1904: Information and Much More from Answers.com
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1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910
Japanese naval forces under the command of Admiral Koshaku Togo Heihachiro, 57, attack Port Arthur (Lushun) on the Yellow Sea in southern Manchuria February 8, bottling up a Russian squadron and launching the largest war thus far in history—the first in which armored battleships, self-propelled torpedoes, land mines, quick-firing artillery, and modern machine guns will be used (see 1903). Concerned at Russia's failure to withdraw from Manchuria and her continuing penetration of Korea, the Japanese follow their sneak attack with a declaration of war February 10 and defeat the Russians near Wiju on the Yalu River May 1. Commanded by Gen. Baron Tamesada Kuroki under the overall command of Field Marshal Marquis Iwao Oyama, 61, the Japanese First Army has 40,000 men to throw against the 15,000 infantry, 5,000 cavalry, and 60 guns of Lieut. Gen. Zasulich, whose overall commander in Manchuria is Alexei Nikolaevitch Kuropatkin, 55. The Russians lose about 3,000 men, including 1,500 killed and 600 taken prisoner; the Japanese lose about 1,000, capture 11 guns and eight machine guns, cross the river, and invade Manchuria, creating wild enthusiasm at home by gaining the first Asian triumph over a Western nation. Japanese troops occupy Dairen May 30, lay siege to Port Arthur, and occupy Seoul.
The Battle of Liaoyang rages on the Mukden-Port Arthur Railway from August 25 to September 3, pitting 150,000 Russians against 125,000 Japanese. Marshal Oyama's forces drive Gen. Kuropatkin and his troops back to Mukden, but Japanese casualties total 23,615 as compared to 17,900 for the Russians, and the victory is not decisive. Both sides receive reinforcements and fighting resumes from October 5 to 17 on the Sha-Ho River, with 210,000 Russians facing 150,000 Japanese. Russian casualties total 44,351, Japanese 20,345, and both sides dig in (see 1905).
Explorer Francis E. Younghusband, now 40, reaches Tuna in Tibet January 4 with a military escort on a mission to establish trade relations with Lhasa (see exploration, 1903; commerce, 1893). Having made grueling marches across the Tang La, nearly 1,000 feet higher than the Jalap La but more gradual in its incline, he prepares to set up winter quarters at Tuna. Twenty men of his 12th Mule Corps are frostbitten, 30 men of the 23rd Pioneers have to be carried in on mules, and there are 70 cases of snowblindness among the 8th Gurkhas. A Tibetan force of nearly 1,500 men confronts Younghusband at Guru, 10 miles from Tuna; the Tibetan general demands that Younghusband return to Yatung, he politely refuses, and a London Daily Mail correspondent is cut down by Tibetan swordsmen (the man sustains 17 wounds and loses a hand but is saved from death by his thick poshteen). The British number fewer than 200, most of them Ghurkas, and they open fire with their 17 machine guns and two Maxims, killing between 700 and 800 Tibetans, including their general, in 90 seconds of continuous firing. The 168 Tibetan wounded expect to be butchered but are treated by British physicians; only 20 of them die (the British sustain half a dozen casualties, none of them fatal). Younghusband blames the incident on the "childishness and stupidity" of the Tibetan general, saying, "They will not believe in our power." Reports of the affair reach London at Easter, and Younghusband is criticized for violating the terms of the 1858 act which stipulated that India's revenues are not to be spent outside her statutory frontiers except to repel aggression without approval of Parliament. Younghusband meets at Simla March 31 with the British viceroy, Lord Curzon, and proceeds on his mission, reaching Gyantse April 11. His post at Chang Lo repels a dawn attack by 800 men May 5 with heavy loss to the Tibetans. A Russian force is reported to be en route to Lhasa in July, Younghusband reaches Lhasa August 3 and meets September 7 with the seventh Dalai Lama (the sixth has been deposed for licentious living). He departs Lhasa September 23, leaving behind 150 men, and returns to find himself accused of insubordination, having been made the scapegoat for leaving Lhasa without having amended the 1893 trade convention with Tibet. Tibetans continue to impose tariffs on the trickle of goods entering from India, and Lord Curzon will resign his viceroyalty next year amidst a storm of controversy.
English political geographer Halford J. Mackinder of the Royal Geographical Society writes a paper, "The Geographical Pivot of History," in which he argues that the decline of sea power and the economic and industrial development of southern Siberia have made the heartland of Asia and eastern Europe the strategic center of the "World Island" (see Nonfiction, 1902; Nonfiction, 1919).
Russia's governor general of Finland is assassinated at Helsinki June 17 at age 65. The ultranationalist Nikolai (Ivanovich) Bobrikov took office in 1898, abolished the Finnish Army, abrogated constitutional rights, forced the Finns to adopt Russian practices in many aspects of their lives, and has ruled ruthlessly since being given dictatorial powers last year, suppressing Finnish resistance by wholesale arrests, banishments, dismissals of office holders, by press censorship, and by personal control of the government; his assassin is the son of a Finnish senator who then kills himself.
Former French premier René Waldeck-Rousseau dies at Corbeil August 10 at age 57.
Cambodia's puppet king Norodom dies at Phnom Penh April 24 at age 69 after a 44-year reign of which 41 have been under a French protectorate. He is succeeded by his 63-year-old half brother Sisovat (Si Suvata), who will visit the Colonial Exhibition at Marseilles in 1906, tour France, and reign until his own death in 1927.
Vietnamese revolutionaries who include nationalist writer Phan Boi Chau and Nguyen Tham organize the Reformation Society (Duy Tan Hoi); they obtain the support of Prince Cuong De in their efforts to gain independence from French rule and reestablish a Vietnamese monarchy. Phan Boi Chau will move with the students in his resistance movement to Japan next year and meet in 1906 with the Chinese revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen, but the French and Japanese will reach an agreement in 1908 and force him and his followers to leave (see 1912).
An Anglo-French agreement signed April 8 strengthens France's position vis-à-vis Germany with regard to Morocco. Negotiated by diplomat Paul Cambon, now 61, it will become known as the Entente Cordiale and will ultimately play a major role in making Britain and France military allies (see 1914). The Moroccan brigand Raisuli and 150 men abduct U.S. expatriate Ion Perdicaris and his British stepson Cromwell Oliver Varley May 18 from the Perdicaris villa three miles outside Tangier, demanding $70,000 ransom from the sultan. Perdicaris actually renounced his U.S. citizenship during the Civil War to protect his South Carolina plantation from being confiscated by the Confederate government. He has become a Greek citizen, but President Roosevelt uses the incident as a campaign issue, he sends a naval squadron to Tangier, and the U.S. consul general there receives a State Department cable June 22 saying, "We want Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead" (Secretary Hay has written the cable with help from a newsman, and it goes on to say that Marines will not be landed without consultation with Washington). Raisuli has already decided to release Perdicaris, and he turns over the hostage June 25 in exchange for the $70,000 and a number of prisoners (see 1906).
Saudi leader Ibn Saud's forces suffer a defeat June 15 at the hands of Ottoman forces, who have responded to an appeal from Ibn Rashid (see 1902). Ibn Saud gains help from the nomadic (and puritanical) Bedouin warriors konw as the Ikhwan, or Muslim brothers; he recontitutes his Wahabi army and will eventually drive out the Turks, who will find it difficult to keep their troops supplied (see 1924; transportation [railroad], 1908).
Zionism's founder Theodor Herzl dies of pneumonia and heart disease at Edlach, outside Vienna, July 3 at age 44. His remains will be moved to Jerusalem in 1949.
Herero and Hottentot tribesmen in German South-West Africa rise against German colonial forces in an insurrection that will continue until early 1908. The revolt will be suppressed only after methodical campaigns by 20,000 German troops.
South African statesman Paul Kruger dies at Clarenz, Switzerland, July 14 at age 78, having built an Afrikaaner nation.
Former Confederate army general James Longstreet dies at Gainesville, Georgia, January 2 at age 82.
The new republic of Panama adopts a constitution February 13 and elects Manuel Amador Guerrero president (see 1903). Colombia's president José Marroquin is succeeded by explorer Rafael Reyes (Prieto), 54, who survived in the Amazon jungle in the 1870s (one of his brothers died of fever, another was eaten by cannibals), established a prosperous business, lost his fortune in a financial panic, and returned home almost penniless to enter politics, allying himself with right-wing elements. Reyes represented his country at Washington last year in the negotiations relating to Panama but failed to obtain financial compensation for the loss of that country; he soon dismisses the legislature, jails some of its members, appoints a puppet assembly, and assumes dictatorial rule that will continue until his forced resignation in 1909.
The Dominican Republic verges on bankruptcy (see 1903). President Roosevelt forces the Dominicans to let U.S. authorities collect customs duties and pay off the nation's creditors, setting a pattern for American imperialism in the Caribbean (see 1905; Nicaragua, 1910).
President Roosevelt wins election in his own right with 336 electoral votes to 140 for the Democratic Party's candidate, Judge Alton B. (Brooks) Parker, 52, of New York, who has been nominated in preference to William Jennings Bryan.
A Massachusetts court convicts James Michael Curley and his brother in November of taking civil service examinations for job applicants in Boston, but on the day they begin serving time they are elected to the offices of alderman and state representative (see 1903). New York's Tammany Hall supports the Curley brothers, and the public excuses their offense on the ground that "they did it for their friends."
The International Council of Women holds a meeting at Berlin in June and forms the International Woman Suffrage Alliance with Carrie Chapman Catt as president. Delegates include National Association of Colored Women president Mary Terrell, who delivers a speech in German describing the numerous contributions made by blacks. Delegate Rosika Schwimmer, 26, returns to her native Budapest, helps found the feminist and pacifist association Feministá Egyesülte, and translates the 1899 Charlotte Perkins Gilman book Women and Economics into Hungarian (see 1913).
Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce dies on the Colville Reservation in Washington State September 21 at age 64 (approximate).
The Chinese Red Cross is established at Beijing (Peking) and Shanghai.
Financier William C. Whitney dies at New York February 2 at age 62, leaving a vast fortune. In addition to his Manhattan residence, he has owned 5,000 acres in the Wheatley Hills near Jamaica, Long Island, a house at Sheepshead Bay with 300 acres and a private racetrack, a mansion with 700 acres in the Berkshire Hills, an Adirondack game preserve of 16,000 acres, a bluegrass horse farm of 3,000 acres in Kentucky, another horse farm in New York State, an estate at Aiken, S.C., that includes a mansion, a racecourse, and 2,000 acres of hunting land, and a palazzo in Venice. His survivors include his sons Harry Payne, 31, and Payne, 27. Iron and steel baron Henry W. Oliver dies at Pittsburgh February 8 at age 63 (see real estate, 1910); Cleveland industrialist Mark Hanna dies at Washington, D.C., February 15 at age 66; businessman (and two-term New York mayor) W. R. Grace at New York March 21 at age 71; Indian industrialist Jamsetji Nasarwanji Tata at Nauheim, Germany, May 19 at age 65.
An International Exposition opens a year late at St. Louis to commemorate the centennial of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase.
U.S. reformers organize the National Child Labor Committee to promote protective legislation. Absent laws requiring protective devices, many child millhands suffer mangled hands and crushed legs, receiving no compensation for their losses (see Owen-Keating Act, 1916).
Colorado authorities accuse Mary Harris "Mother" Jones, now 74, of stirring up striking coal miners and order her out of the state March 27 (see Jones, 1903). Mine owners who include oil magnate John D. Rockefeller have asked for her deportation (see 1925; IWW, 1905). A battle June 8 pits the Colorado militia against striking miners at Dunnville and ends only after six union members have been killed and 15 taken into custody; 79 strikers are deported to Kansas June 10.
Fall River, Mass., textile workers strike in August and will not return until January (see 1905).
Polish-born garment worker Rose (née Rachel) Schneiderman, 22, is elected to the executive board of the United Cloth Hat and Cap-Makers Union (UCHCU) and involves herself in a strike against a "runaway" shop that has relocated to New Jersey in order to avoid paying union wages. Schneiderman went to work at age 16 lining caps at $6 per week, out of which she had to pay for her $30 sewing machine, thread, lunches, and transportation. Her mother warned her that "men don't want a woman with a big mouth," but she and two other women obtained a UCHCU charter by stationing themselves outside factories as workers came off their shifts and getting 25 signatures on membership blanks for their own local of the Jewish socialist United Cloth Hat and Cap-makers' Union (see 1913; human rights, 1912).
Chicago packinghouse workers go on strike. No effort has been made to organize women employees, known to the men as "petticoat butchers," but Irish-born workers Hannah O'Day and Maggie Condon have led a walkout of women. Their strike was quickly broken; some of its leaders were blacklisted; and the women, fearful of starting a union, formed the Maud Gonne Club, named in honor of the Irish patriot-actress. After hearing a speech by Mary McDowell of the University of Chicago Settlement about working conditions in the packing houses, they asked McDowell's help—and began to transform their club into a union: Local 183 of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America. But employers (Swift, Wilson, and Cudahy) break the strike, and the union, including Local 183, is defeated. Working conditions in most U.S. industries remain abominable, but compared to conditions in Europe and Asia they are idyllic.
Japanese factories employ 530,000 workers, 310,000 of them women, of whom 80 percent tend spindles in textile mills and earn wages based on whether their abilities put them into the first grade (27 sen per day) or second grade (14.3 sen per day) (one sho of rice [3.8 pints] costs 20 sen) (see 1872).
Some 520,000 people in England and Wales are on poor relief—the largest number since 1888, according to a report issued November 29. Another 250,000 are in workhouses, up 11 percent over last year. One-third of the English population lives at or below the poverty line, one-sixth the population of London, half the population of Scotland.
Wall Street's Dow Jones Industrial Average ends the year at 69.61, up from 49.11 at the end of 1903.
Montgomery Ward distributes its first free catalogs, having sold catalogs for years at 15¢ each (see 1872). The company mails out more than 3 million of the four-pound books (see 1884).
Sears, Roebuck distributes more than a million copies of its spring catalog (see 1895). Sears has set up its own printing plant but still uses woodcuts for more than half its illustrations and may be keeping the art of wood engraving alive (see 1907).
Merchant Joseph B. Bloomingdale dies at his native New York November 21 at age 61. He has instituted a 10-hour work day at Bloomingdale's with a half-day off each week.
Discovery of oil in California's Hartwell field gives a fresh boost to the 14-year-old Union Oil Co. as it brings a new boom to the state's growing petroleum industry.
Construction of a Panama Canal begins as U.S. engineers struggle to cope with difficult terrain and health conditions that present what some consider insurmountable problems (see 1905; politics, 1903; medicine, 1905).
The first tunnel under the Hudson River is completed March 8 but will not open officially until February 25, 1908. Col. DeWitt Clinton Haskins first broke ground for the project at Hoboken in 1874, a blowout 6 years later killed 20 men, and work was abandoned in 1892 after completion of 2,000 feet of tunnel beneath the river. Georgia-born lawyer-executive William Gibbs McAdoo took over in 1902, he organized the New York & New Jersey Railroad (later the Hudson & Manhattan), and he has overseen completion of the original tunnel plus a parallel tunnel (see 1906).
The Supreme Court rules 5 to 4 March 14 that the Northern Securities Company organized by J. P. Morgan and James J. Hill in 1901 violates the Sherman Act of 1890. The court's majority opinion notes that the company's Northern Pacific and Great Northern have competing and substantially parallel lines from the Great Lakes and Mississippi River to Puget Sound on the Pacific and orders dissolution of the railroad trust. President Roosevelt welcomes the decision but will soon make a "gentlemen's agreement" with Morgan and other Wall Street financiers.
The first New York City subway line of any importance opens to the public October 27 after more than 4 years of construction in which at least 44 men have been killed and thousands injured. A crowd of 25,000 hears speeches marking the occasion in City Hall Park as ships in the harbor blow their whistles and a 21-gun salute is fired (see 1900). The Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) line runs from Brooklyn Bridge north under Lafayette Street, Fourth Avenue, and Park Avenue to 42nd Street, west to Broadway, and north to 145th Street, reaching a top speed of 45 miles per hour (more than twice the safe speed of an elevated train). Wearing a top hat, Mayor McClellan mans the controls for the inaugural run, completing it in 26 minutes with a train of five copper-sheathed wooden cars, each seating 56 passengers, with red-painted roofs. Mosaic tiles bearing visual symbols identify unnumbered stations to aid the city's polyglot population, and there are 133 handsome metal and glass kiosks—modeled on those used for the Budapest subway—to cover entranceways to the gleaming tiled stations (architects George L. Heins and Christoper J. La Farge have designed the interiors and many of the kiosks, including the Battery Park Control House at Bowling Green—so called because a passenger is under the control of the subway once he or she enters the building). Tickets cost 5¢ each, 111,000 people ride the first day, 319,000 the second, and 350,000 the third as New York inaugurates a system that alleviates congestion on trolley cars and elevated trains. Ridership on surface transit immediately drops 75 percent, and the subway is soon extended to 157th Street at the southern end of Washington Heights, with six-car trains requiring platforms at least 310 feet long, but it operates initially only in Manhattan, and above 42nd Street only on the West Side. The world's first subway system to have separate express and local tracks in each direction, its express trains go 35 miles per hour (three times the speed of an El), all trains have Frank J. Sprague's "multiple unit" system first used 7 years ago in Chicago's South Side Elevated Railway (General Electric acquired Sprague Electric Co. 2 years ago), and New York's subway system will grow to cover more than 842 miles (443 of them underground)—the largest rapid-transit complex in the world. It has the world's largest and most complex power system, with a capacity of 1,100 megawatts of 650-volt direct current supplied via "third rails" through 216 substations by means of 2,500 miles of cable and 2,900 circuit breakers. Financier August Belmont II has his own private car equipped with commissary and plumbing facilities. Engineer Parsons predicted from the outset that demand for rapid transit would be insatiable, and work proceeds on a tunnel that will carry the subway to Borough Hall, Brooklyn.
The Trans-Siberian Railroad opens to link Moscow with Vladivostok some 3,200 miles away (see 1903). It is the longest line of track in the world, but Gen. Kuropatkin's Russian army, fighting Japanese forces in Manchuria, finds it less than completely reliable.
A new rail line reaches the lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas and opens up the region for citrus fruits and vegetables on lands irrigated with river water.
The 264-foot wooden excursion boat S.S. General Slocum catches fire in New York's East River off Astoria, Queens, June 15 while carrying 1,400 German-Americans from the Lower East Side to Locust Grove on Long Island Sound for a Wednesday picnic sponsored by St. Mark's Lutheran Church of Sixth Street. Passengers on the freshly painted 13-year-old Knickerbocker Steamship Co. vessel leap into the river with their clothes on fire. The cork in the 13-year-old life preservers has crumbled and they are useless. More than 1,020 die within 50 yards of shore, most are women and children. The tragedy shatters the German community in the Lower East Side, a court finds the paddle-wheeler's captain guilty of criminal negligence, it sentences him to 10 years at hard labor in Sing Sing Prison (he will serve 3 before receiving a pardon), and more Germans move uptown to settle in Yorkville on the Upper East Side.
The British passenger liner S.S. Baltic goes into service to begin a 29-year career. The largest passenger ship yet built, the 23,884-ton vessel is 726 feet in length overall.
The S.S. Kaiser Wilhelm II sets a new transatlantic record in June by steaming from Sandy Hook to Eddystone, off Plymouth, in 5 days, 12 hours; she was built 2 years ago for the North German Lloyd line.
The Tropical Fruit Steamship Co., Ltd. founded by the United Fruit Co. will operate its new S.S. San José, S.S. Limon, and S.S. Esparta under British colors (see 1899). United Fruit has contracted with shipyards to build the three new refrigerator ships.
German physicist Ludwig Prandtl, 29, discovers the "boundary layer" that adjoins the surface of a body moving in air or water. He is appointed professor of applied mechanics at the University of Göttingen, where he will establish a school of aerodynamics and hydrodynamics; his discovery will lead to an understanding of aerodynamics and "streamlining," and he will make basic contributions to wing theory and turbulence studies.
Cadillac Motor Car Co. is created by a reorganization of Detroit Automobile under the aegis of Vermont-born automaker Henry Martyn Leland, 61 (see 1901; 1905; General Motors, 1909; self-starter, 1911).
The Maxwell motorcar introduced by J. D. Maxwell gains quick popularity. The 1914 model will have the first adjustable front seat (see Chrysler, 1923).
The Reo introduced by R. E. Olds has a steering wheel instead of a tiller (see 1901). Olds has left Olds Motor Vehicle Co. in a dispute with Frederick Smith on the size and price of motorcars to be produced by the company (see General Motors, 1908).
The automobile speedometer is invented by U.S. engineer A. P. Warner, 35.
The Rover motorcar is introduced by a British firm that has made some tricars and now offers a one-cylinder four-wheeler (see 1906).
Firearms designer Ferdinand, Ritter von Mannlicher, dies at Vienna January 20 at age 55; firearms designer James Paris Lee of Lee-Enfield rifle fame at Wilkes-Barre, Pa., February 24 at age 72; watch-making pioneer Edward Howard at Roxbury, Mass., March 5 at age 90, having lived to see almost every man carry a pocket watch.
English-born physicist William H. (Henry) Bragg, 41, delivers an address "On Some Recent Advances in the Ionization of Gases" at Dunedin, New Zealand, January 7, finding fault with much of the work that has been done and questioning some of the assumptions on which the work has rested, particularly work on the scattering and absorption of the ionizing radiations by matter. Such matter, says Bragg, is composed of thousands of electrons. His experiments on the absorption of alpha particles emitted by a radium bromide source at Australia's University of Adelaide in the spring support his statements and lead him to question whether gamma rays and X-rays are waves or particles (see 1913; Rutherford, 1911).
Physicist Charles Barkla demonstrates that secondary radiation is polarized and finds that it consists of two distinct types that will later be called "K" and "L" (see 1903; von Laue, 1912). Barkla receives his doctorate from Liverpool University.
A paper published by Cambridge University physicist J. J. Thomson appears in the March issue of Philosophical Magazine with the title "On the Structure of the Atom: An Investigation of the Stability and Periods of Oscillation of a number of Corpuscles arranged at equal intervals around the Circumference of a Circle; with Application of the Results to the Theory of Atomic Structure" (see 1897).
German physicists Julius Elster, 50, and Hans Friedrich Geitel, 49, devise the first practical photoelectric cell.
Marie Curie discovers two new radioactive elements—radium and polonium—in uranium ore (pitchblende) and receives her doctorate at the Sorbonne (see 1898; Becquerel, 1896; McMillan, 1940).
Worcester, Mass.-born U.S. consul Edward H. (Herbert) Thompson, 47, discovers ruins of Chichén Itzá in Mexico's Yucatán. Appointed consul at Mérida early in 1885, archaeologist Thompson finds a pyramidal Mayan temple decorated with a frieze of jaguars, shields on an interior wall painting of warriors attacking the city, an astronomical observatory, and a ceremonial ball court dating from the Middle Ages (see 455; Landa, 1561). He has lived closely with the Maya, Harvard's Peabody Museum has sponsored his work (he will ship gold objects to the museum, making illicit use of his diplomatic pouches), and he will travel to Boston to obtain a dredge and diving gear with which to explore an underground waterhole, or cenote, out of which he will bring up tools, vessels, statuettes, jewelry, and ornaments, but when he finds skeletons in the cenote he will be forced by the Mexican government to leave.
Anatomist and embryologist Wilhelm His dies at Leipzig May 1 at age 72, having created the science of histogenesis; chemist Clemens A. Winkler dies at Dresden October 8 at age 65.
The U.S. War Department sends William C. Gorgas of the Public Health Service to Panama to eliminate the malaria and yellow fever that are discouraging construction of a cross-isthmus canal (see 1901; 1905).
English chemist Henry D. (Drysdale) Dakin, 24, and German chemist Friedrich Stolz, 54, isolate adrenaline (epinephrine) from animal glands (see Takamine, 1901).
Britain's Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration deplores the rapid decline in breast feeding, due in part to the employment of married women in industry but mostly to the chronic ill health that makes women incapable of producing milk. The committee's report demonstrates the alarming extent of poverty and ill health in British slums, where in some areas one out of four infants dies in its first 12 months and 33 percent of the children surveyed are hungry.
The National Tuberculosis Association is established in the United States to raise money for research that will fight consumption. The National Lung Association has its beginnings in the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis. It is the first nationwide U.S. volunteer group aimed at conquering a specific disease, and its initial project is a traveling exhibit that features lungs in a bottle and anatomical models. Members of the association give lectures warning against spitting and sharing a drinking cup (see Christmas Seals, 1907).
Sales of Argyrol and Ovoferrin total more than $93,000, netting Albert Barnes and his colleague Herman Hille more than $44,000 in profits (see 1901). They open offices at London and at Sydney, Australia.
Indiana-born Chicago medical school student and shoe-store salesman William Mathias Scholl, 22, patents a mechanical arch support that he calls a Foot-Eazer. Wearing a stiff winged collar and cutaway jacket to make himself look older and advertising himself as "foot doctor to the world," Dr. Scholl will call on local shoe stores and produce a skeleton of the human foot from his pocket to promote the arch support that he will supplement with a line of products such as corn, callus, and bunion pads, cushion insoles, and exercise sandals to ease aching feet. Some will credit him with coining the phrase, "Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise."
The Ladies' Home Journal launches an exposé of the U.S. patent-medicine business (see 1892; 1898; Adams, 1906).
An Easter Sunday pogrom at Kishenev in Bessarabia kills 45 Jews and destroys 600 houses; acting on orders from Russia's able but ruthless minister of the interior Viacheslav Plehve. The police turn a blind eye at the mob running wild in the streets. Plehve does not allow any political assemblies, requires written police permission for even a small social gathering, and does not permit students to walk together in the streets of Moscow or St. Petersburg. Plehve is assassinated July 28, and a Zemstvo congress meets at St. Petersburg in November, demanding that civil liberties be granted and a representative assembly convened (see politics [revolution], 1905).
Helen Keller graduates magna cum laude from Radcliffe College at age 23 (she is the school's first blind graduate) and begins to write about blindness, a subject taboo in women's magazines because so many cases are related to venereal disease (see medicine [Argyrol], 1901; Keller, 1887). John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil executive Henry H. Rogers have paid her tuition and living expenses at Radcliffe; her teacher Anne Sullivan has accompanied her during her college years, reading for her and spelling lectures into her hand; she has learned to speak at Boston's Horace Mann School for the Deaf by feeling the position of the tongue and lips of others, making sounds, and imitating the lip and tongue motions; and she has learned to lip-read by placing her fingers on the lips and throat of the speaker while the words spoken were spelled out on the palm of her hand. Keller's book The Story of My Life appeared in 1902, and she has become a socialist and suffragist as well as an advocate for the handicapped. She will begin lecturing in 1913 to raise money for the American Foundation for the Blind; Anne Sullivan will marry literary critic John Albert Macy next year, but they will separate in 1913; and Sullivan will remain with Keller until she dies in 1936; Keller will continue to work for the blind and deaf until her own death in 1968.
Bethune-Cookman College has its beginnings in the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute for the Training of Negro Girls opened October 3 by Mary McLeod Bethune, 29, in a rented four-room cabin at Daytona, Florida. Bethune makes potato pies for workmen building the nearby Clarendon Hotel, earns $5 for a down payment on some land, uses charred splinters for pencils, mashed elderberries for ink, and a packing case for a desk as she solicits funds from prominent millionaire vacationers to build Faith Hall. She will have 100 pupils with three assistant teachers next year, and within 2 years her five pupils (four girls and her little son) will have grown to 250 (see 1923).
The wireless radio distress signal letters CQD adopted January 1 mean "stop sending and listen" (see SOS, 1906).
United Fruit Company installs commercial radio equipment on its ships and is the first to do so. The firm depends on radio communications to determine when and where bananas are available for loading (see 1910).
The diode thermionic valve invented by English electrical engineer John Ambrose Fleming, 55, is the first electron radio tube (see De Forest, 1909).
Columbia University physicist Michael I. Pupin succeeds after much litigation in obtaining a patent on the concept of loading cells to enhance reception of long-distance telephone calls (see 1892), but calls beyond 200 miles or so remain impossible without some sort of amplification; a mechanical amplifier consisting of a carbon transmitter and an electromagnet receiver is installed in a commercial circuit between New York and Chicago (see De Forest, 1909).
Parker Pen's George S. Parker obtains a patent May 3 for a lever mechanism that makes it easier to fill his pen's rubber sac (see 1888). Parker has gained success with his "Lucky Curve" hard rubber feed bar, which minimizes leakage since it provides a continuous capillary passage between nib and barrel wall (the feed bar is curved at the end, it extends up into the ink chamber to touch the wall of the barrel, and when the pen is placed in the pocket, nib up, the ink all drains into the pen's reservoir). All fountain pens, including Parker's, have barrels of black hard rubber (the only available ink-resistant material that can be easily heated and formed), the upper end of the pen barrel is sealed to maintain a vacuum equal to the weight of the column of ink, careful adjustment of the feed-bar groove's cross-sectional area allows a slow flow of air bubbles that reduce the vacuum and release more ink, and tiny slits cut in the bottom of the ink channel aid capillarity (see "Big Red," 1921).
Journalist-explorer Sir Henry M. Stanley dies at his London home May 10 at age 63. He became a British subject in 1892, won election to Parliament in 1895, was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1899, and retired to a country estate near Pirbright, Surrey.
The 16-year-old London publishing house J. M. Dent & Sons begins publication of low-priced books under the umbrella name Everyman's Library.
London's W. & G. Foyle bookshop has its beginnings as entrepreneurs William and Gilbert Foyle fail their civil-service examinations and advertise their preparation books for sale; finding that a ready market exists for technical texts, they start a business in their North London home and do so well that they will move in 1929 into a building at 119 Charing Cross Road with five warehouse-sized floors.
The American Academy of Arts and Letters is founded by esthetes to uphold the traditional but now embattled 19th-century ideals of "Taste and Beauty."
Nonfiction: The Shame of the Cities by San Francisco-born McClure's magazine managing editor (Joseph) Lincoln Steffens, 38, whose exposé of squalor in America's urban centers creates a sensation; The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus) by German sociologist Max Weber, 40; Mont Saint Michel and Chartres by Henry Adams, whose work is privately printed. His study of medieval life, art, and philosophy will be published in 1913; Europe and the French Revolution (L'Europe et la révolution française) by French historian Albert Sorel, 62, is published in its final (eighth) volume; Literary History of the English People (Histoire littéraire du peuple anglais) by Jean-Jules Jusserand (second of two volumes, the first having appeared 10 years ago); Mr. Burden by Hilaire Belloc; Adolescence by psychologist Granville S. Hall; Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things by Lafcadio Hearn; The Old Farmer and His Almanack by Boston-born Harvard English professor George Lyman Kittredge, 44.
Marxist philosopher Antonio Labriola dies at Rome February 12 at age 60; Sir Leslie Stephen at London February 22 at age 71; Samuel Smiles at London April 16 at age 91; Lafcadio Hearn of a heart attack at Okubo, Japan, September 26 at age 54.
Fiction: The Late Mattia Pascal (Il fu Mattia Pascal) by Italian novelist Luigi Pirandello, 37, whose beautiful wife became an incurable schizophrenic last year after hearing that his father's sulfur mine had flooded, ruining her husband's family and her own; Peter Camenzind by German novelist-poet Hermann Hesse, 27, who has quit a theological seminary in rebellion against his Protestant missionary father and worked as a mechanic and bookseller; Nostromo by Joseph Conrad; The Golden Bowl by Henry James; Hadrian the Seventh by English novelist Frederick William Rolfe, 44 (who calls himself Baron Corvo and fictionalizes the life of the English pontiff Adrian IV of 1154 to 1159); Green Mansions by English naturalist-writer W. H. Hudson, 63, whose Rima the bird-girl gains him his first large success; The Food of the Gods by H. G. Wells; Reginald by Burma-born English short-story writer Saki (H. H. [Hector Hugh] Munro), 35, who takes his pen name from the female cup-bearer in the last stanza of Edward FitzGerald's translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám published in 1859; The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G. K. Chesterton; Lucky Peter (Lykke Per) by Henrik Pontoppidan; Ashes (Cenere) by Grazia Deledda Esau and Jacob (Esau e Jaco) by Joachim Machado de Assis; Cabbages and Kings by Greensboro, N.C.-born New York short-story writer O. Henry (William Sydney Porter), 42, who was charged 8 years ago with embezzling funds from an Austin, Texas, bank in which he worked from 1891 to 1894. Porter fled to Honduras to escape prosecution, returned when he heard his wife was mortally ill, was convicted after her death, and served 3 years of a 5-year prison term; Freckles by Indiana novelist Gene (née Genera Grace) Porter (née Stratton), 39; The Sea Wolf by Jack London, who spends 6 months covering the Russo-Japanese war; Beverly of Graustark and The Day of the Dog by George Barr McCutcheon; Her Infinite Variety and The Happy Average by Brand Whitlock; The Crossing by novelist Winston Churchill, whose historical romance is his fourth bestseller; Rulers of Kings by Gertrude Atherton, whose newest novel has been serialized in Lippincott's magazine.
Kate Chopin dies at her native St. Louis August 22 at age 53.
Poetry: "Alcione" by Gabriele D'Annunzio.
Juvenile: The Tale of Benjamin Bunny and The Tale of Two Bad Mice by Beatrix Potter; The New Treasure Seekers by Edith Nesbit; Five Little Peppers and Their Friends by Margaret Sidney (Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop).
The Salon d'Automne at Paris exhibits paintings by Paul Cézanne, Odilon Redon, and others but is dominated by the canvases Charity and Hope by the late Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, who died in 1898.
Other paintings: Mont Sainte Victoire by Paul Cézanne; Thames by Claude Monet, who begins to concentrate on the Nymphaes (water lilies) that will occupy him until his death in 1926; Arthur Fontaine Reading in His Salon (oil on paper) by Edouard Vuillard; Sideshow by Dutch-born Paris painter (Cornelius Theodora Maria) Kees Van Dongen, 27, who reinterprets neoimpressionist techniques; Harvest Day by German expressionist Emil Nolde (Emil Hansen), 37; The Wedding by Henri Rousseau; Ellen Mary as a Growing Girl and Mother and Child before a Window by Mary Cassatt. Henri Fantin-Latour dies at Bure, Orne, August 25 at age 68.
Sculpture: The Hand of God (bronze) by Auguste Rodin; General Sherman Memorial by Augustus Saint-Gaudens for the southeast entrance to New York's Central Park.
The Christ of the Andes is dedicated at Uspallato Pass on the Chilean-Argentine border to honor the peaceful settlement of disputes between the two countries since declaring their independence from Spain in 1817 and 1816. The 14-ton, 26-foot high monument is the work of Argentine sculptor Mateo Alonzo, who has molded the figure from the bronze of old Argentine cannon.
Art glass designer Emile Galle dies at his native Nancy September 23 at age 58, having developed new techniques of glass making in the art nouveau style.
Panchromatic films are introduced that record color values such as grey tones which correspond in large measure to the visual brightness of colors.
Photographer Eadweard Muybridge dies at Kingston upon Thames, England, May 8 at age 74.
Theater: The Cherry Orchard (Vishnyovyy Sad) by Anton Chekhov 1/17 at the Moscow Art Theater, with Olga Knipper-Chekhova as Mme. Ranevskaya; Riders to the Sea by John Millington Synge 1/25 at Dublin's Moleworth Hall; Pandora's Box (Die Büchse der Pandora) by Frank Wedekind 2/1 at Nuremberg's Intimes Theater (Viennese playwright Karl Kraus, 30, has arranged for the production); The Superstition of Sue by New York playwright Paul Armstrong, 34, 4/4 at the Savoy Theater, with William Friend, Eddie Heron, 8 perfs.; The Daughter of Jorio (La figlia di Iorio) by Gabriele d'Annunzio 3/2 at Milan's Teatro Lirico, with Eleanora Duse; Candida by George Bernard Shaw 4/20 at London's 16-year-old, 400-seat Royal Court Theatre, with Kate Rorke in the title role; Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch by Anne Crawford Flexner (who has adapted two Alice Hegan Rice stories) 9/3 at New York's Savoy Theater, with New York-born actress Mabel Taliaferro, 17, Boston-born actor Thurston Hall, 24, 150 perfs.; The College Widow by George Ade 9/20 at New York's Garden Theater, 278 perfs.; The Music Master by Charles Klein 9/26 at New York's Belasco Theater, with David Warfield, 288 perfs.; How He Lied to Her Husband by George Bernard Shaw 9/26 at the Berkeley Lyceum, with Brooklyn, N.Y.-born actor Arnold Daly, 28; John Bull's Other Island by Shaw 11/1 at London's Royal Court Theatre, with Granville Barker in a satire about Shaw's native Ireland; Summer Folk (Dachniki) by Maksim Gorky in November at St. Petersburg's Kommissarzhevskaya Theater; Leah Kleschna by C. M. S. McClellan 12/12 at the new Manhattan Theater, which Mrs. Fiske and her husband, playwright Harrison Grey Fiske, have rented since 1901 in order to be independent of Charles Frohman's Theatrical Syndicate, with Mrs. Fiske, Charles Cartwright, George Arliss, 631 perfs.; On Baile's Strand by W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory 12/27 at Dublin's new Abbey Theatre off O'Connell Street (English philanthropist Annie Horniman is a friend of Yeats and has paid for the conversion of the old theater in Abbey Street); Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up by James M. Barrie 12/27 at the Duke of York's Theatre, London, with Nina Boucicault, Gerald du Maurier (as Captain Hook and Mr. Darling), Hilda Trevelyan (as Wendy), 150 perfs.
The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) is founded at London by Shakespearean producer Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree with help from actor Johnston Forbes-Robertson, actress Irene Vanbrugh, and playwrights James Barrie, W. S. Gilbert, and Arthur Wing Pinero.
Playwright and short-story writer Anton Chekhov dies of tuberculosis July 2 age 44, having gone to Badenweiler in the Black Forest for his health.
The Loews movie-theater chain has its beginnings in the People's Vaudeville Co. founded November 14 with $100,000 in capital by New York-born restaurant waiter's son Marcus Loew, 34, in partnership with actor David Warfield and Hungarian-born New York furrier-turned-penny arcade operator Adolph Zukor, 31. Loew will open his own first nickelodeon next year in West 23rd Street and will then turn a Cincinnati arcade into a 110-seat movie theater that will draw about 5,000 patrons its first day (see Zukor, 1912; Loews Corp., 1919).
Opera: Jenufa (Jeji Pastorkyna Jenufa, Her Foster-daughter) 1/21 at Brno in Austrian Moravia, with music by Czech composer Leos Janacek, 49; Madama Butterfly 2/17 at Milan's Teatra alla Scala, with music by Giacomo Puccini, who has seen John Luther Long's play Madame Butterfly at London. Staged originally by David Belasco in New York, the play about the opening of Japan is based on the short story "Madame Butterfly," which appeared in the January 1900 issue of Century magazine (a fiasco in its initial production, the new opera has a libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica).
Russian ballet dancer-choreographer Michel Mikhaylovich Fokine, 24, proposes sweeping changes to the management of the Imperial Ballet at St. Petersburg. Fokine made his debut on his 18th birthday, the management rejects all his suggestions, but he will see them accepted. "Dancing should be interpretive," says Fokine. "It should not degenerate into mere gymnastics. The dance should explain the spirit of the actors in the spectacle . . . The ballet must no longer be made up of 'numbers,' 'entries,' and so on. It must show artistic unity of conception. The action of the ballet must never be interrupted to allow the danseuse to respond to the applause of the public" (see 1907).
First performances: Kossuth Symphony by Hungarian composer Béla Bartók (Nagyszentmiklós), 23, 1/13 at Budapest; Symphony No. 2 in B flat major by Vincent d'Indy 2/28 at Paris; Quartet in F by Maurice Ravel 3/5 at the Société Nationale, Paris; In the South (Alassio) Overture by Sir Edward Elgar (knighted this year) 3/18 at London's Covent Garden Theatre; Symphony No. 5 in C sharp minor by Gustav Mahler 10/18 at Cologne.
Composer Antonin Dvorák dies at Prague May 1 at age 62.
The London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) gives its first concert June 9 under the direction of Hungarian-born conductor (and Wagner promoter) Hans Richter, 61.
Chicago's $1 million Orchestra Hall is completed by Daniel Burnham in French Renaissance style at 216 South Michigan Avenue.
Stage musicals: Piff! Paff! Pouff! 4/2 at New York's Casino Theater, with Eddie Foy, music by Jean Schwartz, lyrics by William Jerome, 264 perfs. (plus a week at the Majestic Theater beginning 12/26); Veronique 5/18 at London's Apollo Theatre, with Isabel Jay, music by French composer André (Charles Prosper) Messager, 50, 495 perfs; The Catch of the Season 9/9 at London's Vaudeville Theatre, 621 perfs.; Higgledy-Piggledy 10/12 at New York's Weber Music Hall, with Anna Held, Canadian actress Marie Dressler (originally Leila von Koerber), 34, Fred M. Weber, music by Maurice Levy, lyrics by Edgar Smith, 185 perfs.; The Cingalee, or "Sunny Ceylon" 10/24 at Daly's Theatre, London, with Lily Elsie, book by James Tanner, music by Lionel Monckton, lyrics by Adrian Ross, 391 perfs.; Little Johnny Jones 11/17 at New York's Liberty Theater, with George M. Cohan, his parents (Jerry J. and Helen F.), book, music, and lyrics by Cohan, songs that include "Give My Regards to Broadway" and "Yankee Doodle Boy," 52 perfs.; It Happened in Nordland 12/5 at New York's Lew M. Fields Theater, with Marie Cahill, Harry Davenport, Melbourne-born actress May Robson, 46, music by Victor Herbert, book and lyrics by Glen MacDonough, 154 perfs.; Lady Madcap 12/17 at London's Prince of Wales Theatre, with Lily Elsie, music by Paul A. Rubens, lyrics by Rubens and Percy Greenback, 354 perfs.
Broadway composer John "Honey" Stromberg is found dead in his apartment at his native New York in July at age 49, an apparent suicide.
Popular songs: "Meet Me in St. Louis" by Kerry Mills, lyrics by Andrew Sterling; "Come Take a Trip in My Airship" by Ren Shields, lyrics by George Evans; "Goodbye My Lady Love" by Joseph D. Howard; "Frankie and Johnny" by Hughie Cannon, whose song is published under the title "He Done Me Wrong, or Death of Bill Bailey."
Minstrel entertainer-songwriter Daniel Decatur Emmett dies at Mount Vernon, Ohio, June 28 at age 88; music-hall entertainer Dan Leno (originally George Galvin) at his native London October 31 at age 43, having starred in the Drury Lane's annual Christmas pantomime since 1888 and given a command performance for Edward VII (the first for a music-hall performer) in 1901.
H. L. Doherty wins in men's singles at Wimbledon, Mrs. Chambers in women's singles; Holcombe Ward, 25, wins in U.S. men's singles, May Godfray Sutton, 16, (Br) in women's singles (the first non-American to win).
The Olympic Games held at St. Louis in August attract only 651 athletes, mostly Americans and Canadians (ocean travel is slow and costly, but South Africa sends some Zulu contestants, who fare poorly). The games are part of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition that belatedly celebrates the centennial of the 1803 purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France, and although 12 countries are represented all the competitors in some of the 91 events are Americans. Gold, silver, and bronze medals are awarded for the first time; U.S. athletes win 236 medals, Germans 13, Cubans 9.
Cy Young pitches the first major league "perfect" game May 5 for the Boston Red Sox, facing 27 batters in nine innings and not letting one of them reach first base (see 1890; Cy Young award, 1955).
No World Series is played because John McGraw of the New York Giants refuses to have his team face the Boston Red Sox.
Dartmouth upsets Harvard 11 to 0 November 14 in the first game played at Harvard's new cement football stadium; the largest collegiate sports arena, it has been constructed in 4 months and holds 40,000. A colonnade will be added in 1910 to provide more seats as college football grows to become a major spectator sport (see 1905; Yale Bowl, 1914).
Auction bridge is invented as a variation on the card game whist played since the early 16th century if not longer. The highest bidder names the trump suit (see contract bridge, 1925).
The Ferris wheel from the 1893 Chicago Midway is moved to St. Louis for the International Exposition there.
Colgate Ribbon Dental Cream is introduced by the 98-year-old William Colgate Co. The company will be incorporated in 1908 under the name Colgate & Co., and its dental cream will become the leading U.S. dentifrice (see P&G's Crest, 1955).
The Gillette razor is patented November 15, sales for the year soar to 90,844 (up from just 51 last year), blade sales reach 12.4 million (up from 168), and the figures will soon be multiplied multifold (see 1903). King C. Gillette pays $62,500 to buy out an investor who acquired 500 shares for $250 in 1901; he will begin next year to set up manufacturing plants and sales offices abroad and will himself be bought out in 1910 and retire to southern California, where he will become a fruit grower and gentleman rancher, although he will remain president of the company until 1931 (see 1921).
Paris-born designer Paul Poiret, 25, opens a house of haute couture under his own name, taking business away from the Maison Worth whose founder died in 1895 and for which he has worked. Poiret will introduce the vertical, tight-bottomed hobble skirt (see 1908). The long, tubular, straight-line silhouette introduced by Poiret supplants the waist-cinching S-shape, and he will go on to pioneer hobble skirts in 1910 (see fashion show, 1912).
Cosmetics manufacturer Harriet Hubbard Ayer dies at New York November 23 at age 54.
The Afro-American Realty Company founded by black New York real estate operator Philip A. Payton Jr., 28, guarantees premium rates to Harlem landlords and thus makes good housing available for the first time to black New Yorkers (see 1901). Harlem will become America's largest black community, and it will be a model community until overcrowding in the 1920s turns it into a ghetto.
The Darwin D. Martin house is completed at Buffalo, N.Y., to designs by Frank Lloyd Wright, as is the Susan Lawrence Dana house at Springfield, Ill.
The Hotel Jefferson opens at St. Louis in time to receive visitors to the city's International Exposition.
Ellsworth M. Statler of 1901 Buffalo Exposition fame opens a 2,257-room Inside Inn for St. Louis fairgoers and shows a profit of $300,000 by fall (see 1905).
Philadelphia's Bellevue Stratford Hotel opens in September at South Broad Street and Walnut to replace an earlier structure. Designed in French Renaissance style by Henry Janeway Hardenbergh for Waldorf-Astoria veteran George C. Boldt, now 53, the 400-room hotel will be nearly doubled in size and given a roof garden in 1913 as it becomes the city's social center.
The New York Times moves into a new 25-story Times Tower at Broadway and 42nd Street December 31 and Longacre Square becomes Times Square (Mayor McClellan has issued a proclamation to that effect April 8). The midnight fireworks display that marks the move will become in modified form a New Year's Eve tradition, continuing even after the Times moves to larger quarters in West 43rd Street and the Tower changes hands.
Fire destroys 75 city blocks in the heart of downtown Baltimore February 7 and 8. Firefighters arrive from Washington, D.C., only to find that the threads on their hoses are not compatible with those of the Baltimore hydrants; whipped by a strong wind, the flames take 30 hours to extinguish, having gutted more than 1,300 buildings, but no one is killed.
Fire destroys much of Toronto April 19, but the city will quickly rebuild.
A New York Zoological Park forester observes that the park's native chestnut trees (Castanea dentata) are dying of a strange fungus disease that will later be identified as Endothia parasitica, a bark blight. A Japanese exhibit has introduced the blight, which begins to wipe out the trees, which can rise as high as 130 feet, have canopies 100 feet wide, and bear nuts that have been an important food source. European trees have developed a resistance to the disease through thousands of years of exposure, but by the late 1930s almost the entire range of the native chestnut—9 million acres of forests—will have been destroyed, although several hundred trees in Michigan, Wisconsin, and the southern Appalachians will survive, possibly because they have developed an immunity. By 1950 as many as 4 billion of the trees will be dead, including virtually every adult specimen. Loss of the native chestnuts will require the United States to import millions of pounds of chestnuts each year from Europe, most of them from Italy.
An entente cordiale settles Anglo-French disputes in the Newfoundland fishery.
Hawaiian growers in this decade will use machines to cover fields with thick black mulch paper in long rows, workers will punch holes in the paper to plant slips, suckers, or crowns, and the paper will discourage growth of weeds that would otherwise strangle the plants, making it impossible to grow pineapples on a commercial scale (it takes about 20 months to produce a harvestable, five-pound pineapple). James D. Dole will also find ways to overcome the nematodes, insect pests, and lack of iron in the red soil of Hawaiian pineapple fields.
English farmers are unable to meet the demand for butter, cheese, and lard, much of which is imported—along with Dutch margarine—from Denmark and North America. Most have turned from raising grain and meat animals, which cannot compete with imports, to dairy farming, market gardening, poultry raising, and fruit growing. Most English fruit goes into jams, whose manufacture is being improved.
Britain's Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration publishes a report demonstrating the alarming extent of poverty and ill health in British slums. One out of four infants dies in its first 12 months in some areas, the committee reports, and it deplores the rapid decline in breast-feeding, due in part to the employment of married women in industry, but due mostly to the chronic ill-health that makes women incapable of producing milk. One third of the children surveyed are actually hungry (see School Meals Act, 1906).
A man can work hard and remain healthy on less than 50 grams of protein per day, says New Haven-born physiological chemist Russell Henry Chittenden, 48, who heads Yale University's Sheffield School of Science. In his book Physiological Economy in Nutrition he disputes Atwater and Voit (see 1902), gives evidence to support his contention, claims that he personally feels better on a low-protein diet, and urges such diets for older people.
Xerophthalmia is reported among Japanese infants whose diets are devoid of fats (see Denmark, 1917).
Pure Food Law advocates take space at the St. Louis exposition to dramatize the fact that U.S. foods are being colored with potentially harmful dyes. North Dakota Food Commissioner Edwin F. Ladd reports that "more than 90 percent of the local meat markets in the state were using chemical preservatives, and in nearly every butcher shop could be found a bottle of 'Freezem' 'Preservaline,' or 'Iceine' . . . In the dried beef, in the smoked meats, in the canned bacon, in the canned chipped beef, boracic acid or borates is a common ingredient."
The hamburger gains popularity at the St. Louis Exposition, where the chopped beef specialty is fried and sold by German immigrants who live in south St. Louis.
French's Cream Salad Mustard is introduced by R. T. French Co. of Rochester, N.Y.; milder than other mustards, it will become the world's largest selling prepared mustard, outselling all others combined in the U.S. market.
James D. Dole enlarges his Hawaiian Pineapple Co. cannery (see 1903). He increases production to 8,810 cases and will raise that figure next year to 25,022 (see 1906).
Campbell's Pork and Beans is introduced by the Joseph Campbell Preserve Co. (see soup, 1898).
The Campbell Kid cartoon characters created by Philadelphia artist Grace Wiederseim (née Gebbie) will be used for decades to advertise Campbell's products (see Joseph Campbell Co., 1905).
Postum Co. introduces Elijah's Manna; its name arouses the wrath of clergymen; Britain denies C. W. Post a trademark for his new corn flakes, and he quickly renames them Post Toasties (see 1897; 1901). He has introduced a second cereal drink called Monk's Brew, which is exactly the same as Postum but sells for only 5¢ per package, about one-fifth of Postum's price, and has thereby put most of his competitors out of business (unsold packages of Monk's Brew are returned to the factory and repackaged as Postum). Postum Co. is the world's largest single user of molasses. It netted $1.3 million last year, and C. W. Post's personal fortune is estimated at $10 million (see 1906).
Peanut butter is introduced at the St. Louis Exposition as a health food for the elderly (see 1890; hydrogenation, 1901; Peter Pan, 1928; Skippy, 1932).
Brewer Frederick Pabst dies of a pulmonary embolism at Milwaukee January 1 at age 67 (see blue ribbon, 1893). He leaves an estate valued at $12 million, and his brewery continues to rival that of Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis.
Tennessee distiller Jack Daniel wins a gold medal for his whiskey at the St. Louis Exposition, beating out single-malt Scotch whiskies and Irish whiskies (see square bottle, 1897). Now 55, Daniel will turn the business over to his nephew Lemuel Motlow in 1907 and dies of gangrene in 1911; Motlow's descendants will carry on the business, leaching the product of the stills through vats filled with 10 feet of charcoal and never producing more than 300 gallons per day.
Poland Spring Water wins top honors as "the best spring water in the country" at the St. Louis World's Fair (see 1893).
Dr. Pepper is introduced at the St. Louis World's Fair but will remain a southwestern soda-pop brand until the mid-1920s (see 1886).
Iced tea is created by some accounts at the St. Louis fair. English tea concessionaire Richard Blechynden, sent to St. Louis to promote Indian and Sinhalese black teas, has tried to attract fairgoers with a troupe of colorfully-dressed Sinhalese, who serve hot tea in a special pavilion in Muslim style. Frustrated when sweltering fairgoers pass him by, he pours his tea over ice and serves it cold, but evidence will be produced of prior invention. Green tea and Formosan continue to outsell black tea five to one in the United States.
Ice cream cones make their debut at the St. Louis fair. By one account the inventor is local confectioner Charles E. Minches, who gets the idea of filling a pastry cone with two scoops of ice cream July 23 and later sells cones at the fair. By another account Syrian immigrant pastry maker Ernest A. Hamwi sells wafer-like Zalabia pastry at a fairground concession, serving them with sugar and other sweets. When a neighboring ice cream stand runs out of dishes, Hamwi rolls some of his wafers into cornucopias, lets them cool, and sells them to the ice cream concessionaire. But an ice cream cone mold patent (#746,971) was issued on December 15 of last year to Italian-born New York pushcart magnate Italo Marchiony, now 36, who claims that he has been making the cones since 1896.
German-born, Iowa-raised Chicago candy salesman Emil J. Brach, 45, opens a store under the name "Brach's Palace of Sweets" at the corner of North Avenue and Towne Street, with a factory making caramels behind the 18 x 65-foot shop he operates with help from his wife and two sons. Brach saved $15,000 as a salesman and candy jobber but lost it all investing in a candy-manufacturing venture that failed. Undercutting the competition, he sells his caramels at 20¢/lb., his 14-year-old son Frank delivers caramels by horse-drawn carriage to a downtown department store, and E. J. Brach will grow to be the largest U.S. candy maker.
William Randolph Hearst's San Francisco Examiner begins publishing articles February 23 that call Japanese laborers a menace; the state legislature at Sacramento adopts a resolution to take action against Japanese immigration (see Asiatic Exclusion League, 1905),
1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910
Astronomy
Jacobus Cornelius Kapteyn [b. Barneveld, Netherlands, January 19, 1851, d. Amsterdam, Netherlands, June 18, 1922] discovers that proper motions of stars are not random, but that there are two distinct star streams in the galaxy, traveling in opposite directions. Further research by other astronomers will show that this effect is caused by rotation of the galaxy, which had not been suspected previously. See also 1927 Astronomy.
Johannes Franz Hartmann [b. Erfurt, Germany, January 11, 1865, d. Göttingen, Germany, September 13, 1936] reports the discovery of the stationary calcium lines in the spectrum of the binary Delta Orionis caused by the presence of an interstellar cloud of atoms. This is the first discovery of interstellar matter.
George Ellery Hale sets up the Mount Wilson Observatory in California, and construction starts on the Mount Wilson 2.5 m (100-inch) telescope. See also 1908 Astronomy.
Biology
Sir Arthur Harden [b. Manchester, England, October 12, 1865, d. Bourne End, Buckinghamshire, England, June 17, 1940] discovers the first coenzyme, a compound that is not a protein but that is required for the protein to act as an enzyme. See also 1905 Biology.
Hans Karl von Euler-Chelpin of Sweden [b. Augsburg, Germany, February 15, 1873, d. Stockholm, Sweden, November 7, 1964] studies the action of enzymes in relation to catalysis. See also 1929 Biology.
Blood Immunity and Blood Relationship by George Henry Falkiner Nuttall [b. San Francisco, July 5, 1862, d. London, December 16, 1937] shows that phyla, classes, orders, and genera of organisms can be distinguished by serological methods; that is, by examining the proteins in the organisms' blood.
Ivan Pavlov of Russia wins the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for his study of the physiology of digestion. See also 1895 Biology.
Chemistry
Richard Wilhelm Heinrich Abegg, German chemist [b. Danzig (Gdansk, Poland), January 9, 1869, d. Köslin (Koszalin, Poland), April 3, 1910], suggests that the outer electron shell governs the chemical properties of an atom. Noting that the inert gases (neon, argon, krypton, xenon, and radon) all have eight electrons and are especially stable, he proposes what comes to be called Abegg's rule: that the difference of the maximum positive and negative valence of an element tends to be eight. See also 1916 Chemistry.
Frederick Stanley Kipping [b. Manchester, England, August 16, 1863, d. Criccieth, Caernarvonshire, Wales, May 1, 1949] discovers silicones, a class of polymers that because of their stability, ability to repel water, slipperiness, and lack of reaction with living tissues become important in many applications, notably in prosthetic devices such as artificial ear lobes and breasts.
Sir William Ramsay of England wins the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his discovery of inert gas elements and their placement in the periodic table. See also 1898 Chemistry.
Communication
Ira Washington Rubel in New York accidentally invents offset printing about this time when he observes that a rubber pad can transmit an image from a lithographic plate to paper.
L.C. Smith & Bros. introduces a replacement for its Smith Premier typewriter, one that has a shift to produce capital letters. The original Smith Premier (date uncertain) uses two keyboards, one for capital letters and another for lowercase. See also 1872 Communication.
Reginald Fessenden demonstrates the transmission of speech by the modulation of a radio wave generated by his high-frequency alternator. The water-cooled microphone is connected directly to the transmitting circuit. More satisfactory results, however, will be obtained a few years later with continuous-wave transmitters using vacuum tube oscillators. See also 1900 Communication; 1906 Communication.
American Alphons Van der Grinten develops a method for the map of Earth in which countries near the North and South Pole are represented more to their true size than the Mercator projection. See also 1568 Communication.
Charles Guillaume discovers that a kilogram of water has a volume of 1000.028 cm3 at 4°C, not 1000 cm3 as planned by the designers of the metric system. Since this is also the definition of a liter, the liter is redefined as being 1000.028 cm3.
Earth science
Weather Forecasting as a Problem in Mechanics and Physics by Vilhelm Frimann Koren Bjerknes [b. Oslo, Norway, March 14, 1862, d. Oslo, April 9, 1951] is one of the first scientific studies of weather forecasting. See also 1918 Earth science.
Electronics
John Ambrose Fleming [b. Lancaster, England, November 29, 1849, d. Sidmouth, England, April 18, 1945] files a patent for the first vacuum tube. Also called the "Fleming valve," it is a diode that acts as a rectifier, a device that makes current flow in a single direction instead of alternating back and forth; hence, it changes alternating current (a.c.) to direct current (d.c.). See also 1883 Physics; 1907 Communication.
Energy
Ultraviolet lamps are introduced.
Johann Phillip Ludwig Elster [b. Bad Blankenburg, Germany, December 24, 1854, d. Bad Harzburg, Saxony, Germany, April 6, 1920] and Hans Geitel devise the first practical photoelectric cell, although their earliest models go back to 1896. In a photoelectric cell, electrons are emitted when the cell is struck by light. See also 1888 Physics; 1905 Physics.
Willis R. Whitney [b. Jamestown, New York, August 22, 1868, d. Schenectady, New York, January 9, 1958] invents a metalized heat-treated carbon filament for light bulbs that leads to the development of the tungsten filament, which continues in use to this day. Tungsten lasts longer than other materials because of its high melting point of 3400°C. See also 1880 Energy.
Food & agriculture
C.W. Post calls his new brand of corn flakes "Elijah's Manna" at first, but finds that Christian ministers oppose it under that name. He renames the cereal "Post Toasties." See also 1897 Food & agriculture.
Materials
Leon Guillet [b. St. Nazaire, France, July 11, 1873, d. Paris, May 9, 1946] develops the first stainless steels, but unaccountably fails to note that they resist corrosion. See also 1898 Materials; 1911 Materials.
W.C. Parkin in France develops a nonflammable celluloid by adding a soluble metallic salt to ordinary celluloid. See also 1862 Materials.
Mathematics
David Hilbert develops a model for his rigorous version of Euclidean geometry within the system of arithmetic, demonstrating that if there are no contradictions in arithmetic, then there are also none in geometry. See also 1899 Mathematics.
Ernst Zermelo proves that every set can be well ordered (that is, has only subsets with first members), but in the process uses the axiom of choice, which engenders great criticism by fellow mathematicians. It will later be determined that the well-ordered set theorem is equivalent to the axiom of choice, so that both must be accepted or rejected together. See also 1883 Mathematics; 1938 Mathematics.
Medicine & health
Army surgeon William Crawford Gorgas [b. Mobile, Alabama, October 3, 1854, d. London, July 3, 1920] is put in charge of disease control during the building of the Panama Canal. He develops such effective measures for controlling mosquitoes that both malaria and yellow fever are wiped out in the region around the canal. See also 1914 Transportation.
Together with Christian Bohr, Schack August Steenberg Krogh, Danish physiologist, publishes a work demonstrating that carbon dioxide reduces the capacity of hemoglobin to bind oxygen. This is the first explanation of how the blood transports and releases oxygen to tissues. The discovery becomes known as the Bohr effect. See also 1862 Biology; 1918 Medicine & health.
Edward L. Thorndike introduces statistics as an objective tool in psychological research. See also 1898 Biology.
Physics
Ernest Rutherford's Radioactivity is published. It describes nuclear radiation in terms of alpha, beta, and gamma rays and reports his discovery that radioactivity is caused by the transformation of one element into another. See also 1903 Physics; 1908 Chemistry.
J.J. Thomson's "On the Structure of the Atom" proposes the "plum-pudding model" of the atom, in which the electrons are embedded in a sphere of positive electricity. A different idea appears in "Kinetics of a System of Particles Illustrating the Line and Band Spectrum and the Phenomena of Radioactivity" by Hantaro Nagaoka [b. Nagasaki, Japan, August 15, 1865, d. Tokyo, December 11, 1950], which includes Nagaoka's "Saturnian model" of the atom, in which a positive nucleus is surrounded by a ring of thousands of electrons. See also 1913 Physics.
Bertram Borden Boltwood [b. Amherst, Massachusetts, July 27, 1870, d. Hancock Point, Maine, August 15, 1927], Herbert McCoy [b. 1870, d. 1945], and Robert Strutt independently discover that radium is a decay product of uranium. See also 1898 Physics.
Hendrik Lorentz anticipates relativity in a paper by introducing the notion of "corresponding states," although he maintains that there is an ether. See also 1905 Physics.
Charles Glover Barkla [b. Widnes, England, June 27, 1877, d. Edinburgh, Scotland, October 23, 1944] discovers that X rays are transverse waves, like those of light, and not longitudinal waves, as had been previously thought. See also 1895 Physics; 1917 Physics.
Ludwig Prandtl [b. Freising, Germany, February 4, 1875, d. Göttingen, Germany, August 15, 1953] discovers a flowing liquid in a tube has a thin boundary layer adjacent to the walls of the tube that does not flow as fast as the rest of the liquid.
Lord Rayleigh of England wins the Nobel Prize for physics for his discovery of argon. See also 1892 Chemistry.
Tools
Reginald Fessenden develops a depth finder (fathometer) that uses electromagnetic waves. See also 1900 Tools; 1938 Tools.
Christian Hülsmeyer in Düsseldorf patents a detection system based on reflected radio waves, an early version of radar. See also 1900 Tools; 1931 Tools.
Transportation
Benjamin Holt [b. 1849, d. 1920] designs the modern tracked vehicle. See also 1908 Food & agriculture.
The Trans-Siberian Railway, started in 1891, is completed in Russia; it links Moscow to Vladivostok.