1900: Information and Much More from Answers.com
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1891 1892 1893 1894 1895 1896 1897 1898 1899 1900
V. I. Lenin returns from exile January 29 after 3 years in Siberia with his wife and mother-in-law (see 1895). He sets up residence at Pskov while awaiting the release of his wife from Ufa, and on July 16 emigrates to Switzerland to begin a 5-year exile. In December, Lenin becomes an editor of the newspaper Iskra (the Spark) published at Munich for distribution in Russia, taking its name from an 1825 poem by an exile in Siberia who said, "The spark will kindle a flame!" (see 1903).
Former Ottoman war minister Osman Nuri dies at Constantinople April 14 at age 67 and is memorialized as the hero of the 1877 Battle of Plevna.
The entire Serbian cabinet resigns in protest when the 24-year-old king Aleksandr announces his intention to marry his mistress Draga Masin (née Lunjevica). The widow of a Bohemian engineer, she was formerly a lady in waiting to the king's mother, is 10 years older than Aleksandr, and has a shady reputation, but Aleksandr defies the objections of his father and other political advisers. The scandal will force the king to grant a more liberal constitution next year and to create a senate as a second house in the legislature (see 1903).
The German Reichstag approves a Second Fleet Act that is more ambitious than the 1898 act. Initiated by Admiral von Tirpitz (he is ennobled this year and awarded the Order of the Black Eagle), it calls for construction by 1917 of two modern flagships, 36 battleships, 11 large cruisers, and 34 small cruisers. Britain responds by initiating a naval construction program of her own (seeDreadnought, 1906).
French naval officer François-Ferdinand-Philippe-Louis-Marie d'Orléans, prince de Joinville, dies at Paris June 16 at age 81, having played a prominent role in modernizing the French Navy.
Italy's Umberto I is assassinated by an anarchist at Monza July 29 at age 56. He is succeeded after a 22-year reign by his 30-year-old son, who will reign until 1946 as Victor Emmanuel III.
German socialist leader Wilhelm Liebnecht dies at Berlin August 7 at age 74, having cofounded the German Social Democratic Party.
Former Spanish general and political leader Arsenio Campos Martínez dies at Zarauz September 23 at age 68.
Britain's "Khaki" election October 16 results in a victory for the Conservatives, who retain power under the marquess of Salisbury, now 70.
The British government takes direct control January 1 of the Royal Niger Company's territories, having revoked the charter granted to Sir George Goldie's company in 1886. Sir George has negotiated with the French and German governments to settle the boundaries of Britain's sphere of influence, but it has been decided that a private company is less able than government ministers to deal in international matters; the company's territory and the adjacent Niger Coast Protectorate are reorganized as Northern and Southern Nigeria.
The Boer War continues in South Africa, where General Frederick Sleigh Roberts (Bobs Bahadur), now 67, arrives January 10 to succeed Sir Redvers Buller as commander-in-chief, with Lord Kitchener as his chief of staff. Buller retains command of an army, but it is cavalry commander John (Denton Pinkstone) French, 47, who relieves Kimberley February 15 after a 4-month Boer siege in which Lieut. Col. Robert Kekewich has had 596 regulars, 352 Cape Police, and 3,658 volunteers to hold off 4,000 to 5,000 Boers (the Boers have had about 12 guns, including one Creusot 155 mm. heavy gun; the British six field guns, one improvised heavy gun, and six machine guns). Roberts surrounds the Boer leader Piet Arnoldus Conje near Paardeberg and forces him to surrender February 27 after he has run out of food and ammunition, General Buller relieves Ladysmith February 28 after nearly 4 months of siege in which the British have lost 894 killed and wounded, the Boers an estimated 1,600 killed and wounded. Bloemfontein falls to Roberts March 13, Boer politician Petrus Joubert dies at Pretoria March 27 at age 69, and Mafeking is finally relieved May 17 after a 215-day siege in which Colonel Robert S. S. Baden-Powell has resisted a far superior Boer force, sustaining 212 killed and wounded while killing more than 500 of the enemy and wounding many more (see Boy Scouts, 1908).
Johannesburg falls to Gen. Roberts May 31, he and Gen. Buller take Pretoria June 5, Boer general Jacobus (Hercules) de la Rey, 53, takes full charge of operations in the Transvaal July 1 and supervises guerrilla tactics, Roberts and Buller join forces at Vlakfontein July 4, Roberts defeats Boer commandos at Bergendal August 27, Britain annexes the Orange Free State and the Transvaal (they become the Orange River Colony and the Transvaal Colony), President Kruger flees to Delagoa Bay and voyages to Europe in hopes of obtaining German support, but Kaiser Wilhelm II denies the aged Kruger an audience October 6. Gen. Roberts hands over his command to Lord Kitchener in November and next year will be created first earl Roberts of Kandahar, Pretoria, and Waterford as the Boers continue guerrilla warfare in their efforts to drive out the British (see 1901).
Russia annexes Manchuria May 21; Russian forces occupy southern Manchuria in the fall.
A "Boxer Rebellion" rocks China beginning June 20 as foreign legations at Beijing (Peking) are besieged by members of a 20,000-man militia force who have murdered the German minister to Beijing with encouragement from an anti-foreigner clique at the Manchu court led by the dowager empress Cixi (Tzu Hsi), now 66, who has effectively ruled China for 39 years (see 1895). Numbering perhaps 4 million, the Boxers massacre missionaries throughout the country, calling them "foreign devils" who are trying to destroy the nation's native culture and religion. Churches are burned, women and children beheaded. An eight-nation expeditionary force that includes Bengalis, Welsh fusiliers, Germans, Italians, Russians, and Americans enters Beijing August 14, lifting the 55-day siege of the legations, but at least 231 foreign civilians, most of them missionaries, are killed in various parts of China, and Russian troops retaliate for mid-July Chinese bombardments across the Amur River by driving thousands of civilians to their death in the river. The dowager empress escapes from Beijing (see 1901; Japanese, 1904).
U.S. troops in the Philippines employ brutal measures to suppress the rebellion that began last year, some 60,000 U.S. troops are in the islands by summer to fight what they call "gooks," the War Department demands two additional divisions, but many Americans decry what they view as U.S. imperialism (see 1899). Massachusetts-born Gen. Arthur MacArthur, 55, U.S. military governor in the Philippines, grants an amnesty to Filipino rebels June 21 as the foreign war becomes an election campaign issue.
Queen Victoria gives assent July 9 to the Commonwealth of Australia Bill, but she is old and ailing (see 1901).
Puerto Rico becomes a U.S. territory under terms of the Foraker Act, which replaces the island's military government with a civil administration (see 1899; Jones Act, 1917).
U.S. Republicans assemble in convention at Philadelphia and nominate President McKinley for reelection, Theodore Roosevelt of New York is selected as his running mate, and the two campaign on a platform of "Prosperity at Home, Prestige Abroad," using "the full dinner pail" as their slogan. William Jennings Bryan and former vice president Adlai E. Stevenson oppose them, criticizing the war in the Philippines as "immoral" and calling McKinley a tool of the moneyed interests. Bryan campaigns vigorously, making six to 12 speeches per day as he criss-crosses the country, but Roosevelt is just as vigorous and McKinley receives a plurality of nearly a million popular votes. The Democratic ticket wins 155 electoral votes versus 292 for the Republicans as Americans vote their pocketbooks, but thousands of workers cast their ballots for Socialist Party candidate Eugene V. Debs.
Lord Kitchener places some 120,000 Boer women and children in concentration camps, where 20,000 will die of disease and neglect (see Cuba, 1896; Germany, 1933).
Chicago's Everleigh Club opens February 1 at 2131-33 South Dearborn Street in the city's infamous First Ward. Entrepreneur Minna Everleigh, 23, and her sister Ada, 21, have adopted pseudonyms, used the inheritance of $40,000 that each received upon the death of their late father (a Kentucky lawyer), bought a bordello, and refurbished it with 12 elaborate, soundproof reception rooms, furnished with tapestries, carpeting, solid gold spitoons, silver wine goblets, and a gold piano. The Everleigh sisters encourage the young women employed in their establishment to read books from its 1,000-volume library, discuss theater and other elevated subjects with their clients, and remember that one $50 client is worth more than 10 $5 clients ("saves wear and tear"). The "club" soon develops a worldwide reputation. Visitors require letters of introduction; they are entertained by string quartets and other divertissements (see 1911).
Kansas City has 147 bawdy houses, the most elegant being that of Annie Chambers. Her $100,000 mansion is graced with a larger-than-life portrait of Annie dressed in a swirl of roses and gauze but little else.
Storyville in New Orleans has more than two dozen ornate Basin Street "sporting palaces" in two blocks set aside 3 years ago under a plan devised by alderman Sidney Story. Mahogany Hall is the most elaborate establishment—a four-story marble mansion at 235 Basin Street built for $40,000 and operated by famed madam Lulu White, with five lavish parlors and 15 bedrooms, each having mirrors at the head and foot of its bed. White, who calls herself the "Queen of the Demi-Monde," is so powerful that the city's tax assessors value her mansion with its furnishings at a mere $300 and she is never arrested. Poorer prostitutes operate out of "cribs" behind the "palaces" (see 1917).
Explorer Alexandre de Serpa Pinto dies at Lisbon December 28 at age 54. He was appointed consul general to Zanzibar in 1887 and governor general of Mozambique 2 years later.
The Gold Standard Act approved by Congress March 14 establishes the gold dollar of 25.8 grains, nine-tenths fine, as the standard unit of money in the United States. Congress authorizes national banks to sell 2 percent "consols."
Carnegie Steel is incorporated March 24 in a consolidation of various steel properties controlled by Andrew Carnegie (see Homestead strike, 1892; U.S. Steel, 1901).
Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company has its beginnings in the Youngstown Iron Sheet and Tube Company founded at the eastern Ohio city November 23 "for the purpose of manufacturing and selling sheet iron and steel and other iron and steel products." The word iron will be deleted from the corporate name in 1905, when the company begins construction of a Bessemer steel mill, and Youngstown Sheet and Tube will continue for more than 76 years to be a major employer in the Mahoning River Valley, with a payroll as high as 7,000 people.
Fewer than one-third of Britons live at or near the poverty line, down from about 85 percent in 1800 and earlier. Enormous inequalities of wealth and income persist, but the Industrial Revolution has worked to reduce them.
The Exposition Universelle that opens at Paris attracts 57 million visitors, including 75,000 Americans, with dazzling displays of electric lights (more lights than have ever been seen in one place and a novelty for many fairgoers), multicolored water fountains, linotype machines, moving sidewalks, escalators, and other wonders. Africans, Filipinos, and other natives are exhibited to show the contrast between "backward" nations and "progressive" ones.
The National Consumers League has its beginnings in the Consumers League for Fair Labor Standards founded by New York social worker Florence Kelley, 41, who last year joined the Henry Street Settlement after 8 years at Chicago's Hull-House (see 1893; Addams, 1889; New York Consumers League, 1890). Conscientious consumers, says Kelley, will not want to buy goods made in substandard factories, or by child labor, or finished in tenements. She is joined by Josephine Goldmark and others in a campaign against child labor and tenement sweatshops. The League will work for minimum wage laws, shorter hours, improved working conditions, occupational safety, better conditions for migrant farm labor, and consumer protection in the form of pure food and drug laws.
The International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union is founded June 3 by cloakmakers who meet in a small hall on New York's Lower East Side (see 1890). The union's seven locals represent 2,310 workers in New York, Newark, Philadelphia, and Baltimore; their normal work week is 70 hours; and many must work even longer. By 1904 the ILGWU will have 5,400 members in 66 locals in 27 cities (see 1909) strike, and by 1913 it will be the American Federation of Labor's third largest affiliate.
Only 3.5 percent of the U.S. work force is organized; employers are free to hire and fire at will and at whim. Only 19 percent of U.S. factory workers are women, down from 25 percent in 1850; most are employed in the northern textile and garment industries, but the number of women in southern factories has tripled since the Civil War. And whereas 41 percent of black women work outside the home for wages (most of them in agriculture or as domestic servants), only 17 percent of white women—chiefly immigrants—work for wages. Women employees overall receive 53 percent of what men are paid for the same work, and in some industries they receive only one-third as much.
A coal mine explosion at Scofield, Utah, May 1 kills more than 200 men, many of whom choke to death for lack of oxygen, but the mine owners have no trouble recruiting replacements willing to work 12- to 16-hour days 6 days per week at $400 per year without accident insurance or death benefits.
John Mitchell's United Mine Workers of America strikes Pennsylvania's anthracite fields September 17; 90,000 men leave the pits and march in their Sunday best to other mines, encouraging the workers to set aside their difference and join with them. By week's end some 120,000 are on strike and soon 90 percent of the mines are closed. President McKinley's friend Mark Hanna asks the mine owners to make concessions, they refuse, he meets at New York with financier J. P. Morgan, and Morgan persuades the other coal operators to grant a 10 percent wage increase. The cold, hungry workers return to their dangerous jobs October 28, ending the threat of cold homes and idle industry that might have cost McKinley his chance of reelection, but the owners do not recognize the union (see 1902).
The Cripple Creek gold field discovered in Colorado 9 years ago yields $20 million worth of gold per year and is second only to South Africa's Transvaal gold field discovered in 1886. It is far larger than the Klondike field discovered 4 years ago.
Moody's Manual of Railroads and Corporation Securities begins publication under the direction of New York financial analyst John Moody, 32, who has worked for 10 years in the banking house Spencer Trask & Company. Moody will establish the investor's monthly Moody's magazine in 1905, and his annual Moody's Analyses of Investments will appear beginning in 1909.
The Caisse Populaire founded at Levis across the St. Lawrence from Quebec City is the first North American credit union. Parliamentary stenographer Alphonse Desjardins, 46, has long been aware of the abuses suffered by farmers, tradespeople, and laborers at the hands of loan sharks in an age when commercial banks do not make personal loans (see Morris Plan, 1910). His cooperative banking system is based on European systems set up in the past 50 years to protect working people from usurious rates. Desjardins will help start the first U.S. credit union in 1909 at Manchester, New Hampshire, and his Quebec operation will grow enormously.
Businessman James Roosevelt dies at New York December 8 at age 72 and is buried at his native Hyde Park. His first wife died in 1876 and in 1880 he married Sara Delano, now 46, whose father, Warren, made a fortune in the Chinese opium trade before his death in 1875. She grew up in Hong Kong and at the family estate on the Hudson near Newburgh.
F. W. Woolworth controls 59 stores, up from 28 in 1895, and has sales in excess of $5 million. Inspired perhaps by A&P storefronts, he adopts a bright carmine-red storefront with gold-leaf lettering and molding for all his stores (see 1879; 1909).
McGraw-Edison Company has its beginnings in the McGraw Electric Company founded at Sioux City, Iowa, by Clear Lake, Iowa-born electrical contractor Max McGraw, 17, who has saved $500 earned by delivering newspapers and goes into business wiring houses for electric doorbells (see food [Toastmaster], 1926).
Danville, Illinois-born chemist Charles Skeele Palmer, 42, invents a new process for cracking petroleum to obtain gasoline. He will sell rights to the process to Standard Oil Company in 1916 (see Burton, 1913; Houdry process, 1936).
John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company buys Pacific Coast Oil (see 1879; 1911).
Royal Dutch Company oil exporter J. B. A. Kessler returns from Sumatra to Europe in an effort to recover his health but dies en route at Naples December 14 at age 47; he is succeeded as managing director of Royal Dutch by Amsterdam-born bank clerk Henri W. A. (Wilhelm August) Deterding, 34, who will head the company for 36 years, becoming a dominant voice in the industry (see Royal Dutch-Shell, 1907).
The first gasoline-powered British motorbuses go into service in January as single-deck buses begin operating in Norfolk.
Only 144 miles of U.S. roads are hard-surfaced, with paving confined mostly to city streets, but by year's end there are 13,824 motorcars on the road.
Auburn, Franklin, Lambert, Packard, Peerless, and Stearns motorcars are introduced.
The Auburn motorcar introduced by Auburn Automobile Company of Auburn, Indiana, is a single-cylinder runabout with solid tires and a steering tiller. Frank and Morris Eckhardt of Eckhardt Carriage Company have started the firm with $2,500 in capital; they will produce a two-cylinder model in 1905, a four in 1909, and a six in 1912 (see 1924).
The Franklin motorcar made by Herbert H. Franklin, 34, has an air-cooled engine; sales will peak at 14,000 in 1929.
The Lambert Friction Drive motorcar introduced at Anderson, Indiana, by John W. Lambert's Buckye Manufacturing Company will have limited success (see 1891). The company will turn to making other products, many of them invented by Lambert.
The Packard motorcar introduced at Warren, Ohio, has a chain-driven, one-cylinder, 12-horsepower engine and three forward speeds. Engineer James W. (Ward) Packard, 37, and his brother William, 39, have run Packard Electric Company since 1890.
Renault Frères introduces the first glass-enclosed two-passenger motorcar (see 1899).
Automotive pioneer Gottlieb W. Daimler dies at Cannstatt March 6 at age 65 (his son Paul carries on the firm Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft with Wilhelm Maybach); internal-combustion engine inventor J.-J.-E. Lenoir dies at La Varenne-Saint Hilaire, France, August 4 at age 78.
Only 936 gasoline-powered motorcars are produced in the United States as compared to 1,681 steam-powered cars, 1,575 electric cars.
Firestone Tire & Rubber is founded August 3 at Akron, Ohio, by Ohio-born entrepreneur Harvey S. (Samuel) Firestone, 32, who has patented a method for attaching tires to rims. He invests $10,000 to start the new firm (see 1908).
The first U.S. National Automobile Show opens November 10 at New York's Madison Square Garden with 31 exhibitors displaying 159 vehicles. Contestants compete in starting and braking, and exhibitors demonstrate hill-climbing ability on a specially built ramp, but horseless carriages are forbidden to park on the city's streets and even stables refuse to take them in.
The Trans-Siberian Railway opens between Moscow and Irkutsk (see 1891; 1904).
India's railroad trackage reaches a total 25,000, up from something over 5,000 in 1869.
U.S. railroads charge a freight rate that averages 75¢ per ton-mile, down from $1.22 in 1883. The Great Northern charges only $35 for a railcar traveling 500 miles between St. Paul, Minnesota, and Minot, North Dakota; the Chicago and North Western $40 for a railcar traveling the 750 miles between Chicago and Pierre, South Dakota.
Cody, Wyoming, is founded by William "Buffalo Bill" Cody in order to have the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy run a spur to the large tracts of land he has acquired in the area of the Shoshone River's south fork.
Illinois Central engineer Jonathan Luther "Casey" Jones, 36, of Jackson, Tenn., pulls his six-coach Cannonball Express into Memphis on the night of April 29, learns that the engineer for the return run is ill, and volunteers to replace him. Highballing at 75 miles per hour through Mississippi to make up for lost time, the six-foot-four-inch Jones rounds a gentle curve at 4 o'clock in the morning and sees a freight train stalled on the track dead ahead. Hand upon the throttle, Jones yells at his fireman to jump, plows into the caboose and several cars of the stalled freight train, and is killed by a wood splinter driven through his head. While the collision is only one of 27 rear-end collisions on U.S. railroads in the month of April, and Jones is only one of 2,500 railroad men killed in accidents this year, a ballad will make him famous.
The Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad boasts that it is cleaner than its competition because it fuels its locomotives entirely with anthracite coal rather than bituminous. Advertising department artist Penrhyn Stanlaus creates the image of a girl, clad entirely in white and named Phoebe Snow; actresses representing the new symbol will appear at special events and civic celebrations to promote the jingle, "Says Phoebe Snow about to go/ Upon a trip to Buffalo/ My gown stays white from morn 'til night/ Upon the road of anthracite."
The Pennsylvania Railroad acquires control of the Long Island Rail Road that will soon be the nation's largest passenger carrier (see 1836; 1905).
Santa Fe Railroad cofounder Cyrus K. Holliday dies at Topeka March 29 at age 73; Southern Pacific Railroad president Collis P. Huntington of heart disease at his Adirondack summer home near Raquette Lake, New York, August 13 at age 78. His nephew Henry E. Huntington, 50, sells the family's controlling interest in the Southern Pacific to Wall Street speculator Edward H. Harriman and turns his interests to buying, building, and consolidating an interurban transit system in Southern California (see 1910).
Excavation begins March 24 at the corner of Bleecker and Greene streets on a New York subway system that will grow to become the largest in the world. City planners have predicted that Manhattan traffic will soon come to a standstill, there being too many horses and too many tons of manure for anyone to be able to move, but the city has refused to accept defeat. More than 7,700 laborers begin digging up the streets for 10 hours per day at wages of 20¢ per hour; most are Italian, Irish and Polish, hired by contractor John B. Macdonald from the tenement districts or brought over from Italy by padrones who receive part of the men's wages. Private investors led by August Belmont & Company with backing from the English Rothschilds have financed the Rapid Transit Subway Construction Company, of which August Belmont II is president. Belmont has hired engineer William Barclay Parsons, 35, to work out the formidable problems presented by underground streams, quicksand, varying depths of bedrock, and river tunneling, and although the work sometimes requires blasting through solid rock, most is digging relatively shallow trenches (Parsons fears that too many steps will discourage passengers from using the stations), using the cut-and-cover method employed in building the Budapest subway rather than the deep-tunnel method used in London (see 1904).
Electric trolley cars that take their power from overhead wires provide transportation in much of Brooklyn and Queens (but not in Manhattan, where aerial wires are forbidden). Introduced at Richmond, Virginia, only 12 years ago, trolleys are used in every other major U.S. city, with some 30,000 cars operating on 15,000 miles of track (see 1917).
Cable-car inventor Andrew S. Hallidie dies at San Francisco April 24 at age 64.
Paris hails the opening of the new d'Orsay railway station (see Saint Lazare, 1837). Technological advances within the next 30 years will permit longer trains, making the Gare d'Orsay's platforms too short and it will eventually be turned into a museum.
Métro underground rail service begins at Paris July 19 (see London, 1891; Budapest, 1896; Boston, 1897). It has been designed in part by Jean-Baptiste Berlier, who has invented the city's pneumatic public mail system, which uses compressed air to send rubber-tipped containers rocketing through tubes beneath the streets. Entered through art nouveau kiosks designed by architect Hector Guimard, now 33, the Métro initially runs a mile and a half east and west between Porte Maillot at one end of the Champs Elysées to Porte de Vincennes at the other, but will grow to become the world's third largest subway (second largest in terms of passenger traffic), carrying more than a billion passengers per year in cars with pneumatic tires rolling along 131 miles of track, with 59 miles of corridors and 297 white-tiled stations (see New York, 1904). The city's Petite Ceinture elevated lines that have run since late 1852 will lose much of their ridership to the new Métro and will shut down in 1934.
The Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal opens January 2 to link Lake Michigan with the Des Plaines River (see Joliet, 1673; environment, 1892). Built in 7 years and 4 months by some 1,800 black and immigrant workers who have earned 15¢ per hour (militia were called in when the workers struck for higher wages in 1893 but no raises were given), the 33.8-mile canal connects the Great Lakes with the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico.
The Hay-Pauncefote Treaty signed February 5 includes a British renunciation of rights to build a Panama canal. Parliament rejects the treaty (see 1901).
Only 25 percent of the U.S. commercial shipping fleet remains in sail, down from 56 percent in 1870. More than 60 percent of world shipping is in steamships, up from 16 percent in 1870.
The U.S. Navy purchases the first modern submarine (see Lake, 1897). Invented by Irish-born U.S. engineer John Phillip Holland, 60, the Holland uses electric motors under water and internal combustion engines on the surface, employing water ballast to submerge.
Retired German general Ferdinand graf (count) von Zeppelin, 62, launches a rigid airship July 2 at Friedrichshafen and flies for 18 minutes over Lake Constance (see Renard, Krebs, 1884); after serving as a volunteer cavalry officer for the Union Army during the Civil War, Zeppelin observed a free balloon ascent at St. Paul, Minnesota, became interested in aeronautics, and determined that a series balloons enclosed in a rigid frame would be superior to a single balloon. His LZ-1 stays aloft for 1½ hours in October, and although he dismantles it later in the year he will go on to build many such lighter-than-air craft (see 1905).
Czech munitions maker Emil von Skoda dies at Amstetten, Austria, August 8 at age 60. He has expanded the 33-man factory that he bought in 1869 and last year consolidated his array of forges, machine shops, and tool-and-die shops at Pizen, where the Skoda Works now employs more than 4,000 workers; British armaments manufacturer William G. Armstrong, Baron Armstrong (of Cragside), dies at Cragside, Northumberland, December 27 at age 90, having played a major role in modernizing the hardware of the army and Royal Navy.
A new quantum theory enunciated by German physicist Max (Karl Ernst Ludwig) Planck, 42, will have enormous impact on scientific thinking (see Frobenius, 1879). Basing his work on that of Wilhelm Wien (see 1898), Planck states that bodies that radiate energy do not emit the energy constantly but rather in discrete parcels that he calls quanta (see Maxwell, 1865; Stefan, 1879; Einstein, 1905; Compton, 1922).
French chemist Victor (François-Auguste) Grignard, 29, discovers magnesium compounds (Grignard reagents) that will be essential to the development of many synthetics.
Genetic laws revealed by Gregor Mendel in 1865 become generally known for the first time as Dutch botanist Hugo De Vries, 52, at the University of Amsterdam, German botanist Carl Erich Correns, 35, and Austrian botanist Erich Tschermak von Seysenegg, 29, working independently, discover Mendel's published work and make public his Mendelian laws (see Bateson, 1902).
Mathematician Eugenio Beltrami dies at Rome February 18 at age 64, having built on work by the late Nikolai Lobachevski, Carl Friedrich Gauss, and Bernhard Riemann to remove any doubts about the validity of non-Euclidean geometry in dealing with the differential geometry of curves and surfaces.
English archaeologist Arthur John Evans, 40, unearths the palace of Knossós on the Greek island of Crete. Curator of the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford since 1884, Evans went to Crete in 1894 after seeing ancient coins and stone seals from the island. His monograph "Cretan Pictographs and Prae-Phoenician Script" was published in 1895. He has purchased a tract of land, and after digging for a year has found palace ruins covering five and a half acres of the land. His work over the course of the next 8 years will reveal the seat of an ancient culture that he will call "Minoan" after the legendary King Minos (see Ventris, 1952).
Smithsonian Institution ethnologist Frank Hamilton Cushing chokes to death on a fishbone in Maine April 10 at age 42, having gone to study prehistoric remains; naturalist Mary Kingsley goes to Africa to serve as a nurse in the Boer War but contracts typhoid fever at Simonstown and dies June 1 at age 37.
Bubonic plague strikes Honolulu in epidemic form. A large section of the city's Chinatown is condemned and burned under fire-department supervision to kill the plague-bearing rats, but the fire gets out of control and much of the city is destroyed.
The first U.S. bubonic plague epidemic begins at San Francisco. The body of a Chinese man is discovered March 6 in the basement of Chinatown's Globe Hotel, local authorities try to hush up the cause of death, but 120 others will be stricken before the plague ends in February of 1904, and all but three will die (San Francisco will have another plague epidemic in 1907, as will Seattle; New Orleans will have one in 1914 and 1919, and Los Angeles in 1924).
The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung) by Sigmund Freud is based on psychoanalytic techniques that lean heavily on dream analysis (see 1895; Heracleitus, 440 B.C.). Freud's colleague Joseph Breuer has enjoyed some success with a patient who is identified only as Anna O.; she calls Breuer's treatment "the talking cure" (see first international meeting, 1908).
A U.S. Public Health Commission headed by Major Walter Reed, 49, of the Army Medical Corps shows that the yellow fever virus is transmitted by the Aëdes aegypti mosquito. Physician Carlos Juan Finlay, now 66, has alerted Reed to the possibility (see 1881); unlike the mosquito whose bite transmits the malaria virus, the Aëdes aegypti mosquito breeds only in fresh water that gathers in artificial containers (see Havana, 1901).
Chicago's death rate falls as clean, wholesome water from the newly opened sanitary canal brings a sharp reduction in cholera and typhoid fever cases.
The U.S. death rate from tuberculosis is 201.9 per 100,000; from influenza and pneumonia 181.5; heart disease 123.1; infant diarrhea and enteritis 108.8; diabetes mellitus 91.7; cancer 63; diphtheria 43.3; typhoid fever and paratyphoid 35.9 (see 1922). Average age at death in the United States is 47 (most people live much longer, but so many still die before age 5 that the average remains low). Average life expectancy at birth in the United States is only 45, up from 40 in the Bronze Age (and for blacks it it is only 33), but it will rise by an average of nearly 4 months per year in the coming century and reach 76 by the end of 1997.
Infant mortality in the United States is 122 per 1,000 live births; in England and Wales it is 154; and in India 232 (see population, 1951).
The U.S. Census shows 12 million Roman Catholics, 6 million Methodists, 5 million Baptists, 1.5 million Lutherans, 1.5 million Presbyterians, 1 million Jews, 700,000 Episcopalians, 350,000 Mormons, 80,000 Christian Scientists, and 75,000 Unitarians.
U.S. Pentecostalism has its beginnings in an all-night prayer session at a Bible school outside Topeka, Kansas, when a student of Iowa-born clergyman Charles Fox Parham, 27, asks Parham to lay hands on her and pray that she will be filled with the Holy Spirit. A former Methodist minister who has denounced "denominationalism" and begun publishing a periodical, The Apostolic Faith, Parham has come to believe in the literal truth of Peter's sermon on the day of Pentecost as recorded in Acts I:12-2:4. Jews used the word Pentecost for the Feast of Weeks, originally an event 50 days after Passover when the faithful presented to God the first fruits of the harvest; the holiday later came to celebrate the revelation of the Ten Commandments by Moses on Mount Sinai. Christians came to celebrate Pentecost as the 50th day after Resurrection Sunday, when the Holy Spirit descended on the Apostles. Believing, like Parham, that the end of the world is approaching, Agnes Ozman begins "speaking in tongues" and is unable to communicate in English for the next 3 days. The rest of Parham's students are also soon speaking in unknown languages (glossolalia). Parham takes his "apostolic faith" to Kansas City and will proclaim that the restoration of this faith began January 1, 1901 (see Los Angeles, 1906).
The United States has 6,005 public high schools, up from 40 in 1860, but there is no standard curriculum, and while some schools have five or six grade levels others have only one or two. Teachers remain poorly paid, in most states education is not compulsory after age 14, dropout levels are high, and only 8 percent of children aged 14 to 17 attend school. Popular subjects include bookkeeping, logic, and rhetoric, but memorization takes precedence over comprehension, only about 11 percent expect to go on to college (they study Greek and Latin), and although the schools are open about 135 days per year students attend classes on average only 86 days.
A U.S. College Entrance Examination Board is founded at New York to screen applicants to colleges (see SAT, 1926).
New York University's business school has its beginnings in the NYU School of Commerce, Accounts, and Finance. The first large-scale U.S. business school, it will have prominent faculty members who will lecture without compensation (see Harvard Business School, 1908).
Carnegie Institute of Technology is founded at Pittsburgh with a gift from steel magnate Andrew Carnegie.
England's Birmingham University is founded largely through efforts by colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain, now 64, who will be the new university's first chancellor beginning next year.
The Daily Express that begins publication at London April 24 is the first national paper to print news on its front page; founder Cyril Arthur Pearson, 34, will lose his eyesight beginning in 1912 but amass a fortune that he will devote to helping blind soldiers and sailors (see Beaverbrook, 1916).
Pony Express cofounder Alexander Majors dies at Chicago January 12 at age 85; Hartford Courant editor-author Charles Dudley Warner at Hartford October 20 at age 71.
One U.S. home in 13 has a telephone.
Researchers at Boston make the first long-distance telephone call using loading coils to reduce attentuation of the signal over a 40-kilometer circuit (see Heaviside, 1892); it is followed later in the year by a test over a 1,000-kilometer circuit (see 1904).
The telegraphone patented December 1 by Copenhagen Telephone Company engineer Valdemar Poulsen has attracted fairgoers at the Paris Exposition (see 1898); his ingenious device records telephone conversations and can be used to play them back, but he cannot obtain European backers, and although he will organize the American Telegraphone Company in 1903 with some American investors, his wire recorder will not find wide application even after he makes an improved version (see radio waves, 1903; Blattnerphone, 1929; Müller's answering machine, 1935).
Nonfiction: The Century of the Child (Barnets arhundrade) by Ellen Key, now 51, who has taught school at Stockholm for 19 years and is now a lecturer at the People's Institute for workingmen; A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great by J. B. Bury, who has completed a new edition of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire with notes and appendixes documenting his research; The Light of Day by naturalist John Burroughs celebrates Darwinian theory; Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution by Charlotte Perkins (Stetson) Gilman, who writes, "The women whose splendid extravagance dazzles the world, whose economic goods are the greatest, are often neither houseworkers nor mothers, but simply the women who hold most power over the men who have the most money" (see Veblen, 1899).
Critic and social moralist John Ruskin dies at his country house in Coniston, Lancashire, January 20 at age 80. He has been mentally unbalanced since 1889 and unable to write anything but his name; philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche dies of a stroke at Weimar August 25 at age 65. He has been mentally unbalanced from tertiary syphilis since 1889 and living in the care of his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, now 44, whose late husband, Bernhard Förster, committed suicide in the 1880s after the couple went to Paraguay, founded the supposedly pure Aryan colony of Nueva Germania, but failed in their enterprise. Förster was an anti-Semitic agitator, his widow has the same prejudice, and she will edit her brother's manuscripts accordingly.
Fiction: Sister Carrie by Indiana-born novelist Theodore Dreiser, 29. Publisher Frank N. Doubleday hastily withdraws the book when his wife says it is too sordid, the small edition goes almost unnoticed, and Dreiser suffers a nervous breakdown; Monsieur Beaucaire by Booth Tarkington; To Have and to Hold by Mary Johnston; Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad; Love and Mr. Lewisham by H. G. Wells; The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay by Maurice Hewlett; The Flame of Life (Il fuoco) by Gabriele D'Annunzio has been inspired by the actress Eleanora Duse, now 41, with whom D'Annunzio has had a long affair; The Visits of Elizabeth by English novelist Elinor Glyn (née Sutherland), 35, who knows little about grammar or syntax but whose epistolary novel about the philanderings of European society has been serialized in the World.
Novelist R. D. Blackmore dies at Teddington January 20 at age 74; novelist-short story writer Stephen Crane of tuberculosis at Badenweiler, Germany, June 5 at age 28, having been taken to the Black Forest and placed in the personal care of a sanitarium director who could do no more for him than administer morphine to ease his pain.
Poetry: Souls of Violet (Almas de violeta) and Waterlilies (Ninfeas) by Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, 19, who has come to Madrid at the invitation of Rubén Darío. His impressionism is based on scenes of his native Andalusia; The Masque of Judgment (verse drama) by Indiana-born University of Chicago English instructor-poet William Vaughn Moody, 31.
Poet Ernest Dowson dies of tuberculosis at Catford, Lewisham, February 23 at age 32.
Juvenile: Claudine at School (Claudine à l'Ecole) by French author Colette (Sidonie Gabriele Claudine Colette), 27, is a semi-autobiographical series of stories that will have many sequels; The Wizard of Oz by Chicago newspaperman Lyman Frank Baum, 44 (see stage musical, 1901).
Author Lucretia Peabody Hale dies at her native Boston June 12 at age 79.
Painting: Le Moulin de la Galette and Lovers in the Street by Pablo Picasso, now 19; La Modiste by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec; Still Life with Onions by Paul Cézanne, who in 1895 met Réunion-born Paris art dealer Ambroise Vollard, then 28, who had opened a shop in the Rue Lafitte with help from Mary Cassatt (she told her friends they must buy Cézannes), arranged Cézanne's first exhibition, and has advanced money not only to Cézanne but also to Renoir, Rousseau, and others; Nude in the Sun by Pierre-Auguste Renoir; Portrait of a Young Girl by Mary Cassatt; Siesta by French postimpressionist Pierre Bonnard, 32, shows his wife, Marthe, in the nude; Waterlily Pond and Path by the Water by Claude Monet; The Wyndham Sisters and Lord Dalhousie by John Singer Sargent; Philosophy (mural) by local Art Nouveau (Sezessionstil) painter Gustav Klimt, 38, for the University of Vienna. Frederick Edwin Church dies at New York April 7 at age 73; Jasper Francis Cropsey at Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, June 22 at age 77.
Noa by Paul Gauguin is an account of the painter's first years in Tahiti from 1891 to 1893. Gauguin returned to Tahiti in 1895.
The $1 Brownie box camera introduced by Eastman Kodak puts photography within reach of everyone and makes Kodak a household name (see 1898; Pocket Kodak, 1895). George Eastman has acquired other companies and thereby gained the technology needed to create the cheaper camera, which is marketed to children ("So simple that it can be operated by any School Boy or Girl"), is named after a popular cartoon character, and launches a photography craze among adults as well as children; a six-exposure roll of film costs 15¢ and 150,000 Brownies are sold in its first year, enabling amateur photographers to capture and preserve images that bring alive people and scenes that might otherwise fade from memory. Hannibal Goodwin wins his patent-infringement suit against Eastman (see 1889), but Eastman will negotiate the $25 million award down to $5 million as he becomes one of the six richest men in America (see acetate film, 1924; Kodachrome, 1935).
Theater: Schluck und Jau by Gerhart Hauptmann 1/3 at Berlin's Deutsches Theater; When We Dead Awaken (Naar vi dode vaaguer) by Henrik Ibsen 1/26 at Stuttgart's Hoftheater; You Never Can Tell by George Bernard Shaw 5/2 at London's Strand Theatre, with Charles Charrington, Yorke Stephens, 6 matinee perfs.; Arizona by St. Louis-born playwright Augustus Thomas, 43, 9/10 at New York's Herald Square Theater, with English-born actor Sidney Ainsworth, 27, Chicago-born actor Walter Hale, 31, Lancashire-born ingénue Eleanor Robson, 21, Chicago-born ingénue Louise Closer Hale, 28, 140 perfs.; The Wedding Guest by James M. Barrie 9/27 at London's Garrick Theatre, with Brandon Thomas, Charles Daly, Violet Vanbrugh, H. B. Irving, 101 perfs.; St. John's Fire (Johannisfeuer) by Hermann Sudermann 10/5 at Berlin's Lessingtheater; Mrs. Dane's Defence by Henry Arthur Jones 10/9 at Wyndham's Theatre, London, with Charles Wyndham, now 62, Alfred Bishop, Lena Ashwell, Alice de Winton, Alfred Kendrick, 207 perfs.; To Damascus (Till Damaskus) by August Strindberg 11/19 at Stockholm's Royal Dramatic Theater (Dramaten); Michael Kramer by Hauptmann 12/21 at Berlin's Deutsches Theater; The Good Hope by Herman Heijermans 12/24 at Amsterdam's Hollandsche Schouwburg.
"The Great Houdini" gains wide publicity by executing an escape from Scotland Yard, becomes a main attraction at London's Alhambra Theatre, and begins a 4-year tour of the Continent (see 1894). Escape artist Ehrich Weiss, now 26, has adopted the name Houdini from that of the late French magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, who died in 1871; he has studied Robert-Houdin's work, his book The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin in 1908 will show that the Frenchman's dexterity was much exaggerated, and he will far surpass Robert-Houdin's reputation with feats such as having himself shackled in irons, locked into a roped and weighted box, dropped overboard from a boat, and emerging with a smile before baffled audiences (see 1926).
The Shubert brothers of Syracuse, New York, lease the Herald Square Theater, challenging New York's Theatrical Syndicate headed by booking agent Charles Frohman, 40. Lithuanian-born theatrical manager Sam S. Shubert (originally Szemanski), 24, and his brothers Lee (originally Levi), 25, and J. J. (Jacob J.), 20, begin a 10-year battle with Frohman, A. L. Erlanger, and Marc Klaw by renting theaters to producers against whom the syndicate discriminates. The Shuberts will soon become producers themselves, Sam will be killed in a 1905 train wreck, and the other two brothers will triumph over the syndicate (which is, in effect, a theatrical trust), developing the most far-flung privately-controlled theatrical organization in the world.
Playwright-librettist-lyricist Charles Hoyt dies of syphilis at New York November 20 at age 40, having been institutionalized briefly for insanity; playwright-novelist Oscar Wilde dies at the Hôtel Alsace in Paris November 30 at age 46. He was released from prison 3 years ago, broken by disgrace and hard labor, went to France under the pseudonym Sebastian Melmouth (his great-uncle Charles R. Maturin used that as the name of the martyr in his 1820 novel Melmouth the Wanderer), broke off with his onetime lover Lord Alfred Douglas after a brief resumption of their friendship, and has led a dissipated existence ever since, wandering idly about the Continent.
Opera: Louise 1/2 at the Opéra-Comique, Paris, with Scottish soprano Mary Garden (Mary Davidson), 25, in the title role, music by French composer Gustave Charpentier, 39; German soprano Johanna (Amelia Agnes) Gadski, 27, makes her debut 1/6 as a regular member of New York's Metropolitan Opera company, singing the role of Senta in the 1843 Wagner opera Der Fliegende Holländer. She will remain with the Met until 1917; Tosca 1/14 at Rome's Teatro Costanzi, with music by Giacomo Puccini. The libretto is based on an 1887 tragedy by Victorien Sardou, now 69, about the 1796 political strife in Rome between Bonapartists and monarchists; Milka Ternina sings the title role in Tosca at Covent Garden 7/12 in its first London production; Prométhée 8/22 in the ancient Roman arena at Beziers, France, with music by Gabriel Fauré; The Tale of Tsar Saltan (Skazka o Tsarye Saltanye) 11/3 at Moscow, with music by Nikolai Rimski-Korsakov that includes his violin piece "The Flight of the Bumble-Bee."
Musicologist Sir George Grove of 1889 Dictionary of Music and Musicians fame dies at London May 28 at age 79; composer Sir Arthur Sullivan at London November 22 at age 58.
First performances: "Alborado de Gracioso" by French composer Maurice (Joseph) Ravel, 24, 1/6 at the Société Nationale, Paris; The Dream of Gerontius by Edward Elgar (text by Cardinal Newman) 10/3 at England's Birmingham Festival.
Boston's 2,500-seat Symphony Hall opens October 15 at the corner of Massachusetts and Huntington avenues (see 1881). Financed by stockbroker Henry Lee Higginson, who dislikes New York's 9½-year-old Carnegie Hall, it has been designed by Charles Follen McKim of New York's McKim, Mead and White, who has modeled it on Leipzig's 1,500-seat Gewandhaus, and Harvard physicist Wallace Clement Sabine has engineered the extraordinary acoustics. Now 66, Higginson sets aside 1,000 25¢ "rush tickets" on Friday afternoons; students and other nonsubscribers line up 1 hour before concert time and then quickly fill the second balcony.
The Philadelphia Orchestra gives its first concert November 16 at the city's 43-year-old Academy of Music. Its founders have engaged German conductor Fritz Scheel to direct it.
Stage musicals: The Messenger Boy 2/3 at London's Gaiety Theatre, with Maud Hobson, book by James T. Tanner and Alfred Murray, music by Lionel Monckton and Ivan Caryll, 429 perfs.; Fiddle-dee-dee 9/16 at Weber and Fields' Music Hall, with Lillian Russell, Joe Weber, Lew Fields, Little Rock, Arkansas-born soprano Fay Templeton, 34, DeWolf Hopper, San Francisco-born actor David Warfield, 33, music by John Stromberg, book and lyrics by Edgar Smith, songs that include "Rosie, You are My Posie (Ma Blushin' Rosie)," "Come Back My Honey Boy," and "I'm a Respectable Working Girl," 262 perfs.
Popular songs: "A Bird in a Gilded Cage" by New York composer Harry Von Tilzer (Harry Gumm), 28, lyrics by Arthur J. Lamb.
The trademark "His Master's Voice" appears on phonograph records (the first records with circular paper title-labels) issued by Eldridge R. Johnson's Consolidated Talking Machine Company of Camden, New Jersey, which will become the Victor Company (see 1877). Emile Berliner has devised the trademark, which is registered in the United States by Berliner's brother Joseph in May and in Britain by London's Gramophone Company, which has purchased an 1899 painting by Francis Barraud of his fox terrier Nipper listening attentively to a horn gramophone. Nipper dies later in the year and is buried at Kingston-on-Thames. The Gramophone Company issues a catalog containing 5,000 entries, the Phonographische Zeitschrift begins publication at Berlin, Karl Stumpf founds the Berliner Phonograph archives, and Thomas B. Lambert introduces a molded celluloid cylinder (see Victrola, 1906).
John Sholto Douglas, 8th marquess of Queensberry, dies at London January 31 at age 55, having helped draft new rules for boxing in 1867 and later caused the downfall of poet-playwright Oscar Wilde.
The Olympic Games held at Paris attract 1,505 athletes from 16 nations (see 1896). France is the unofficial winner, but government bureaucrats take over the games and will nearly ruin them before the Olympiad is returned to the Olympic Committee headed by the baron de Coubertin.
Christy Mathewson leaves Bucknell University to join the New York Giants, but he pitches so poorly that New York sells him to the Cincinnati Red Stockings. Factoryville, Pennsylvania-born right-hander Christopher Mathewson, 20, will soon be bought back (see 1903).
Reginald Doherty wins in men's singles at Wimbledon, Mrs. Hillyard in women's singles; Malcolm Whitman wins in U.S. men's singles, Myrtle McAteer in women's singles.
The first Davis Cup tennis matches open August 8 at Brookline, Massachusetts, and continue for 3 days. A U.S. team defeats a British team to gain possession of an $800 silver cup donated by St. Louis-born Harvard senior Dwight F. (Filley) Davis, 21, who won the U.S. men's doubles championship last year with his Harvard teammate Holcobe Ward (they will win again this year and next) and has commissioned the Boston jeweler Shreve, Crump & Low to design and produce the challenge cup.
Chess master William Steinitz dies a pauper in confinement at New York's Manhattan State Hospital on Ward's Island August 12 at age 64. Having won the world title in 1886, his defeat for the championship by Emanuel Lasker in 1894 upset his mental balance and he has had several breakdowns.
One U.S. home in seven has a bathtub; showers are even rarer.
Glaswegian architect-designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh, now 32, attracts attention at the Vienna Secession Exhibition, where the clean, distinctly un-Victorian aesthetic of his furniture is much admired.
The paper clip patented by Norwegian inventor Johan Vaaler replaces the straight pin used for many years to secure papers. His bent metal clip avoids countless pin pricks, but Vaaler will sell his patent to a stationer, Gem Manufacturing Co. of Britain will produce its own version, and it is the Gem design that will come into wide use in the next century.
The Junior League of the New York College Settlement is founded by post-debutante Barnard College undergraduate Mary Harriman, 19. Eldest of financier Edward Harriman's six children, she organizes a group to aid a local settlement house; debutantes flock to join the league that Harriman will head as chairman until 1904 and that will be followed by Junior Leagues of Baltimore, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and Boston. By 1920 there will be 39 Junior Leagues engaged in civic improvement projects, and Mrs. Willard Straight (née Dorothy Whitney) will organize them into the Association of Junior Leagues of America.
Lionel Train Company is founded by New York inventor-entrepreneur Joshua Lionel Cowan, 23, who grew up on the Lower East Side. The eighth of nine children, he has created a little wooden railcar, placed it on a battery-powered two-rail track, and persuaded local shopkeeper Robert Ingersoll to use it in an eye-catching window display. It fails to move the other merchandise in the window, but Ingersoll sells the toy in his display and Cowan is encouraged to make hundreds of such toys, going into competition with German imports.
Amsterdam's Diamond Workers' Union Building (Diamantbewerkersbond) is completed to design by Dutch architect Hendrik Petrus Berlage, 44, who has studied at Zürich.
Castel Béranger is completed at 14-16, rue de La Fontaine, Paris, to designs by Hector Guimard, who has been creating plans for houses elsewhere in France as well as in Paris.
Architect-engineer Dankmar Adler dies at Chicago April 16 at age 55.
Earthquakes rock Ecuador and Peru in mid-August, killing thousands.
Brazil's northeastern Hump remains 40 to 50 percent forested, but the figure will drop to 5 percent in the next 70 years. Deforestation will lead to erosion and water problems.
A hurricane strikes Galveston, Texas, September 8, shattering the city of 36,000 with 125-mile-per-hour winds that gust much higher and a 15- to 20-foot storm surge that washes across the Gulf of Mexico sandbar and splinters houses in the worst recorded natural disaster in North American history. A newspaper account reports the death toll as being at least 4,263, although some estimates place the total at close to 10,000 (the actual total is between 6,000 and 8,000). Thousands more are injured, 5,000 are left homeless, and property damage amounts to $17 million. U.S. Signal Corps Weather Service head Isaac Cline, 38, and his staff recorded the steady rise in sea level and plummeting barometer but did not realize that anything more than a standard Gulf storm was approaching (a 15-year veteran of the Weather Service, Cline wrote an article 9 years ago stating that "the coast of Texas [is] according to the general laws of the motion of the atmosphere exempt from West India hurricanes"). Weather Service director Willis Moore at Washington, D.C., is averse to giving out bad news and not only refused to identify the storm as a hurricane but stoutly insisted that it had shifted north and was rapidly losing strength (Moore is discharged for using his office to further his political career). President McKinley sends in troops with tents and emergency supplies, Clara Barton arrives with Red Cross workers to relieve the suffering, and the city will build a three-mile concrete seawall, 100 feet wide and 17 feet high, to protect it from future storms (see Corpus Christi, 1919).
Some 2 million mustangs (wild horses) roam the U.S. prairie, but the nation has no more than 300 head of buffalo (bison), down from 1,093 in 1893 and possibly 60 million in 1800 (see 2000). Longhorn cattle are also close to extinction (see 1850).
Texas steers bring $4.25 per hundredweight, but the price index for U.S. farm products will rise by a spectacular 52 percent in the next decade as more efficient transport enables Britain and Europe to import North American grain at low rates.
U.S. wheat fetches 70¢ per bushel as 34 percent of the crop goes abroad, and corn brings 33¢ per bushel as 10 percent of the crop is exported.
The first full-size concrete grain elevator in North America goes up at Duluth, Minnesota, where "elevator king" Frank H. Peavey's 3.3-million-bushel elevator reduces insurance rates on stored grain by 83 percent and more (see 1899). The Peavey elevator makes wood obsolete for building large elevators.
Mark Carleton makes another trip to Russia and returns with hard red Kharkov wheat, a winter variety that withstands winter-kill and gives high yields (see 1899; 1914).
Steam tractors appear on wheat fields of the U.S. Pacific Northwest, but their main use is to draw portable threshing machines, many of which are still pulled by 40 horses driven abreast. Some 2.5 horsepower is available to each man working on a U.S. farm, up from 1.5 in 1850.
The average U.S. farm worker produces enough food and fiber for seven people, up from 4.5 in 1860.
Agriculturist Sir John Bennet Lawes dies at his native Rothamsted, Hertfordshire, at age 85, having seen artificial fertilizer come into widespread use in much of the world.
The world has 100 million acres of irrigated cropland, up from 20 million in 1880.
The first sluice gate on the Colorado River brings irrigation water from Arizona to California's Imperial Valley (see Salton Sea, 1909).
World beet-sugar production reaches 5.6 million tons, a figure that will more than quadruple in the next 64 years.
India has famine as monsoons fail for a second year and drought reduces the size of crops. Heat in the Gujarat region is so intense that rivers dry up, fish flop in the shallows, and cholera-infected farmers gather them up to feed their families.
English biochemists Frederick Gowland Hopkins, 39, and S. W. Cole isolate the amino acid tryptophan (see niacin, 1945; Hopkins, 1906). Thirteen amino acids have now been isolated; eight will be found essential to adult human nutrition (see Rose, 1949).
The best quality ground pepper offered to Londoners contains equal parts of black peppercorns, hot pepper dust, and white pepper dust (see 1891). Most of the ground pepper in the shops contains very little real pepper and may be composed largely of ground olive stones.
Four Britons die December 1 and 2,000 fall ill from drinking beer treated with arsenic.
Milk bottles are introduced in England, but only for pasteurized milk (see Borden, 1885; Hood, 1897). Most British milk remains unpasteurized, and bottles will not be widely used for another two decades (see 1901; 1942).
Regulations limiting bacteria in U.S. milk to 1 million per cubic centimeter prove difficult to enforce despite growing use of pasteurization (see 1890). Contaminated milk remains a major source of food-borne disease (see Evans, 1917).
Battle Creek, Mich., has 42 breakfast cereal plants (see Kellogg, 1898; Post, 1897).
A model Shredded Wheat factory goes up at Niagara Falls, New York (see 1898). A picture of H. D. Perky's "Palace of Light" factory will appear on every package of Shredded Wheat, and the new factory will also produce Shredded Wheat crackers called Triscuits.
Per capita U.S. wheat flour consumption averages 224 pounds, up from 205 pounds in 1850 (see 1920). Flour milling is the nation's largest industry.
The average French adult consumes an estimated 21 ounces of bread per day (children are taught to eat with a fork in one hand and a pusher of bread in the other); the figure will decline in the next 65 years to less than 10 ounces.
Commercial bakeries now produce 25 percent of U.S. bread, up from 20 percent in 1890, mostly because the urban population is eight and a half times what it was in 1850, whereas the rural population has merely doubled, and industry employs more women (they now account for 17 percent of the workforce). Population concentrations have made possible the mass distribution of perishable bakery products. There are seven times more commercial bakers than in 1850, and the value of their products has increased thirteenfold.
Uneeda Biscuits have sales of more than 10 million packages per month, while all other packaged crackers sell scarcely 40,000 per month (see 1898). National Biscuit Company cofounder Adolphus W. Green's partner Frank Peters comes up with a moisture-sealed package that will make the cracker barrel obsolete, and advertisements suggest that the crackers remain crisp even in damp weather (see Animal Crackers, 1902).
Per capita U.S. sugar consumption averages 65.2 pounds per year.
Meat consumption among British working-class families is more than double its 1880 level, and consumption of butter and milk also shows a marked increase. The wages of Lancashire factory workers allow them a breakfast of coffee or tea, bread, bacon, and eggs (except when egg prices are too high), a dinner of potatoes and beef, an evening meal of tea, bread and butter, cheap vegetables and fish, and a light supper.
Typical U.S. food prices: sugar 4¢/lb., eggs 14¢/doz,, butter 24¢ to 25¢/lb. Boarding houses offer turkey dinner at 20¢ and supper or breakfast at 15¢, but a male stenographer earns $10 per week and an unskilled girl $2.50.
Duffy-Mott Co. is created by a merger of W. B. Duffy Cider Co. of Rochester, N.Y., with the S. R. Mott Co. (see 1842). The new concern will be incorporated in 1914 (see apple sauce, 1930).
Milton S. Hershey sells his Lancaster Caramel Company for $1 million in cash to the American Caramel Company but retains his chocolate manufacturing equipment (see 1894). American Caramel has offered Hershey $500,000 outright for his business, his lawyer has demanded twice that amount, he has got his price, and as part of the sales agreement Hershey retains that part of his old factory which contains chocolate-making equipment so that he may continue production. Hershey introduces the first Hershey chocolate bars (plain and with almonds), which will have sales next year of $622,000 (see 1903).
Homogenized milk (lait homogeneise) produced by Auguste Gaulin's process is exhibited at the Paris International Exposition but is thought to be of scientific value only (see 1899). The ability of the milk's constituents to remain fixed is considered remarkable, and Gaulin's process will for some time be called "fixation." He is the first to use the term "homogenized," but he recognizes the imperfections in his process and undertakes a scientific study of milk in order to improve it. Gaulin observes under a microscope that the largest fat globules are 500 to 600 times smaller than the diameter of the hairlike tubes through which they pass, and that further reduction can be ascribed only to the friction caused by forcing the milk through the tubes (see 1902).
Hills Bros. at San Francisco begins packing roast ground coffee in vacuum tins to begin a new era in coffee marketing (see 1881). Marketed in July with the exaggerated claim that it is the "Highest Grade Java and Mocha Coffee" and will "Keep Fresh Forever If Seal Is Unbroken," the product marks the beginning of the end for the coffee roasting shops common now in every town and the coffee mill seen in almost every U.S. kitchen, but it will be 13 years before any other San Francisco firm adopts the vacuum pack, and firms elsewhere in the country will take even longer.
Coca-Cola goes on sale in Britain for the first time August 31 (see 1899; 1909).
Kansas prohibitionist Carry Nation (née Moore), 54, declares that since the saloon is illegal in Kansas, any citizen has the right to destroy liquor, furniture, and fixtures in any public place selling intoxicants. Nation stands six feet tall and weighs 170 pounds; her second husband, David, is an elderly widower who served in the Civil War and became a newspaper editor. She made her first foray last year at Medicine Bow, when she and another WCTU member walked into Strong's saloon singing hymns. Thrown out, the two women marched over to a drugstore that sold whiskey, rolled its keg into the street, and destroyed it. Nation now loads a buggy with rocks and bits of brick, sets out for neighboring Kiowa, Kansas, and goes into Dobson's saloon singing, "Who hath sorrow? Who hath woe?" She breaks glasses and bottles behind the bar. At the Hotel Carey in Wichita she is arrested for destroying a huge mirror, smashing bottles, decanters, and gilded signs, and throwing a brick through a canvas depicting Cleopatra at her bath (complete with pubic hair). The exploit gains her national publicity as she continues a campaign of hatchet-wielding through Kansas cities and towns, and although she will be arrested, fined, imprisoned, clubbed, and shot at, she will persevere (see Anti-Saloon League, 1895; Eighteenth Amendment and Volstead Act, 1919).
Bovril creator John Lawson Johnston dies at London November 24 at age 64; his son George takes over as head of the company that will later make Bovril a vegetarian product, using flavorings to provide a beefy taste.
The Guide Michelin published at Paris is the first systematic evaluation of European restaurants. Financed by tire producers André and Edouard Michelin, the Guide rates restaurants using a system of three stars (worth a special journey), two stars (worth a detour), or one star, and will be updated periodically (the star awards were originated by Karl Baedeker; see 1829).
Metal catheters for use in abortion are widely available in France. A physician writes that a woman can perform the procedure without assistance, but most women in France and elsewhere rely on vaginal douching, which is safer, albeit far less effective.
A new German criminal code includes provisions against obscene advertisements, including those promoting the sale of contraceptives.
The North American population reaches 81 million, up from 5.7 million in 1800, and begins a growth that will reach 355 million by 1978.
The U.S. census shows a population of 74,885,943, up from 23.1 million in 1850, with 10.3 million in the 45 states of foreign birth, roughly 9 million black or of mixed blood, 237,000 Native Americans or partly Indian, 90,000 Chinese, 24,000 Japanese.
Some 45.8 million Americans are rural residents, 30.2 million urban. Half of all U.S. working women are farmhands or domestic servants (see 1960). White mothers in America have 3.56 children on average, down from more than 7 a century ago when infant mortality was higher, girls married slightly younger, and women knew less about contraception and abortion. The birthrate will decline by another third in the next 30 years.
The population of the world reaches 1.65 billion, up from 870 million (or possibly 960 million) at the end of the last century; 16 cities have populations of 1 million or more (see 1901; 1930).
1891 1892 1893 1894 1895 1896 1897 1898 1899 1900
Archaeology
Arthur John Evans [b. Nash Mills, England, July 8, 1851, d. Oxford, England, July 11, 1941] discovers the palace at Knossos, the central site of the Minoan civilization on Crete. See also 1908 Archaeology.
Greek sponge divers accidentally stumble on the wreck of a first century bce freighter sunk off the island of Antikythera off the southern coast of Greece while carrying works of art to Italy. Eventually they find bronze statues, glass bowls, and even a now famous bronze orrery (an astronomical instrument used for calculating positions of planets). This is the beginning of marine archaeology. See also 80 bce Computers.
Biology
During this single year, Hugo-Marie de Vries [b. Haarlem, Netherlands, February 16, 1848, d. Lunteren, Netherlands, May 21, 1935], Karl Franz Joseph Correns [b. Munich, Germany, September 19, 1864, d. Berlin, February 14, 1933], and Erich Tschermak von Seysenegg [b. Vienna, Austria, November 12, 1871, d. Vienna, October 11, 1962] independently rediscover Gregor Mendel's work on genetics, ignored for 40 years by science. See also 1865 Biology. (See essay.)
William Bateson coins the word genetics to describe the study of the physical basis of heredity.
Paul Ehrlich coins the term receptor to indicate sites on a molecule to which bacterial toxins or drugs will bind, causing changes to take place in cellular metabolism. See also 1973 Medicine & health.
Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins [b. Eastbourne, England, June 30, 1861, d. Cambridge, England, May 16, 1947] discovers tryptophan, an amino acid. He demonstrates that it is necessary for rats to obtain it from their food, the first known essential amino acid. See also 1806 Chemistry.
Chemistry
Russian-American chemist Vladimir Nikolaevich Ipatieff [b. Moscow, November 21, 1867, d. Chicago, Illinois, November 29, 1952] discovers that catalysts can affect organic reactions at very high temperatures. This leads to new means for synthesizing useful chemicals, including catalytic cracking of hydrocarbons.
German physicist Friedrich Ernst Dorn [b. Guttstadt (Dobre Miasto, Poland), July 27, 1848, d. Halle, Germany, June 13, 1916] recognizes that the gas produced by thorium is a separate element, which he names nitron. Today the gas is known as radon (Rn). See also 1899 Physics.
Russian-American chemist Moses Gomberg [b. Elizavetgrad, Ukraine, February 8, 1866, d. Ann Arbor, Michigan, February 12, 1947] develops a carbon compound that has one valence location open, the first known free radical. (Although free radicals form often, they are usually destroyed quickly by interacting with other compounds; Gomberg's compound is stable.)
Communication
Canadian-American physicist Reginald Aubrey Fessenden [b. Milton, Quebec, October 6, 1866, d. Hamilton, Bermuda, July 22, 1932] invents the radio-frequency alternator, the device that produces AM radio signals, although several years of development of the device will still be ahead before the alternator becomes practical. See also 1904 Communication.
Raoul Grimoin-Sanson [b. Elbeuf, France, 1860, d. Oissel, France, 1941] projects a motion picture on a circular screen using ten projectors. The spectators are in the middle of the circle and see a moving image all around. This idea is revived for special theaters later in the century. See also 1951 Communication.
Frenchman Constantin Perskyi coins the term television. See also 1884 Communication.
Earth science
Emil Wiechert [b. Tilsit, Germany, December 26, 1861, d. Göttingen, Germany, March 19, 1928] invents the pendulum seismograph, essentially the type used today. See also 132 ce Earth science.
Energy
Edison invents the nickel-alkaline electric battery. The battery does not, however, produce nearly as much power as Edison hopes to achieve. He wants a battery that can be used in electric automobiles. See also 1881 Energy; 1903 Energy.
The first offshore oil wells are drilled. See also 1859 Energy; 1923 Energy.
Food & agriculture
Father Clément Rodier, a French missionary in Algeria, develops the hybrid of the bitter orange and the mandarin orange that is now known as the clementine.
Materials
Johann August Brinell [b. Bringetofta, Sweden, November 21, 1849, d. Stockholm, November 17, 1925] develops a test named after him for estimating metal hardness. A steel ball or diamond cone is pressed against a metal to perform the Brinell ball test, which gives the Brinell hardness number of the metal. The number is inversely proportional to the depth of impression.
Mathematics
At the International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris, David Hilbert suggests 23 problems that he hopes will be solved in the 20th century; many mathematicians take Hilbert's list as an agenda, with the result that most of the problems are either solved or proved unsolvable in the century. See also 1934 Mathematics.
Medicine & health
Walter Reed [b. Belroi, Virginia, September 13, 1851, d. Washington, DC, November 23, 1902] directs James Carroll [b. Woolwich, England, June 5, 1854, d. Washington, DC, September 16, 1907], Jesse William Lazear [b. Baltimore County, Maryland, May 2, 1866, d. Quemados, Cuba, September 25, 1900], and Aristides Agramonte [b. Puerto Principe, Cuba, June 3, 1868, d. August 19, 1931] in the study of the yellow fever epidemic in Havana. On August 27 James Carroll deliberately allows mosquitoes that have fed on yellow fever victims to bite him in his effort to prove that the disease is carried by the insects. He develops the fever but survives, only to die a few years later from yellow fever-induced heart disease. Lazear is killed by yellow fever in a successful attempt to show that it is transmitted by mosquitoes of the genus Aedes, as Carlos Finlay had proposed a few years earlier. See also 1901 Medicine & health.
Paul Ehrlich and his assistant Julius Morgenroth [b. 1871, d. 1924] make a study of hemolysis (the breakdown of red blood cells) and introduce the terms complement (a fraction of the blood that aids the immune response) and amboceptor (a fraction that prepares bacteria for the immune system to attack them -- a term no longer in use). See also 1898 Medicine & health; 1908 Medicine & health.
Austrian doctor Karl Landsteiner [b. Vienna, Austria, June 14, 1868, d. New York, New York, June 26, 1943] shows that there are at least three different types of human blood (A, B, and O), some of which are incompatible. The serum of a person can agglutinate red globules of a donor from an incompatible group. See also 1902 Medicine & health.
Sigmund Freud publishes Die Traumdeutung ("the interpretation of dreams"), which presents his theory that dreams are wish fulfillment. He also proposes that sexuality is an important part of childhood. See also 1895 Medicine & health.
Sir William Boog Leishman [b. Glasgow, Scotland, November 6, 1865, d. London, June 2, 1926] discovers the cause of a tropical disease known as kala-azar, but officially called leishmaniasis. Leishman discovers that the disease is caused by a protist spread by sandfly bites. See also 1880 Medicine & health.
Physics
Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck [b. Kiel, Germany, April 23, 1858, d. Göttingen, West Germany, October 3, 1947] announces the first step toward quantum theory on December 14; substances can only emit light at certain energies, which implies that some physical processes are not continuous, but occur only in specified amounts called quanta. See also 1905 Physics.
Henri Becquerel discovers that part of the radiation produced by uranium (and identified as beta rays by Ernest Rutherford) is identical to the electrons identified in cathode-ray experiments. See also 1899 Physics.
Paul Villard [b. Lyon, France, September 28, 1860, d. Bayonne, Basses-Pyrénées, France, January 13, 1934] is the first to observe a radiation emitted by radium that is more penetrating than X rays. This third type of radioactivity is now called gamma radiation and is recognized as high-energy electromagnetic waves. See also 1914 Physics.
Hans Friedrich Geitel [b. Braunschweig, Germany, July 16, 1855, d. Wolfenbuttel, Germany, August 15, 1923] and Charles Wilson independently study the spontaneous discharge of electric charge on objects caused by natural radioactivity. In the process, each discovers that there is a hitherto unknown factor causing discharge, which is later identified as cosmic radiation. See also 1912 Astronomy.
Paul Karl Ludwig Drude [b. Brunswick, Germany, July 12, 1863, d. Berlin, July 5, 1906] publishes Lehrbuch der Optik ("handbook of optics") arguing in favor of Maxwell's electromagnetic theory. He also becomes the first to show that conduction of electricity in metals results from a few electrons that are free to move away from their atoms. See also 1928 Physics.
Tools
Nikola Tesla proposes the use of radio waves to detect moving objects. Tesla's proposal is the basic idea of radar, but the technology is not sufficiently developed for making this idea practical. The short radio waves called microwaves, needed to locate an object with any precision, could not yet be generated. See also 1904 Tools.
Transportation
In Germany, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin [b. Konstanz, Germany, July 8, 1838, d. Charlottenburg, Germany, March 8, 1917] launches on July 2 the first of his line of rigid-framed, hydrogen-filled airships, which come to be known as Zeppelins. These are built at a rapid pace during World War I, but after 1918 the main stock will be taken away by the Allied victors in the war. By 1924 the Zeppelin company will be back in operation in Germany, however. See also 1896 Transportation; 1937 Transportation.