
Pennsylvania Railroad president J. Edgar Thomson dies at Philadelphia May 27 at age 66, having built a network of lines connecting Philadelphia with cities as distant as Norfolk, Virginia, and Chicago (he leaves his estate in trust to fund the St. John's Orphanage, the income to be used for the education and maintenance of young women whose fathers were killed while working on any railroad); inventor and former Reading Railroad president Asa Whitney dies at Philadelphia June 4 at age 82.
The first bridge to span the Mississippi at St. Louis is tested July 2 by seven 50-ton locomotives loaded with coal and water that chug slowly across from one bank while another seven chug across from the opposite bank, pausing at the slender junctures of the three cantilevered arches on the steel arch Eads Bridge (see 1867). Some 300,000 residents and visitors crowd the levee to witness the collapse of "Eads's Folly" but the bridge holds all 700 tons. The crowd cheers, a 3-day celebration ensues with parades, band concerts, and speeches culminating in a $10,000 fireworks display, and the Eads Bridge opens to traffic July 4 with a 100-gun salvo. The world's first steel bridge and the first to have such long arches (its central span is 520 feet long), it has cost $9 million (and the lives of 13 divers). Its construction has required the work of some 2,000 men, and its success will lead to the ascendancy of rail transportation over steamboat transportation in the Mississippi Valley.
The Southern Pacific Railroad reaches Anaheim outside Los Angeles, providing a link to the 5-year-old transcontinental rail line and enabling local farmers to sell their oranges, walnuts, and other produce to markets nationwide. Collis P. Huntington hopes to extend the line along a coastal route through part of the 110,000-acre Irvine Ranch (see 1864), but Huntington by some accounts antagonized James Irvine at San Francisco in 1849, allegedly by cheating at a small-stakes poker game. Irvine refuses to negotiate, and Huntington files suit in federal court. He argues that part of the ranch's boundaries remain under federal domain, but the court will rule in Irvine's favor 4 years hence (see 1888; agriculture, 1878).
Belgian-born U.S. inventor Charles Joseph Van Depoele, 28, demonstrates the practicality of electric traction (see trolley, 1885).
New York City gets its first electric streetcar. Invented by Stockbridge, Mass.-born engineer Stephen Dudley Field, 28, it is the first car anywhere to be run successfully with current generated by a stationary dynamo: one wheel picks up current carried by one of the rails. Conveyed to the car's motor, it flows back to the other rail via a second wheel, insulated from the first, and is returned to the dynamo, but the system is hazardous and presents no immediate threat to the horsecar (see 1888).
The first chain-driven bicycle has two medium-sized wheels of equal diameter. Designed by H. J. Lawson with a chain-driven rear wheel, it is easier to mount and steer than the high front-wheeled "penny-farthing" introduced by James Starley 4 years ago, has a decided advantage in terms of stability over what will be called an "ordinary," and is safer (see 1885; Starley, 1876).
German physicist F. W. G. (Friedrich Wilhelm Georg) Kohlrausch, 33, demonstrates that an electrolyte has an amount of electrical resistance that is both definite and constant (see Hittorf, 1869). A professor at the University of Darmstadt, he shows that by observing the dependence of conductivity upon dilution he can determine the transfer velocities of the ions (charged atoms or molecules) in solution.
Dutch-born physical chemist Jacobus Henricus van't Hoff, 22, and French chemist Joseph-Achille Le Bel, 27, announce a concept that helps explain the property of optical rotation and will prove basic to the study of stereochemistry—the three-dimensional structure of organic compounds (see Wislicenus, 1873). Chemical formulas up to now have been written on paper in two dimensions, but Hoff and Le Bel note that carbon can comprise four different chemical compounds directed to the corners of a tetrahedron; these four different atoms are linked to a carbon atom, they exist in two forms, and the mirror images of these atoms or groups cannot be superimposed: either pair will be dissymetric and therefore optically active. It will later be found that all molecules are three-dimensional arrangements of atoms bonded to each other, that a carbon atom is often bonded to four other atoms (or groups of atoms) and that these other atoms are as far apart from each other as possible at the corners of a tetrahedron, with the carbon atom in the center. If two or more of the other atoms in a carbon molecule are the same, then the molecule is symmetrical—identical in all respects with its mirror image (simple molecules such as ethyl alcohol, carbon tetrachloride, and methane are symmetric); but many larger molecules, such as sugars, are asymmetrical, meaning that they have four different kinds of atoms, and their solutions are optically active, meaning that they rotate the plane of polarized light (as observed with a polarimeter or polariscope), their mirror images are not found in nature, but if they are synthesized from inorganic materials (or from organic materials that are not optically active), the result is a "racemic mixture"—a 50-50 mixture of right-handed and left-handed molecules (see Bijvoet, 1946).
Irish physicist George Johnstone Stoney, 48, uses knowledge gained from his studies of molecular physics and the kinetic theory of gases to estimate the number of molecules in a volume of gas under pressure. Having an erroneous idea of the number of atoms in a gram of hydrogen; his result is not correct, but his method is sound and he introduces the term electron for the fundamental unit of electricity (see Thomson, 1897).
German physicist Moritz H. Jacobi dies at St. Petersburg March 10 at age 72, having made significant contributions to the understanding of electricity; Physicist Anders J. Angstrom dies at Uppsala June 21 at age 59. He has been the first to use the 10-10 meter as a unit to measure wavelengths of light, and it will be named the angstrom in 1905.
Norwegian physician Arrnauer Gerhard Henrik Hansen, 33, discovers the leprosy bacillus (the term bacillus will not be introduced until 1875). The disease will hereafter properly be called Hansen's disease (see 1246; Father Damien, 1873).
"Investigations of the Vegetal Forms of Coccobacteria septica" ("Untersuchungen über die Vegetationsformen von Coccobacteria septica") by surgeon Theodor Billroth at Vienna is a pioneer study of the bacterial causes of wound fever.
U.S. physicians continue as they will until the end of the century to obtain medical diplomas after as little as 4 months' attendance at schools that often have no laboratories, no dissection facilities, and no clinical training.
The Baltimore Eye & Ear Dispensary is founded by physicians who include local ophthalmologist Samuel Theobald, 28, who has introduced the use of boric acid for treating eye infections.
East Orange, New Jersey, inventors Robert Wood Johnson, 29, and George J. Seabury pioneer improved surgical dressings; they succeed in manufacturing an adhesive and medicated plaster with a rubber base (see 1885).
Chicago's Free Religious Society hears an address May 3 from agnostic lawyer and orator Robert Green Ingersoll, now 40, who praises individualists who think for themselves. In "Heretics and Heresies," he condemns churches and other institutions that condemn free thinkers. Clergymen inveigh against Ingersoll, but he will attract huge audiences for his lectures on "a religion of humanity" that would venerate only "inquiry, investigation, and thought."
Constantinople's 1,337-year-old mosque Hagia Sophia installs calligraphy disks bearing the name of Allah and that of the caliph Abu Bakr.
The London School Board grants degrees to women for the first time after agitation by reformers who include Board member Emily Davies, mistress of Girton College at Cambridge.
Japan's Ministry of Education founds a teachers' school for women in Tokyo's Ochanomizu (the word means "water for tea") district but has trouble finding girls who are qualified, or willing, to be teachers (only 80 students apply for 100 places, and only 15 will be in the first graduating class of 1878, because teaching is considered a suitable occupation only for unattractive girls from families without means). Ochanomizu Women's College, opened in March, will become a liberal-arts college under that name in 1949.
About 33 percent of school-age Japanese girls are in elementary school as compared with 54 percent of school-age boys (see 1873).
The U.S. public high school system wins support from the Supreme Court, which rules against Kalamazoo property owners who had filed suit to prevent collection of additional taxes. The court upholds the city's right to establish a high school and to levy taxes to support it.
The Chautauqua movement in U.S. education has its beginnings in a summer training program for Sunday School teachers started at Fair Point on Lake Chautauqua, New York, by clergyman John Heyl Vincent, 42, and Akron, Ohio, farm machinery maker Lewis Miller, 44: they begin an institution 10 miles from Lake Erie that will develop into a traveling tent show of lecturers, bringing culture to small-town America. President Grant's appearance at Chautauqua next year will lend prestige to the movement, more than 100,000 people will sign up for home-study correspondence courses by 1877, the Chautauqua Normal School of Languages will start in 1879, and the Chautauqua Press will list 93 titles by 1885 by which time there will be Chautauquas in more than 30 states (see music [Damrosch], 1909).
Cornell University cofounder Ezra Cornell dies at Ithaca, New York, December 9 at age 67.
The Remington typewriter introduced by E. Remington & Sons Fire Arms Company begins a revolution in written communication. Philo Remington, now 68, took over his late father's company in 1871 (see technology, 1845), set up a new company in 1865 to make farm equipment, and has acquired sole rights to the Sholes typewriter for $12,000 (see 1873), but the $125 price of the Remington typewriter is more than a month's rent for many substantial business firms, Remington produces only eight machines, and business letters continue for the most part to be hand written (see 1876).
Elisha Gray of Western Electric Company tries in April to patent a musical telegraph consisting of a two-tone transmitter that contains two single-pole elecromagnets, each with a vibrating armature (see 1872). Each armature makes and breaks contact with a platinum one that switches the current to the coil on and off; since each electromagnet exerts a different magnetic pull on its armature, each armature vibrates at a different frequency. A telegraph key controls each coil-and-armature combination, so each frequency can be sent either separately or simultaneously (see telephone, 1875).
Ohio-born New York inventor Thomas Alva Edison, 27, obtains a patent for a quadruplex telegraph system that permits the same line to be used simultaneously for sending and receiving two signals in each direction, thus doubling the capacity of a duplex system devised 3 years ago by U.S. inventor J. B. Stearns, who had refined a system devised by German inventor Wilhelm Gintl.
French engineer Jean-(Maurice)-Emile Baudot, 29, receives a patent for a binary telegraphic code that will come to replace the Morse Code of 1837. Each letter of the Roman alphabet (and each punctuation mark) is represented by a five-unit combination of current-on/current-off signals, each of equal duration, and the resulting 32 permutations permit a telegrapher to control his machine's mechanical functions far more efficiently than the system of short dots and long dashes employed in the Morse Code. The correct transmitter and receiver must be connected at the same time, and the first Baudot systems will employ manual transmission, but perforated tape will soon be used instead (see Baudot, 1894).
Yomiuri Shimbun begins publication at Osaka.
The Oakland Tribune begins publication at the California city, where George Sanford and Benet A. Dewes put out a four-page paper whose pages measure only six by 10 inches each. Dewes and a later partner will sell the sheet in 1876 to William E. Dargie, who will be publisher until his death in 1911, widening the Tribune's scope to give it international coverage.
The November 7 issue of Harper's Weekly carries a cartoon by Thomas Nast that introduces the elephant as a symbol for the Republican Party (see donkey, 1870).
Nonfiction: The Principles of Science by economist-logician William Stanley Jevons, who attacks the late John Stuart Mill's inductive logic and proposes alternatives; Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte) by University of Würzburg philosophy professor Franz (Clemens) Brentano, 36, a nephew of the late poet Clemens Brentano; Fossil Horses in America by paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh; Encyclopaedia of Wit and Wisdom by humorist Josh Billings, who says, "It is better to know nothing than to know what ain't so."
Historian Jules Michelet dies at Hyères February 9 at age 75, his idealism and illusions about Germany having been shattered by the Franco-Prussian War.
Fiction: Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy; Phineas Redux by Anthony Trollope; "Nedda" by Sicilian short-story writer Giovanni Verga, 34, who pioneers the Italian version of naturalism that will be called verismo; Die Messalinen Wiens by German novelist Leopold von Sacher Masoch, 38, from whose name the word masochism will be derived (see "sadism," 1791).
Poetry: Romances sans paroles by French poet Paul Verlaine, 30, who in 1871 left his wife after 18 months of marriage to live with the poet Arthur Rimbaud, now 20. Verlaine was encouraged and influenced by Rimbaud, but in July of last year shot Rimbaud in the wrist during a lovers' quarrel and is serving a 2-year prison sentence; Une saison en enfer by Arthur Rimbaud, who has had his hopes dashed for a new, amoral society and for writing an unconventional new kind of poetry. Rimbaud will go into business as a North African merchant and trader, amassing a fortune before his death in 1891; Ode by English poet Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy: "We are the musicmakers,/ And we are the dreamers of dreams."
Juvenile: Two Little Wooden Shoes by Ouida, who settles at Florence, where she will live for the next 20 years.
Painting: Mme. Boursier and Her Daughter by Berthe Morisot, now 33, who marries Edouard Manet's brother and joins the French Impressionists. The Salon has rejected their work and they hold their first exhibition April 15 on the Boulevard des Capuchins at Paris in an independent show of canvases which include a harbor scene entitled Impression: Sunrise and The Studio Boat by Claude Monet, now 40, who receives support from art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, now 42. Monet's work prompts art critic Louis Leroy to call the painters "impressionists," an epithet that will soon lose its pejorative overtone although initial reactions to the works are mostly derisive. The group includes Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, now 44, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley; Quarry near Pontoise by Camille Pissarro; La Loge (The Theater Box) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir; Homer and His Guide by William Bouguereau; Calling the Roll after an Engagement, Crimea by English painter Elizabeth Thompson, 24; Cliffs of Green River by Thomas Moran; Boys in a Pasture by Winslow Homer; John Biglin in a Single Scull, The Schreiber Brothers, and Benjamin Howard Rand by Thomas Eakins.
English photochemist William B. (Blanchard) Bolton, 26, shows that nitrates (by-products of the formation of silver halide and nitrate) can be washed out of photographic emulsions through a process that will be used hereafter in developing (see 1864; Maddox, 1871; Seed, 1879).
Theater: Libussa by the late Franz Grillparzer 1/21 at Vienna's Burgtheater; The Two Orphans (Les Deux orphelins) by French playwright Adolphe D'Emery, 62, 1/29 at Paris; The Shaughraun by Dion Boucicault 11/14 at Wallach's Theater, New York.
Opera: Boris Godunov 1/24 at St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Theater, with music by Russian composer Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky, 34, libretto from the Aleksandr Pushkin play of 1831; Die Fledermaus (The Bat) 4/5 at Vienna's Theater-an-der-Wien, with music by Johann Strauss.
First performances: Overture to the Piccolomini (Max and Thekta) by French composer (Paul Marie Theodore) Vincent d'Indy, 22, 1/25 at Paris; Patrie Overture in C minor by Georges Bizet 2/15 at Paris; Requiem by Giuseppe Verdi 5/22 at Milan's Church of San Marco. Verdi has written the work to memorialize the late poet-novelist-patriot Alessandro Manzoni.
Lawn tennis is patented under the name Spharistike (Greek for playing ball) by British sportsman Walter Clopton Wingfield, 41, who has codified rules for a game played indoors for at least 5 centuries (see 1532). Introduced in Bermuda, the new game quickly moves to the United States, but more vigorous sportsmen dismiss it as suitable only for ladies.
The Royal Quebec Golf Club is founded (see Montreal, 1873). The Toronto and Niagara (Ont.) clubs will be founded in 1876, the Brantford (Ont.) club in 1879.
The first real football game held May 14 at Boston is a variation of rugby (see 1823; Princeton vs. Rutgers, 1869). McGill University has come to play Harvard with only 11 of its 15 players, Harvard players opt for the 11-man team. Players are permitted to run with the ball as well as kick it (Columbia, Princeton, Rutgers, and Yale continue to play by the old soccer rules). Harvard wins the "Boston Game." A second match is held May 15, a third played at Montreal October 22 ends with Harvard winning 3 to 0. The Canadians revert to 15 men on a side upon their return (see 1912), but scrimmage lines and "downs" will not be introduced until the 1880s (see Harvard-Yale game, 1875).
The Siamese twins Chang and Eng die at Mount Airy, North Carolina, the night of January 16 at age 62, having sired 19 children between them.
Jennie Jerome is married April 15 at the British Embassy in Paris to Lord Randolph Henry Churchill, 24, third son of the 7th duke of Marlborough and newly elected member of Parliament. Wall Street speculator Leonard Jerome is the father of the beautiful, 20-year-old, dark-eyed bride, and although he has suffered financial reverses he provides the couple with an income of £3,000 per year; the duke (who does not attend the ceremony) has had to sell off family treasures but pays Lord Randolph's debts of £2,000 and raises his allowance to £1,100 per year, Lord Randolph makes his maiden speech in the House of Commons May 22, and Jennie gives birth November 30 to a son, Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (see 1895).
New York's Madison Square Garden opens in April under the name Barnum's Hippodrome at the north end of the city's 38-year-old Madison Square Park on Fifth Avenue. Showman P. T. Barnum has taken over a shed used until 1871 as a freight depot for the New York and Harlem Railroad. He has spent $35,000 to remodel the roofless structure and will sell his lease in the winter to Patrick S. Gilmore. who will rename it Gilmore's Garden and will use it for flower shows, policemen's balls, America's first beauty contest, religious and temperance meetings, and the first Westminster Kennel Club Show, while Barnum will pitch his circus tent at Gilmore's Garden each spring (see 1879; Gilmore, 1863; Barnum, 1871; Westminster, 1877).
U.S. inventor William Baldwin improves the steam radiator by screwing short lengths of one-inch pipe into a cast-iron base, but mass production of cast-iron radiators will not come for another 20 years and central heating of U.S. homes and offices not until the turn of the century.
First National Bank of Morrison, Illinois, thwarts prospective robbers May 26 by letting Rochester, New York, inventor James Sargent of Sargent & Greenleaf install the world's first time lock to its vaulted door. A former sales agent for Yale & Greenleaf Lock, Sargent devised the first successful key-changeable combination lock, went into partnership with his onetime employer Halbert Greenleaf 9 years ago, and last year used parts from other locks and two 8-day kitchen clocks to create the time lock (see time combination lock, 1880).
Texas gunman John Wesley Hardin celebrates his 22nd birthday May 26 and is confronted by Brown County Sheriff Charles Webb, who says he comes in peace. Hardin, drunk, turns toward the bar, Webb starts to draw, a bystander shouts a warning, Hardin whirls and fires before Webb's gun is out, and the sheriff falls. Hardin has killed about 20 men but never stood trial. He will be captured at Pensacola, Florida, in 1877 and charged with killing Webb. Convicted of second-degree murder, he will serve 17 years of a 25-year sentence at hard labor before winning parole (see 1895).
The dome of Boston's Massachusetts State House is covered in gold leaf 13 years after its first gilding.
Cast-iron construction pioneer James Bogardus dies at New York April 13 at age 74.
The Philadelphia Zoo opens on the West Bank of the Schuylkill River where its 42-acre grounds encompass the 15-acre estate of John Penn, a grandson of the Pennyslvania Colony's founder William Penn, and John's elegant 90-year-old manor house Solitude.
Turkey red wheat arrives in America with German-speaking Mennonites from Russia's Crimea (see population, 1872). The Santa Fe Railroad has brought the Mennonites to Kansas, where the road has been granted 3 million acres of land along its right of way and needs farmers who will occupy the land and produce crops that will generate freight revenue. Santa Fe official Carl R. Schmidt went to Russia last year and brought over a Mennonite delegation to see possible sites for settlement. He has obtained passage of a law in the Kansas legislature giving exemption from military service to those who oppose war on religious grounds, has offered free passage to Kansas plus free transport of furniture, and set up temporary living quarters. The first Mennonites arrive August 16 at Hillsboro in Marion County. The 163 pioneers from 34 families pay in gold to buy 8,000 acres from the Santa Fe. They found the village of Gnadenau. A second group of 600 follows, then a third group of 1,100, and by fall the Mennonites are arriving by the thousands, each family bringing its hard, drought-resistant, and high-yielding Turkey Red seed wheat obtained originally from Turkey and planted in the Crimea for years (see 1895).
The first Peavey grain elevator goes up at Sioux City, Iowa, where farm-equipment dealer Frank H. Peavey has heard customers complain of having no permanent market for their grain (see 1870). Peavey and his original partners were nearly wiped out by a fire in 1871, the 6,000-bushel "blind horse" elevator erected with a new partner is powered literally by a blind horse walking in an endless circle while towing a post atttached to an axle at the center of a circle. The facility saves farmers from having to haul wagonloads of grain back to the farm because they could find no buyer in town, and it will be followed by warehouses that Peavey will build with partner J. S. Meckling along the Dakota Southern Railway between Sioux City and Yankton, South Dakota. Peavey will persuade Minneapolis flour mills that he can provide a steady supply of wheat, and he will pioneer in the mass buying and selling of grain (see 1884).
The Appleby harvester is introduced by John F. Appleby, who organizes the Appleby Reaper Works at Mazomanie, Wisconsin, while continuing to work on developing an automatic binder (see binder, 1872; knotting device, 1878).
The first shipment of Montana cattle for eastern markets arrives at the railhead at Ogden in Utah Territory, where cattleman James Forges has driven it from the Sun River range of Conrad Kohrs.
A decade of drought begins on part of the western U.S. cattle range while other parts enjoy plenty of rain (see 1886).
George Perkins Marsh prepares a paper on the feasibility of irrigating western lands at the request of the U.S. commissioner of agriculture (see environment, 1864). Irrigation projects are possible, writes Marsh, if they are undertaken on a river-basin scale after thorough hydrological surveys "under Government supervision, from Government sources of supply" (see Powell, 1878).
British farm wages fall, farm workers strike in the east of England, and an agricultural recession begins that will lead to an exodus of farm workers into the growing mill towns. British agriculture has been undercut by foreign producers of grain and meat and begins a long decline.
New York restaurateur Lorenzo Delmonico supervises the preparation of free meals for the hungry as economic recession continues in the city; he reports that in one city ward alone 71,892 persons were fed between February 18 and April 7.
A Minneapolis flour mill opened by C. C. Washburn employs fluted chilled steel rollers in addition to conventional millstones (see 1866). Washburn has made a fortune in Wisconsin land speculation and served as governor of Wisconsin (see 1879; Pillsbury, 1878; Gold Medal Flour, 1880).
New technology improves food canning—a drop press introduced by Allen Taylor and a pressure-cooking "retort" either by A. K. Shriver or Baltimore canner Isaac Solomon (see 1861). Live steam keeps the outside walls of the can under pressures comparable to those exerted by the heating contents of the can, thus speeding up the cooking of the contents without permitting the can to buckle or burst as it cools because of any buildup in pressure during the heating process. The retort gives canners accurate control of cooling temperatures and will lead to a large-scale expansion of the industry (see Howe floater, 1876).
Margarine is introduced into the United States (see 1881).
Condensed milk pioneer Gail Borden dies at Borden, Texas (named for him), January 11 at age 72. He campaigned in recent years for sanitary dairying practices, and his son John Gail continues that effort, devoting his time to educating dairy farmers in how to produce better—and cleaner—milk (see 1866; 1875). Borden has selected a gravesite in New York's Woodlawn Cemetery and his tombstone is engraved with the words, "I tried and failed, I tried again and again and succeeded."
Several dozen milk companies open in Japan, and cows' milk begins to gain some popularity among the Japanese (see Townsend Harris, 1856).
Bovril has its beginnings in Johnston's Fluid Beef, produced commercially at Sherbrooke, Quebec, by former Edinburgh butcher John Lawson Johnston, 38, who by some accounts has won a contract from the French government to supply canned meat for stocking forts against the kind of emergency that produced starvation 3 years ago in the Franco-Prussian War. His product gains quick popularity, and production will be moved in 1880 to Montreal (see Britain, 1886).
The ice cream soda is invented at the 50th anniversary celebration of Philadelphia's Franklin Institute. Robert N. Green demonstrates a soda fountain, possibly using the invention of James W. Tufts's Arctic Soda Water device, which spurts out seven varieties of beverages and 16 different kinds of syrups. When he runs out of cream after making $6 per day selling a mixture of syrup, sweet cream, and carbonated water, he substitutes vanilla ice cream and by the time the exhibition ends is averaging more than $600 per day.
Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company is incorporated at Milwaukee with a capitalization of $200,000 (see 1856). Schlitz himself will drown next year at age 44 on a voyage to his native Germany, but his four nephews—Alfred, August, Henry, and Edward Uihlein—will keep management of the company in family hands for more than a century.
The first brut champagne is created by Mme. Pommery of the Pommery Champagne house at Reims, who produces an extremely dry sparkling wine.
The Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) is founded at Cleveland, where 135 women meet November 18 at the Second Presbyterian Church and dedicate themselves to ending the traffic in liquor (see National Prohibition Party, 1869). Bands of women have appeared in cities throughout the year to sing and pray in the street and in saloons against the "evil" of drink, Northwestern University dean Frances Willard, now 35, has joined one such group at Pittsburgh and delivered her first public prayer kneeling on the sawdust-covered floor of a Market Street saloon (see Anti-Saloon League, 1895).
U.S. postal inspectors seize more than 60,000 "rubber articles" and 3,000 boxes of pills under terms of the 1872 Comstock Law.
The first Hutterite immigrants to America arrive at New York from Europe (see 1528). A group speaking Tyrolean Hutterische dialect founds the Bonhomme colony at Yankton, South Dakota, and it will be followed by 200 colonies in the Dakotas, Minnesota, Montana, Washington, and the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan; the Hutterites now number 20,000.
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