1883: Information and Much More from Answers.com
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1881 1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889 1890
The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act passed by Congress January 16 provides for competitive examinations for positions in the federal government and establishes a Civil Service Commission to end the abuses that culminated in the assassination of President Garfield 2 years ago. Named for Sen. George H. Pendleton (D. Ohio), the act sharply reduces the number of federal appointees who get their jobs from elected officials under the "spoils system," it establishes a merit system for appointment and promotion based on competitive examinations, and Congress will expand the number of "classified" civil service workers employed on the basis of merit, with such workers protected from loss of job through change in political administration (see Tillman Act, 1907).
Former Confederate vice president Alexander H. Stephens takes office as governor of Georgia but dies at Atlanta March 4 at age 71, having worked since 1865 to promote the myth that the Civil War was fought not to protect slavery but rather to defend states' rights; former Maine governor and Republic Party cofounder Israel Washburn travels to Philadelphia for medical attention and dies there May 12 at age 69.
Russian statesman Aleksandr Prince Gorchakov dies at Baden-Baden March 11 at age 84, having retired only last year from his posts as foreign minister and chancellor.
Former Greek prime minister Aléxandros Koumondhouros dies at Athens in February at age 68, having pursued strongly anti-Turkish policies in his nine ministries; former Ottoman grand vizier Midhat dies at At-Taif, Arabia, May 8 at age 60, probably having been murdered; former grand vizier Mahmud Nedim dies at Constantinople May 14 at age 64 (approximate); Algeria's founder Abdul-Qadir (Abdulkader) dies at Damascus May 26 at age 74.
The convention of Marsa signed June 8 with the bey of Tunis assures French control of Tunisia.
Britain's new consul general at Cairo Sir Evelyn Baring, now 42, receives his appointment with plenipotentiary diplomatic rank to advise the khedive (see 1882). Given a mandate to carry out sweeping reforms in the now-bankrupt country with a view to evacuating British troops, Baring will effectively rule Egypt as viceroy until his retirement in 1907, encouraging public irrigation works, generally improving agriculture, and making the country financially solvent by 1887 under a form of government that will come to be called "the Veiled Protectorate" (see 1892).
The Mahdi (Muhammad Ahmad ibn as-Sayyid Abdullah), 39, challenges Egyptian control of the Sudan. The son of a Nubian shipbuilder in the Dongola district, he proclaimed his divine mission 2 years ago to cleanse Islam and the governments that defile it. Having set out from Aba Island with a few followers armed only with sticks and spears, he has captured booty that includes Krupp artillery and Remington rifles along with money, bullion, jewels, and military supplies. His forces ambush British general William Hicks, 53, and kill him November 4 along with almost every member of the 8,000-man British camel train. They wipe out the Egyptians November 5 at the Battle of El Obeid. The self-styled prophet gains control over Kordofan, the governors of Darfur and Bahr-el-Ghazal are obliged to surrender, and the Mahdi's lieutenants attack the Red Sea forts (see 1884).
Japanese statesman Tomomi Iwakura dies at Tokyo July 20 at age 57, having paved the way for a constitution that safeguarded the emperor's prerogative and resisted the idea of democratic rights.
Vietnam's fourth Nguyen dynasty emperor Tu Duc dies at his native Hue July 9 at age 53 after a troubled 35-year reign in which he has persecuted Christian missionaries and been forced to cede his three southern provinces to France. Tu Doc is succeeded by a son who will reign until 1889. A treaty signed at Hue August 25 recognizes Tonkin (north Vietnam), Annam (central Vietnam), and all of what the French call Cochinchina as French protectorates (see 1882), but China regards the territory as a vassal state, rejects the treaty, and continues to resist French control. Chinese Black Flag irregulars, Vietnamese, and French forces battle outside Hanoi September 3 in a bloody confrontation (see 1884).
The Treaty of Ancon October 20 ends the war between Chile, Peru, and Bolivia over the nitrate-rich Atacama Desert. Chile gains territory at Peru's expense (see 1879; 1884).
Kansas "Exoduster" Benjamin "Pap" Singleton founds what he calls the Chief League to encourage emigration of blacks to the Mediterranean island of Cyprus (see 1881). Now 74, he finds few willing to go, and in 1885 will organize the Trans-Atlantic Society to help blacks resettle in their ancestral African homelands, but this too will prove unsuccessful and Singleton will die at St. Louis in 1892 (see Garvey, 1913).
The U.S. Supreme Court rules 8 to 1 October 15 that the Fourteenth Amendment barred discriminatory action by the states, not by private individuals, and that two sections of the civil rights act of 1875 are therefore unconstitutional: blacks have filed suit under the 1875 law to protest their exclusion from a hotel room at Topeka, the ladies' car on a train, an opera house at New York, and the dress circle of an opera house at San Francisco, but the court says it is not unconstitutional to bar blacks from public accommodations, including hotels, restaurants, theaters, barbershops, and the like. Justice Joseph P. Bradley writes the majority opinion; Kentucky-born Justice John Marshall Harlan, 50, dissents, noting the public nature of inns and restaurants (see 1964; Ida B. Wells, 1884; Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896).
Alabama planter-newspaper publisher James T. Rapier dies at Montgomery May 11 at age 45, having served as a U.S. congressman during Reconstruction and worked thereafter to unite poor urban workers and rural sharecroppers; abolitionist Sojourner Truth dies at Battle Creek, Michigan, November 26 at age 86 (approximate).
Oregon newspaper publisher Abigail Duniway persuades the state legislature to approve a constitutional amendment providing for woman suffrage, but voters reject the measure (see 1872; 1896).
U.S. clergymen and liberals organize The Friends of the Indian and hold their first conference in the fall at the Mohonk Lake House in New York's Shawangunk Mountains. Indian Commissioner Albert K. Smiley, now 55, opened the inn to guests in 1870 and has convened the meeting. Jamesville, New York-born Philadelphia clergyman's wife Amelia Quinton (née Stone), 49, has petitioned Congress and the White House to honor treaties with Native Americans and demanded a new policy that would include legal equality, allotment of farm-sized land parcels to tribespeople, and education of their children (see Dawes Act, 1887). She begins a program of missionary work and education that next year will take her on her first trip to the West. The Mohonk conferences will continue each year until 1916, attracting attendees who will include Sen. Henry L. Dawes (R. Mass.), former president Rutherford B. Hayes, naturalist John Burroughs, politicians Theodore Roosevelt and James S. Sherman, and oilman John D. Rockefeller. They will broaden their discussions to include blacks and the inhabitants of U.S. dependencies, and although the participants have lofty principles their powerful influence will result in Indian children being taken from their families and placed in schools like the Carlisle Training and Industrial School established in 1879, whose purpose will be to rid them of their tribal customs, languages, and religion.
The Working Girls' Vacation Society founded by philanthropists at New York will lead to other such organizations.
The New Jersey legislature at Trenton adopts a law February 14 that legalizes labor unions, becoming the first state to do so.
Labor leader Ira Steward dies at Piano, Illinois, March 13 at age 52, having worked indefatigably to promote his philosophy that shorter hours develop leisure-time wants, which lead to demands for higher wages, which force the introduction of labor-saving machinery and improved techniques, which permit mass production, which requires mass purchasing power, which must be protected from decline by progressively shortening hours in accordance with an index of unemployment. His capable wife having died 5 years ago, Steward married his rich cousin Jane (Steward) Henning in 1880 and moved west, but he has remained president of both the Boston Eight-Hour League and the National Ten-Hour League. He leaves his unfinished notes to George Gunton, who will incorporate some of his ideas into a book of his own in 1887.
Socialist philosopher Karl Marx dies at London March 14 at age 64, 15 months after the death of his wife, Jenny (née von Westphalen), who was 4 years his senior and whose loss left him shattered. Having lived for years on bequests from relatives and financial support from Friedrich Engels, Marx is buried in Highgate Cemetery, where Engels delivers a eulogy in which he says that while Marx made two discoveries (the law of development of human history and the law of motion of bourgeois society) he was primarily a revolutionist, "the best-hated and most calumniated man of his time," yet "beloved, revered, and mourned by millions of revolutionary fellow-workers."
The League of Struggle for the Emancipation of Labor is founded in Switzerland by émigré political philosopher Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov, 26; it will make the first Marxist analysis of Russian society, economics, and politics and issue the first directives toward the creation of a Russian labor movement (see 1878; Lenin, 1895).
Russian revolutionary Vera Nikolaevna Figner is arrested and condemned to death (see 1881). The authorities commute her sentence, and she will spend 20 years in solitary confinement at the notorious Schlusselburg Prison on an island in the Neva River, writing poetry and memoirs (see 1917).
Japan's Asano zaibatsu (industrial combine) has its beginnings as former coal merchant Soichiro Asano, 35, acquires at no cost a government cement plant that is being transferred to private ownership. Asano developed methods 7 years ago for utilizing coke in cement production and has caught the eye of industrialist Eiichi Shibusawa, who makes the transfer of the plant possible. The Asano Cement Company will be the basis of an empire that will grow by 1929 (a year before Asano's death) to become Japan's fifth largest zaibatsu, with interests in shipping, shipbuilding, mining, gas and electricity, oil, iron and steel, and breweries (see 1947).
Workers building the Canadian Pacific Railway discover copper ore in the Sudbury Basin of northern Ontario (see 1882). Use of copper wire for electricity and telephone lines has created a huge demand for copper (see 1885).
Prospectors Andrew Prichard and Bill Keeler find gold nuggets and flakes near the north fork of the Coeur d'Alene River in Idaho's northern panhandle in August. Nearly 8,000 miners will have flocked to the area by next spring, and galena (sulfide of lead) will be found to the south next year (see human rights, 1891).
Pickands, Mather & Company is founded by Cleveland iron ore, coal, and pig-iron dealer Samuel Mather, 32, of the Cleveland Iron Ore Mining Company headed by his father, Samuel Livingstone Mather (see 1855).
Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company (PPG) is created by a reincorporation of the New York City Plate Glass Company. Ohio River steamboat-fleet operator Captain John Baptiste Ford has persuaded Scottish-born former Pennsylvania Railroad president John Pitcairn Jr., 42, that a site 20 miles north of Pittsburgh would be an ideal location for a glassworks, since soda ash is available from the Pennsylvania hills for melting purposes, the river bottom can provide sand for grinding, and local mines can produce cheap coal to power the grinders and polishers. By 1900 PPG will have 10 plants producing 65 percent of all the plate glass made in America and will be the second largest producer of paint (see 1896; Duplate, 1927).
Fire guts London's Harrods store December 6, but proprietor Charles Digby Harrod orders new stock and enjoys record Christmas sales (see 1861). Harrod employs 100 clerks, bookkeepers, packers, etc. and fines latecomers a penny-halfpenny for every 15 minutes they are late (see 1884).
Ediswan Company is founded by Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison (who has beaten Swan to obtain English patent rights to the incandescent bulb; see 1878; 1879). Swan has patented a process for squeezing nitrocellulose through holes to form fibers, creating a carbonized nitrocellulose filament that has advantages over Edison's carbon filament (see tungsten, 1913).
Maine-born shoe manufacturer Charles A. (Albert) Coffin, 38, and other Lynn, Massachusetts, investors form a syndicate that purchases control of the American Electric Company of New Britain, Connecticut, moves it to Lynn, and renames it the Thomson-Houston Electric Company (see 1879). Electrical engineer Elihu Thomson has discovered the alternating-current (AC) repulsion phenomenon and invented a transformer that steps down high-voltage alternating current, thereby laying the foundation for AC motors. His associate Edwin J. Houston will return next year to teaching, but Thomson's young assistant Edwin W. Rice will soon become plant superintendent, improve factory routine, and obtain more than 100 patents of his own in every area of electrical operations (see 1886; Tesla, 1888; General Electric, 1892).
German Edison Company is founded by German electro-technician Emil Rathenau, 45, and Oskar von Miller, now 28 (see Miller, 1882). The new firm will be renamed Allgemeine Elektricitäts Gesellschaft (AEG) in 1887 and Rathenau will head it.
George Westinghouse pioneers control systems for long-distance natural gas pipelines and for town gas-distribution networks (see 1882; 1885).
Peabody Coal Company has its beginnings in a small retail business started at Chicago with $100 in capital by Yale graduate Francis S. Peabody, 24, who will use his father's business connections and his own political skills to make the enterprise grow. He will buy out his partner and open his first coal mine in Williamson County, Illinois, in 1895 (see 1913).
John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Trust monopoly absorbs Tidewater Pipe. The trust takes the output of 20,000 wells and employs 100,000 people (see 1882; 1884).
Railroad builder-philanthropist Amasa Stone commits suicide at Cleveland May 11 at age 65, having brooded over accusations that he was responsible for the loss of life in the collapse of the Lake Shore & Michigan Central bridge in December 1876.
The Brooklyn Bridge (Great East River Bridge) opens to traffic May 24, linking America's two largest cities. President Arthur, Governor Cleveland, New York's mayor Edson, and Brooklyn's mayor Low officiate at the opening ceremonies, and Emily Roebling is the first person to cross the bridge, using a parasol to shade her from the sun (she has mastered mathematics and engineering to superintend the final phases of construction). "It so happens that the work which is likely to be our most durable monument, and which is likely to convey some knowledge of us to the most remote posterity, is a work of bare utility," writes Montgomery Schuyler in Harper's Weekly; "not a shrine, nor a fortress, not a palace, but a bridge." Designed by the late John A. Roebling (see 1869), financed in large part by the Brooklyn Trust Company, and built in 13 years at a cost of more than $16 million (and 20 lives), the 1,595.5-foot span has a steel web truss to keep it from swaying in the wind; it has been completed by Roebling's son Washington Augustus, now 45, who has been crippled, half-paralyzed, and made partially blind by caisson disease (the "bends") but observes the dedication ceremony from the bedroom window of his house on Columbia Heights and sees his wife, Emily, cross to Manhattan. The great bridge rises 276 feet into the air (only the spire of Trinity Church is higher); its overall length is 5,989 feet, its center span is 85 feet wide, each of its four main cables is 15¼ inches in diameter and contains 5,434 galvanized steel wires, each 3,515 feet long and able to sustain a load of 12,000 tons (there are 14,357 miles of wire overall); its 86-foot-wide surface accommodates two outer roadways for horse-drawn vehicles, two tracks for trains, and a center walk for foot traffic. Showman P. T. Barnum leads 21 of his elephants across the span on opening day to assure spectators of its safety (and publicize his circus), but a panic May 30 produces a stampede in which 12 pedestrians are trampled to death on the bridge's promenade.
The Brooklyn Elevated Railroad runs its first train September 24, bringing elevated railway service for the first time to America's second largest city.
The New York and Brooklyn Bridge Railway operates cable-powered trains between Manhattan's Park Row and Brooklyn's Sands Street, but cable cars will be involved in so many accidents that they will soon be given up as an unsuccessful experiment (see elevated trains, 1885).
The Northern Pacific Railroad is completed September 8 with a "last spike" ceremony at Gold Creek in Montana Territory after 13 years of work (see Villard, 1881). Former president Ulysses S. Grant and NP president Henry Villard attend the ceremonies, and while the northern tier of the United States lacks enough population to be admitted to the Union or to make the railroad profitable, the area will soon fill up with more people (see financial struggles, 1893; 1901).
Chicago meatpacker Philip D. Armour creates Armour Car Lines (see food, 1872). By the end of the century it will be operating 12,000 cars, the largest privately owned refrigerated-car fleet anywhere.
Australians complete a rail link between Sydney in New South Wales and Melbourne in Victoria.
Norwegians complete the Kristiania (Oslo)-Bergen railway across the Hardanger mountain range with nearly 60 miles of its track above the timber line. The new rail link ends the isolation of Bergen and brings it to within 8 hours of Norway's capital.
The Calais-Nice-Rome Express from Paris goes into service. The run to Nice takes 18 hours but will take only 14 by the end of the century.
The Express d'Orient (Orient Express) that leaves for Constantinople October 4 from the Gare de l'Est, Paris, is Europe's first transcontinental train (see Train Bleu, 1876). Designed for Georges Nagelmakers and his Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits et des Grand Express Européens, it has two sleeping cars, a smoking room, a ladies' boudoir, mosaic-floored bathrooms, red plush armchairs, oriental rugs, velvet draperies, mahogany paneling, a tapestry-lined restaurant car with an embossed leather ceiling, a baggage wagon containing a lavish kitchen, and a mail car. The restaurant car and both sleeping cars are fitted with newly invented four-wheel bogies and superior springing that give passengers a steady ride even around the sharpest bends at speeds of close to 50 miles per hour, but since no direct rail link to Constantinople has been completed, the new train goes only to the Bulgarian border south of Bucharest, where passengers are ferried across the Danube, taken by a less comfortable train to Varna on the Black Sea, and there put on a ship for Constantinople (see 1889).
U.S. railroads adopt standard time beginning at noon November 18 as telegraph lines transmit time signals to all major cities (see 1854; Greenwich Mean Time, 1880). Representatives of the major railroads have met at Chicago to eliminate more than 100 local time zones as a safety measure (many parts of the country have only one line of railroad track, and confusion over exact time has resulted in head-on locomotive collisions). There are four separate time zones—Eastern, Central, Rocky Mountain, and Pacific; Pacific Standard Time is 3 hours behind Eastern Standard Time.
Ferdinand de Lesseps of 1869 Suez fame begins work on a Panama Canal for the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interocéanique he has organized (see 1879). He has engaged thousands of men from Barbados and Jamaica to work on the project but has failed to appreciate the magnitude of the task. Malaria and yellow fever take a heavy toll on his engineers and workers, and the project is doomed to fail (see 1888).
Yuba City, California-born engineer John J. (Joseph) Montgomery, 25, builds a gull-winged glider and makes what some will call the first controlled flight by a human in a heavier-than-air craft August 28 (see 1906; Cayley, 1853; Lilienthal, 1889).
Aviation pioneer John Stringfellow dies at London December 13 at age 84. His erstwhile partner W. S. Henson emigrated to the United States with his family in 1848 and will survive until 1888.
An International Convention for the Protection of Industrial Properties signed at Paris March 20 is the first effort to ease multinational patent differences. It will be revised at Brussels in 1900, at Washington D.C., in 1911, at the Hague in 1925, at London in 1934, at Lisbon in 1958, and at Stockholm in 1967, providing inventors who file a patent application in one member country with the benefit of using that original filing date for applications in other member countries (see 1970).
A shoe-lasting machine patented March 20 by Dutch Guiana-born Lynn, Massachusetts, inventor Jan (Ernst) Matzeliger, 30, revolutionizes the U.S. footwear industry by permitting the upper portions of shoes to be shaped mechanically rather than by hand. He has worked alone at night for 6 months to produce a wooden model of his machine, which will supplant hand methods at Lynn by 1885.
The Maxim/Vickers gun invented by Maine-born London engineer Hiram S. (Stevens) Maxim, 43, is the first fully automatic machine gun. Maxim obtained his first patent (for a hair-curling iron) at age 26, went on to invent a device that generated illuminating gas, a locomotive headlight, and an electric pressure regulator that he exhibited 3 years go at Paris. His weapon is an advance over the 1861 Gatling gun in that the recoil energy of each bullet is employed to eject the spent cartridge, insert the new round, and fire it. The British Army will adopt it in 1889; it will be adopted thereafter by every other major army. Maxim Gun Company will be absorbed into Vickers' Sons and Maxim in 1896 (see Omdurman, 1898; Boer War, 1899; Armstrong-Vickers, 1927).
French chemist Hilaire Bernigaud, 44, comte de Chardonnet, demonstrates an artificial silk he has developed from nitrocellulose (see viscose rayon, 1892).
The Morgan mill patented by Rochester, New York-born mechanical engineer Charles H. (Hill) Morgan, 52, is a rolling mill that produces steel wire in continuous rolls. Morgan has studied wire making in England and put up an English rolling mill at Worcester, Massachusetts.
Open hearth steel-making pioneer Sir William Siemens dies at London November 18 at age 60, having helped also to develop the telegraph industry.
Science magazine begins publication February 9 with backing from Alexander Graham Bell and his father-in-law, Gardiner G. Hubbard (seeNature, 1869). The journal has 2,000 subscribers by year's end and will later become the organ of the 35-year-old American Association for the Advancement of Science (see National Geographic Society, 1888).
Assyriologist and numismatist François Lenormant dies at his native Paris December 9 at age 46, having recognized from cuneiform inscriptions a language that will come to be called Akkadian.
A German sickness insurance law enacted in May is the first of several moves by Prince Otto von Bismarck to lead the German people away from state socialism. Workers are to bear two-thirds of the cost of the insurance program, employers one third (see accident insurance law, 1884).
German pathologist Edwin Klebs, 49, describes the diphtheria bacillus Corynebacterium diphtheriae. F. A. J. Löffler at Berlin makes the same discovery independently (see Löffler, 1884).
London physiologist Victor (Alexander Haden) Horsley, 26, removes the thyroid glands of monkeys and establishes the role of the gland in determining the body's growth rate, development, and metabolism. His work implicates thyroid malfunction as the cause of myxedema and cretinism (see Gull, 1873).
The Contents of Children's Minds on Entering School by Massachusetts-born Johns Hopkins University psychologist Granville Stanley Hall, 39, inaugurates the field of child psychology.
Robert Koch develops a preventive inoculation against anthrax (see 1882).
Robert Koch identifies the bacillus that causes Asiatic cholera (see Ferran, 1881). A worldwide cholera pandemic begins that will kill millions in the next 11 years.
Lydia Pinkham dies at Lynn, Massachusetts, May 17 at age 64, less than 5 months after suffering a paralytic stroke, but letters bearing her "signature" continue to be sent to customers writing in for advice; physician James M. Sims dies at Washington, D.C., November 13 at age 70.
A dinner at Cincinnati July 11 celebrates the ordination of the Reform Jewish seminary's first class of rabbis (see Wise, 1866). Violating most Orthodox dietary laws (kashrut), the feast includes Little Neck clams on the half shell, soft shell crab and shrimp salad, beef fillet, and ice cream. Reform Judaism will gain adherents in America, and by the end of the next century will be the largest denomination of that faith.
The first direct telegraphic service between the United States and Brazil begins September 21.
Commercial Cable Company is founded by Comstock Lode millionaire John W. Mackay, now 52, and New York Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett, who challenge Jay Gould's monopoly in transatlantic cable communication. Mackay and Bennett will lay two submarine cables to Europe next year and break the Gould monopoly (see 1869; 1886).
Chemist and telegraphy pioneer Leonard D. Gale dies at Washington, D.C., October 22 at age 83, having helped the late Samuel F. B. Morse make his device work in the 1830s.
Thomas Edison pioneers the radio tube with a method for passing electricity from a filament to a plate of metal inside an incandescent light globe, and he patents the "Edison effect" (see Arnold, 1912).
German engineer Paul O. Gottlieb Nipkow, 26, pioneers television with a rotating scanning device that he calls the Nipkow Disk. It has small holes arranged on a spiral with a light source positioned behind it; when the disk is spun, light shining through the holes streak across a picture, one line of light per hole. The lights can be converted into electrical signals and transmitted to another Nipkow Disk, which can reconstruct the original picture on a photosensitive surface. The device can be used for sending copies of documents, but the disks have to be precisely synchronized and spun very rapidly, making for a system that easily becomes unstable (see Baird, 1926).
The Cutler Mail System patented by Rochester, New York, inventor J. G. Cutler calls for the installation of mail chutes in high-rise buildings so that tenants on upper floors can deposit letters for collection from ornate bronze boxes in lobbies, thereby saving time and effort. Various companies will license the system, and mail chutes will be used for more than century, despite their occasional tendency to jam, requiring local post offices to send out men with electricians' snakes to unjam them.
Joseph Pulitzer of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch acquires the New York World from Jay Gould (see 1878). The paper has a circulation of 15,000 and is losing $40,000 per year, but Pulitzer will raise its circulation to 345,000 and make the World profitable (see 1893; Hearst, 1896; Howard, 1931).
E. W. Scripps buys Cincinnati's Penny Post and will rename it the Cincinnati Post in 1890 (see 1878; UP, 1907).
Life magazine begins publication at New York in January. Local artist John Ames Mitchell, 38, has started the new humor magazine with Edward Sandford Martin, 27, who helped start the Harvard Lampoon in 1876; using cartoons and words Life will continue for more than half a century to satirize the times (see Gibson Girl, 1890; Luce, 1936).
Grit begins publication at Williamsport, Pa. The weekly for rural readers will grow to have a circulation of 5 million and continue into the 21st century.
The Ladies' Home Journal begins publication February 16 at Philadelphia under the name Ladies' Journal as a supplement to the 4-year-old Tribune and Farmer, which will go out of business in 1885. Maine-born publisher Cyrus H. K. (Herman Kotzschmar) Curtis, 32, offers cash prizes to readers who submit the most names of possible subscribers and lets his wife, Louisa (née Knapp), edit the magazine, which will begin independent publication next year and gain a circulation of more than 400,000 with help from a large advertising campaign (see Bok, 1889).
The rubber stamp patented February 27 by Philadelphia inventor William Purvis will come into use in offices worldwide. Purvis will obtain a patent in 1890 for making the fountain pen more durable, inexpensive, and more suitable for carrying in the pocket without leaking ink.
More than 3,000 Remington typewriters are sold, up from about 2,350 last year (see 1878). Sales will reach 5,000 per year by 1885 (see Underwood, 1895).
Nonfiction: Thus Spake Zarathustra (Also Sprach Zarathustra) by German philosopher and psychologist Friedrich (Wilhelm) Nietzsche, 39, appears in the first of its four parts and introduces the idea of the Superman (Ubermensch). Nietzsche maintains that Judaeo-Christian teachings have weakened the moral power of Western civilization. Nietzsche's theories will be influential on German thinking 30 years hence and—more especially—a half century hence; Dynamic Sociology by Illinois-born Hegelian sociologist Lester Frank Ward, 42, who has just been appointed geologist of the 4-year-old U.S. Geological Survey now headed by John Wesley Powell. He is critical of laissez-faire capitalism; Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain is a memoir of riverboat piloting and a critique published from the world's first typewritten book manuscript; "The Forgotten Man" by Yale political and social science professor William Graham Sumner, 43, extols the "clean, quiet, virtuous, domestic citizen, who pays his debts and his taxes and is never heard of out of his little circle . . . The Forgotten Man . . . delving away in patient industry, supporting his family, paying his taxes, casting his vote, supporting the Church and the school . . . He is the only one for whom there is no provision in the great scramble and the big divide. Such is the Forgotten Man: He works, he votes, generally he prays—but his chief business in life is to pay"; "All history is only one long story to this effect: men have struggled for power over their fellow-men in order that they might win the joys of earth at the expense of others, and might shift the burdens of life from their own shoulders upon those of others"; Ragnarōk: The Age of Fire and Gravel by Ignatius Donnelly, who claims that the Pleistocene Ice Age resulted from a collision between Earth and a comet (see Velikovsky, 1950).
Fiction: Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson is an adventure novel that includes Long John Silver's pirate song, "Fifteen men on a dead man's chest—/ Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!" (Long John is based in part on the author's close friend William Ernest Henley, now 33, who lost a foot to tuberculosis in the early 1870s.) Stevenson has returned to Scotland after traveling across the Atlantic in steerage, crossing America in an emigrant train to pursue Fanny Van de Graft Osbourne, a married woman 11 years his senior and mother of three. He met her 7 years ago at Fontainebleau, France, married her at San Francisco in 1880, and thereafter took her to a western mining town; The Story of a Country Town by Indiana-born Atchison, Kansas, newspaper publisher E. W. (Edgar Watson) Howe, 30, whose realistic novel of small-town Midwestern life wins critical praise from William Dean Howells.
Author-playwright Ivan Turgenev dies at Bougival, outside Paris, September 3 at age 64.
Poetry: Prometheus the Firegiver by Robert Seymour Bridges; Poems of Passion by Wisconsin-born poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox, 33, whose poem on solitude begins, "Laugh, and the world laughs with you;/ Weep, and you weep alone" (publishers originally rejected her book because of the "immorality" of some of its poems); The Old Swimmin' Hole and 'Leven More Poems by Indiana poet James Whitcomb Riley, 34, of the Indianapolis Journal, who includes his poem "When the Frost is on the Punkin!"
Poet Edward Fitzgerald dies at Merton, Norfolk, June 14 at age 74.
Painting: The Swimming Hole by Thomas Eakins; Wawayanda Valley by Jasper Francis Cropsey; Sunset Glow by George Innes; Dance at Bougival by Pierre-Auguste Renoir; Portrait of Young Woman in Black, Portrait of Mrs. Robert Simpson Cassatt, and Elsie Cassatt (the artist's niece) by Mary Cassatt. Gustave Doré dies at Paris January 23 at age 51; Edouard Manet of tertiary syphilis at Paris April 30 at age 51 following a long and painful bout with gangrene of the leg.
The Ferroni Circus goes up in flames at Berditschoft, Poland, January 13; the blaze leaves 430 dead, many of them children.
Theater: An Enemy of the People (En Folkefiende) by Henrik Ibsen 1/13 at Kristiania's (Oslo's) Kristiania Theater; The Tragedy of Man (Az ember tragédiája) by the late Hungarian playwright Imre Madách 9/21 at Budapest's Magyar Nemzeti Szinhaz (see 1861); Lucky Per's Journey (Lycko-Pers reja) by August Strindberg 12/22.
Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show 5/19 at Omaha, Nebraska, with riding, target shooting, and showmanship in an open-air spectacle that will be America's favorite entertainment of its kind for the next 20 years and continue for another 10, with performances at Chicago, Philadelphia, New York's Madison Square Garden, Staten Island, Paris, Munich, and elsewhere. Promoter William Frederick Cody, 37, is a former buffalo hunter and cavalry scout who received his nickname "Buffalo Bill" in 1869 from E. Z. C. "Ned Buntline" Judson (see 1844). Famous for having killed and scalped the Cheyenne leader Yellow Hand in a July 1876 duel, Cody features a wagon train being attacked by Indians but saved by Buffalo Bill, Pony Express riders, Mexican vaqueros, and a reenactment of the 1876 Battle of the Little Big Horn (see Annie Oakley, Sitting Bull, 1885).
Keith & Batchelder's Dime Museum opens at 585 Washington Street, Boston, where New Hampshire-born former circus promoters B. F. (Benjamin Franklin) Keith, 37, and George H. Batchelder have assembled a group of sideshow freaks to support themselves during the months the circus is not on tour. Keith covers the front of the three-story building with red and blue canvas twelve-sheets advertising Siamese twins, tattooed ladies, wild men of Borneo, sword swallowers, snake charmers, Circassian beauties, and the cow that allegedly kicked over the lantern to start the Chicago fire in 1871. Keith & Batchelder employ ticket seller Edward F. (Franklin) Albee, 26, to manage a second-floor vaudeville theater that opens at 10 in the morning and continues until 11 at night; acts include the Reed family troupe and New York song and dance comedians Joe Weber and Lew Fields (Shanfield), both 16, who go on eight times a day for $40 per week (see 1885).
Opera: Lakmé 4/14 at the Opéra-Comique, Paris, with music by Leo Delibes, libretto by Philippe (Emile François) Gille, 51, and Edmond Gondinet, 49. The Bell Song "De la fille du paria" in Act II receives special applause.
Composer Richard Wagner drops dead of a heart attack at Venice February 13 at age 69.
New York's Metropolitan Opera House opens 10/22 with a performance of the 1859 Gounod opera Faust sung in Italian with Christine Nilsson, 40, of Sweden as Marguerite. The 3,700-seat Met replaces the smaller Academy of Music that opened in Irving Place in 1854 and whose Old Guard have prevented the city's new millionaires from obtaining desirable boxes (see 1966). Marcella Sembrich makes her Metropolitan Opera debut 10/24—second night of the Met's first season—in the title role of the 1835 Donizetti opera Lucia di Lammermoor. She will be a regular at the Met from 1898 to 1909.
Composer Baron Friedrich von Flotow dies at Darmstadt January 24 at age 70.
First performances: The Accursed Huntsman (Le Chasseur Maudit) (symphonic poem) by César Franck 3/31 at Paris; "Kol Nidre" by German composer Max Bruch, 45 (who has arranged a traditional Hebrew melody for cello and orchestra) 10/20; España orchestral rhapsody by French composer (Alexis-) Emmanuel Chabrier, 42, 11/4 at Paris; Husitska (dramatic orchestral work) by Antonin Dvorák 11/18 at Prague's Bohemian Theater; Symphony No. 3 in F major by Johannes Brahms 12/2 at Vienna.
Broadway musical: Cordelia's Aspirations 11/5 at the Theatre-Comique, with Ned Harrigan and Tony Hart, songs by Harrigan and Hart that include "My Dad's Dinner Pail."
Hymns: "When the Mists Have Rolled Away" by Ira David Sankey, verses by Annie Herbert; "Till We Meet Again" ("God Be With You") by William Gould Tomer, verses by Jeremiah Eames Rankin.
Sportsman-journalist John Graham Chambers of 1867 Marquess of Queensberry boxing rules dies at London March 4 at age 40, having edited the weekly Land and Water since 1871.
William Renshaw wins in singles at Wimbledon, Richard Sears at Newport.
The New York Gothams baseball team holds the first Ladies' Day in professional ball June 16, allowing women into its ballpark at a reduced rate (see 1867). Spectators at public sporting events have been virtually all men up to now.
English Channel swimmer Captain Matthew Webb makes a desperate effort to recoup his fame and fortune (see 1875). Sailing for America with his wife, son, and 7-month-old daughter, he trains in the sea off Nantasket Beach, leaves his family on the coast, travels by rail to Niagara Falls in hopes of attracting a $10,000 gate from spectators, has himself rowed out to the middle of the river July 24, dives in, and is sucked under to his death at age 35. His body is found downstream a few days later.
Colorado silver king Horace Tabor's wife, Augusta, agrees to a divorce January 2 (see 1882). Now 53, Tabor is appointed to serve a 30-day term as U.S. senator, and President Arthur is among the guests March 1 when a Catholic priest performs a second marriage ceremony between Tabor and "Baby Doe" McCourt at Washington's Willard Hotel (the bride, now 28, wears a $7,000 gown and a $90,000 diamond necklace). The couple returns to Denver, where Tabor builds his wife a mansion graced with nude statuary and 100 peacocks. His Matchless mine produces more than $2,000 worth of silver per day (see commerce, 1893).
The most lavish party yet held in America is staged March 26 at the new $2 million, 58-room Gothic mansion of railroad magnate William Kissam Vanderbilt, now 34, on the northwest corner of New York's Fifth Avenue at 53rd Street (see 1875). The New York World estimates that his wife, Alva, now 29, has spent $155,730 for costumes, $11,000 for flowers, $4,000 for hired carriages, $4,000 for hairdressers, and $65,270 for catering, Champagne, music, and the like for 1,200 people to make the $250,000 fancy-dress ball a success. Ward McAllister has persuaded Mrs. Astor, now 52, to end her hostility toward the Vanderbilts, and she has deigned to call on Alva Vanderbilt in order to secure an invitation for her unmarried daughter Carrie (who next year will marry Orme Wilson Jr.).
The opening of New York's Metropolitan Opera House is a social event as much as a musical one. It has been built at the instigation of Alva Vanderbilt, who could not obtain one of the Academy's 18 boxes; the lower tier of boxes, or parterre, at the Met make up what will be called the "Diamond Horseshoe," with Box 6 reserved for Mrs. Vanderbilt and Box 7 for Mrs. Astor, who comes each evening (arriving at 9 o'clock, after the first act) except on the Monday in January when she gives her annual ball (see 1888).
Gold Flake cigarettes are introduced at London.
Moscow's Church of Christ the Saviour is dedicated on the bank of the Moscow River after 53 years of construction (it was originally planned in 1812 to commemorate Russia's victory over Napoleon). Rising 30 stories in height, the great cathedral is topped by a gigantic copper-covered onion-shaped cupola (see religion, 1931).
Washington's Pension building opens with a grand court enclosed by four levels of galleries and with eight massive 75-foot Corinthian columns to support its roof. Designed by General Montgomery C. Meigs to provide offices for the disbursement of pensions to war veterans and widows, the building has a court that will be the scene of at least seven presidential inaugural balls beginning in 1885.
The Stoughton house at Cambridge, Massachusetts, is completed to designs by Henry Hobson Richardson, who weighs 345 pounds, suffers from two hernias, both heavily trussed, and must be carried everywhere he goes.
Krakatoa in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra erupts August 27 in the greatest volcanic explosion since the eruption of Tambora in 1815. Although Tambora's explosion was twice as powerful, Krakatoa's is heard in Australia some 4 hours later. Krakatoa disgorges six cubic miles of rock and ash more than 20 miles into the stratosphere, the ash falls 10 days later at points more than 3,000 miles away, and the explosion creates waves that reach 33, 70, even 135 feet in height that move hundreds of miles per hour, wipe out 163 Indonesian villages, and submerge about 130 others, taking more than 36,000 lives. Thousands of ships are destroyed in the harbor of Batavia (later Jakarta), 94 miles from the epicenter, and even 2,000 miles away at Calcutta 9 hours later the waves swamp and sink many houseboats.
White and Cree hunters in Dakota Territory discover a herd of 10,000 buffalo (bison) on the Cannon Ball River and exterminate the animals (see 1875; 1893).
The Annisquam Cotton Mill at Rockport, Massachusetts, goes up in flames December 9, throwing 240 people out of work. Among them is the plant's overseer Slade Gorton, now 51, who occupies himself by catching cod and mackeral that his (second) wife, Margaret Ann, salts, smokes, and serves to the unmarried mill hands who occupy the company houses she has been managing (see 1868). Gorton's sons Nathaniel and Thomas have taken jobs at the Gloucester fish plant he opened 15 years ago, and they will soon persuade him to advertise the company's boneless codfish, which will be marketed in one-pound black-and-white wooden boxes (see codfish cake, 1899).
Drought strikes the northern plains states. Railroad builder James J. Hill is pushing his Great Northern track along the 49th parallel across the plains and urges diversified farming. He buys 600 purebred bulls, distributes them among the farmers in the region, and offers prizes for the best cattle produced.
Sheboygan, Wisconsin, foundry owner John Michael Kohler takes a hog scalder/cattle watering trough from his line, heats it to 1,700° F., sprinkles it with enamel powder, adds legs to it, and sells it to a farmer for use as a bathtub large enough to hold a cow or 14 chickens and rid them of parasites (see 1873). Kohler will expand to making toilets and other bathroom fixtures, establishing a company that his son Walter will take over (see everyday life [built-in bathtub], 1911).
The Liverpool Corn Trade Association authorizes trading of grain futures, permitting purchase and sale of contracts for grain to be delivered months later (see Chicago, 1865; hedging, 1879). Grain traders can reduce their risks through arbitrage—selling grain at a profit for future delivery at the same time that they buy it from farmers.
Purdue University chemistry professor Harvey W. (Washington) Wiley, 39, gains appointment as chief of the Division of Chemistry in the U.S. Department of Agriculture (see "Poison Squad," 1902).
Some 40,000 tons of Jurgens Dutch margarine are shipped to Britain, which imports most of her margarine and butter (see 1871). Such imports increase to about 120,000 tons, up from 60,000 to 70,000 in 1873, with the margarine going mostly to poor, working-class Britons, who cannot begin to afford high-priced butter (see 1899).
Claus Spreckels of San Francisco gains a monopoly on West Coast sugar refining and marketing (see 1868; 1880). He has obtained a large concession of land in the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands to keep his big refinery supplied with cane and also uses some sugar beets, having established sugar-beet farms near Salinas (see politics, 1891).
Oscar Mayer wieners have their beginnings in a Chicago retail shop opened to sell fresh and cured meats. German-born butcher Oscar F. Mayer, 23, has been in America since 1873 and in Chicago since 1876; he operates the North Side shop in Sedgewick Street in partnership with his brother Gottfried, who has apprenticed in the art of sausage-making and ham curing in Bavaria, and his brother Max. Young Oscar will put his name on his meats, and by 1904 he will have eight salesmen selling his sausages to grocers throughout Chicago and elsewhere in northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin (see 1929).
English-born inventor William Horlick, 37, produces the first "malted milk" (he will coin the term in 1886) at Racine, Wisconsin. He has combined dried whole milk with extract of wheat and malted barley in powder and tablet form, and his "diastoid" is the first whole dried milk that will keep (see evaporated milk, 1885).
Copenhagen's Carlsberg Brewery introduces the first absolutely pure brewers' yeast culture. Carlsberg's owner Carl Jacobsen has backed Danish biochemist Emil Christian Hansen, 41, in his experiments to free yeast from bacteria. Yeast propagated from a single selected cell will eliminate brewing failures, a fact recognized by Schlitz Brewery head William J. Uihlein at Milwaukee (see 1874). He obtains a pure yeast culture from Copenhagen.
B. H. Kroger Company has its beginnings in a Cincinnati grocery store opened by local grocery salesman Bernard H. Kroger, 23, whose 17-foot front store is called the Great Western Tea Company. He has put up $372 in capital, a partner has put up $350, and Kroger buys out the partner by year's end for $1,550. He will have four stores by mid-1885, and his company will grow to have more than 1,250 stores in 20 states.
Monte Carlo's Grand Hotel engages Swiss manager César Ritz, 33, and he soon hires Georges Auguste Escoffier, now 37, as chef (see Savoy, 1889).
The Northern Pacific Railroad sends agents to the British Isles to encourage immigration to the U.S. Northwest (see Santa Fe, 1874).
James J. Hill sends agents to Scandinavia to encourage immigration to the territory that will be served by his Great Northern Railway.
The Southern Immigration Association is founded to encourage European immigration to the U.S. South.
The United States has her peak year of immigration from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and China (see Exclusion Act, 1882).
German-born New York entrepreneur Julius Schmid, 18, begins making condoms, using the tissue of lamb ceca that he has been using to make "goldbeater" capping shins for bottles of perfume and other volatile liquids. A cripple who came to New York 2 years ago from Scherndorf, Schmid is arrested by order of Anthony Comstock but is quickly released and promptly goes back into business, competing with the relatively low-priced rubber condoms that have been available in America since the 1850s and he himself will switch to the manufacture of "rubbers," using aliases and advertising his products as "rubber goods" for "gents. 25¢ each" and "married women's friends." But even if washed and reused the condoms are too costly for working-class people, and because their reliability is suspect they must be tested first by inflating them with air or water. Most women find them unacceptable because of their known associations with prostitution and disease prevention (see Youngs, 1920).
1881 1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889 1890
Archaeology
The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh by English archaeologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie [b. Charlton, England, June 3, 1853, d. Jerusalem, Palestine, July 28, 1942] reveals for the first time the precision with which the Great Pyramid is aligned, only a little more than a twelfth of a degree away from a perfect north-south alignment. See also 2575 bce Construction; 1887 Archaeology.
Louis Julien, a French chemist, discovers the first of the so-called Venus figurines at the Grimaldi site, a cliff in Italy near Monaco overlooking the Mediterranean. The 15 figurines he finds are of women with exaggerated sexual features and sometimes pregnant and have been dated from 18,000 to 25,000 years ago.
Biology
The last known quagga, a close relative of or subspecies of the plains zebra of Africa, dies in the Amsterdam zoo.
Camillo Golgi discovers "Golgi cells," a type of cell in the nervous system. See also 1873 Biology; 1906 Biology.
Max Rubner [b. Munich, Germany, June 2, 1854, d. Berlin, April 27, 1932] notes that metabolic rate is proportional to the surface area of an animal's body.
Animal Intelligence by George John Romanes [b. Kingston, Canada, May 19, 1848, d. Oxford, England, May 23, 1894] is the first book on comparative psychology. See also 1898 Biology.
Chemistry
Johann Gustav Kjeldahl [b. Jagerpris, Denmark, August 16, 1883, d. Tisvildeleje, Denmark, July 18, 1900] develops a simple way to analyze the nitrogen content of organic compounds. See also 1850 Food & agriculture.
Communication
George Francis Fitzgerald [b. Dublin, Ireland, August 3, 1851, d. Dublin, February 21, 1901] points out that Maxwell's theory of electromagnetic waves indicates that such waves can be generated by periodically varying an electric current. Later Hertz will demonstrate that this is true. Radio waves continue to be generated this way today. See also 1866 Communication; 1884 Communication. (See biography.)
The International Convention for patents, signed on March 20, is ratified and goes into effect in July 1884. It will be subsequently revised and extended on June 2, 1911, and November 6, 1925. The most important provision is that if a patent is granted in one member country, subsequent patents in other countries are granted as of the date of the first patent.
Construction
The ten-story Home Insurance Building is started in Chicago, Illinois. Designed by William Le Baron Jenney [b. Fairhaven, Massachusetts, September 25, 1832, d. Los Angeles, California, June 15, 1907] with a combination cast-iron and steel skeleton covered by a brick exterior, it is the first major use of steel in an office building. It is also the first tall building that has many windows, possible because the skeleton supports the structure. See also 1879 Construction;1889 Construction.
Washington Augustus Roebling [b. Saxonburg, Pennsylvania, May 26, 1837, d. Trenton, New Jersey, July 21, 1926] completes his father's design of the Brooklyn Bridge, although from 1872 on he is confined to his apartment as a result of caisson disease. His wife Emily Warren Roebling [b. Cold Spring, New York, September 23, 1843, d. 1903] acts as an intermediary, learning mathematics and engineering so that she can oversee construction. The completed bridge has a main span of 486 m (1595 ft) and is dedicated on May 24. See also 1869 Construction; 1931 Construction.
Earth science
Krakatoa, a volcanic island between Java and Sumatra, explodes on August 27, sending waves around the world and killing nearly 40,000 people. See also 1815 Earth science; 1980 Earth science.
Accepting an 1879 report from meteorologist and astronomer Cleveland Abbe, the United States sets up four time zones based on zones previously developed by the railroad industry. See also 1891 Earth science.
Energy
Stuart Perry [b. Newport, New York, November 2, 1814, d. February 9, 1890] introduces the first steel-bladed windmill. See also 1854 Energy; 1927 Energy.
Lucien Gaulard [b. Paris, 1850, d. November 26, 1888] of France and John Dixon Gibbs of England together introduce an induction coil system used as an electric transformer. The coils are arranged in a series circuit. See also 1879 Energy; 1885 Energy.
Materials
Metallurgist Robert Abbott Hadfield [b. Sheffield, England, November 29, 1858, knighted 1908, d. London, September 30, 1940] patents manganese steel, a superhard alloy that is the first of the specialty alloy steels. See also 1855 Materials; 1888 Materials.
Polish physicist Zygmunt Florenty von Wroblewski [b. Grodno (Belarus), October 28, 1845, d. Krakow (Poland), April 19, 1888] becomes the first to liquefy hydrogen. See also 1877 Materials.
Mathematics
Vito Volterra [b. Ancona (Italy), May 3, 1860, d. Rome, October 11, 1940] founds functional analysis, a generalization of problems seeking functions (as in differential equations or the calculus of variations) in which, as it has developed, functions are treated as operators in abstract spaces that transform one set of points into another.
Georg Cantor's Foundations of a General Manifold Theory claims that every set can be made into a well-ordered set, the proof of which, supplied by Ernst Friedrich Ferdinand Zermelo [b. Berlin, July 27, 1871, d. Freiburg, Germany, May 21, 1953] in 1904, requires the controversial axiom of choice: In a well-ordered set, every subset has one member that can be identified as the first member for that subset. See also 1874 Mathematics; 1904 Mathematics.
Medicine & health
Sir Victor Alexander Horsley [b. London, April 14, 1857, d. Amara, Turkey, July 1916] studies growth disorders and shows some that are caused by lack of thyroid secretion. See also 1818 Medicine & health.
Robert Koch discovers Cholera vibrio, the bacterium that causes cholera in humans, and shows that cholera can be transmitted by food and drinking water. See also 1854 Medicine & health; 1892 Medicine & health.
Sydney Ringer [b. Norwich, England, 1835, d. Lastingham, Yorkshire, October 14, 1910] discovers that an isolated frog heart kept in a saline solution will beat longer if calcium and potassium are added to the solution. The combination is known today as Ringer's solution. Ringer also finds that other activities of cells require calcium.
Francis Galton's Enquiries into Human Faculty introduces the term eugenics and suggests that human beings can be improved by selective breeding.
Physics
Edison discovers the "Edison effect," the basic principle of the vacuum tube. Edison is attempting to keep his incandescent electric bulb from turning black from carbon deposits on the glass. He introduces a metal plate into the partial vacuum inside the lamp, hoping it will draw off carbon particles. This concept does not succeed, but Edison observes that the hot lamp filament induces a current in the metal plate. Although he patents a voltage regulator based on the effect, and publicizes it, not enough it known at this time to make a useful device from it. Others will apply it in creating the first vacuum tubes after the electron is discovered. See also 1904 Energy.
Osborne Reynolds [b. Belfast, Ireland, August 23, 1842, d. Watchet, Somerset, England, February 21, 1912] introduces the concept of critical velocity of a fluid; that is, the velocity at which the motion changes from laminar flow to turbulent flow. This work introduces the "Reynolds number" to physics.
Transportation
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky [b. Izheskaye, Russia, September 17, 1857, d. Kaluga, Soviet Union (Russia), September 19, 1935] defines his principle of rocket motion, stating that it is possible to travel through the vacuum of space with rockets. See also 1881 Transportation; 1895 Transportation.
Inventor Gottlieb Wilhelm Daimler [b. Schorndorf, Germany, March 17, 1834, d. Kannstatt, Württemberg, Germany, March 6, 1900] develops the first of his high-speed internal combustion engines and uses it on a boat, the first true motorboat. See also 1877 Transportation; 1909 Transportation.