1911: Information and Much More from Answers.com
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A 60-horsepower Glenn H. Curtiss plane flown by civilian pilot Eugene Ely lands on a specially rigged deck platform aboard the U.S. Navy's armored cruiser Pennsylvania January 18. Ropes attached to sandbags brakes the plane's speed (see 1912).
A Mexican revolution begins May 25 as President Porfirio Díaz resigns under pressure, boards the private train of British construction engineer John Body, and voyages with Body to France (see 1910). Mestizo revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, 31, has taken the city of Cuautla in March and closed the road to Mexico City. He enters Cuernavaca with 5,000 men, and he brings them to the support of Francisco Madero, who has led a military campaign against Díaz and established a new capital May 11 at Ciudad Juarez; Madero enters Mexico City on a white horse in June, Zapata meets with him and asks that he bring pressure on the provisional president left behind by Díaz to return lands to the former Indian communal system of ownership (the ejidos), Madero refuses and demands that Zapata's guerrilla force be disbanded. He offers Zapata money to buy the land, but Zapata refuses. Teacher Otilio Montaño helps Zapata prepare the Plan of Ayala, whose signers vow to return lands that were stolen from the people, expropriating one third of the property occupied by large haciendas with compensation; haciendas that do not accept the plan will lose their property without compensation under the plan. Zapata adopts the slogan "Land and Liberty!" ("Tierra y Libertad"), and exploited peons begin breaking up the nation's large land holdings, distributing farmland among the campesinos. The provisional president sends troops to battle Zapata's guerrillas, and Madero makes himself president November 6, beginning an administration that will continue for 15 months (see 1913).
A military coup establishes a new Honduras "banana republic" favorable to the interests of planter Samuel Zemurray, who for the past 6 years has been shipping bananas from lands he has bought along the country's Cuyamel River. Now 34, he loans former Honduras president Gen. Manuel Bonilla enough money to buy the yacht Hornet, sends him out to the yacht in his own private launch at Biloxi, Miss., with a case of rifles, a machine gun, and ammunition, and provides him with the mercenary services of Guy "Machine Gun" Molony and Lee Christmas, now 48 (see 1897). When Bonilla and his cohorts oust the old Honduras government, Zemurray gains valuable concessions.
Canada's Liberal Party loses power and Prime Minister Wilfred Laurier goes down to defeat, partly over the issue of a reciprocal trade treaty signed with the United States, partly because his decision to build an independent Canadian Navy has pleased neither imperialists (who have called the aging vessels that he acquired Laurier's "tin pot navy") nor nationalists (whose leader Henri Bourassa has complained in his new Montreal newspaper Le Devoir that it would be placed under British command in any British war) (see 1909). The Conservatives regain a majority at Ottawa, and Nova Scotia-born party leader Robert (Laird) Borden, 57, becomes prime minister, a post he will hold until 1920.
Californians vote in a special election October 10 to amend the state's constitution to permit recall of elected officials, enactment of laws and constitutional amendments by initiative, and repeal of laws by referendum. Sacramento-born lawyer Hiram (Warren) Johnson, now 45, won election to the governorship last year with support from the progressive Lincoln-Roosevelt League, challenging the dominant group in the Republican Party with the slogan, "Kick the Southern Pacific out of politics" (see Fiction [Frank Norris novel], 1901). In his inaugural address January 3 the plain-spoken Johnson has said, "Nearly every governmental problem that involves the health, the happiness, or the prosperity of the state has arisen because some private interest has intervened to exploit either the resources or politics of the state." Politicians will be paying people to sign recall petitions by 1914, and many local and state officials will be recalled, but no effort to hold a recall election for a governor will succeed until 1921.
The Black Hand secret society founded at Belgrade May 9 works to reunite Serbs living within the Austrian and Ottoman empires with their kinspeople in Serbia. "Union or Death" ("Ujedinjenje ili Smrt") is the society's slogan, but while the Black Hand will influence Serbian policies in the Balkan wars, its Belgrade-born leader, Col. Dragutin Dimitrijevic, 34, will clash with the Serbian government (see Sarajevo, 1914).
Britain's House of Lords gives up its veto power August 10 under the Parliament Act passed under pressure from Prime Minister Asquith, who threatens to create enough peers to carry the bill.
Britain's House of Commons votes for the first time to pay its members regular salaries. Each MP is to receive £400 per year under terms of the measure adopted August 10, 6 weeks after the coronation of George V.
An act of Parliament establishes a naval counterpart to the MI5 military intelligence service created 2 years ago (His Majesty's Secret Service will later become MI6 and engage only in foreign intelligence). Capt. Sir George Mansfield-Smith Cumming, 52, Royal Navy, heads the agency, writes only in green ink, signs his papers "C," regards foreign espionage as great sport, is considered an eccentric, and will run the service until his death in 1923.
Russia's premier P. A. Stolypin is assassinated September 1 at age 49 in the presence of Nicholas II at the Kiev Opera House, having pushed through some comparatively liberal and human policies since his appointment in 1906 and obliged the reactionary czar to accept, albeit grudgingly, some limitations on his autocratic power. An informer for the czar's secret police fires a revolver at point-blank range.
Former Boer general Pieter Arnoldus Cronjé dies at Potchefstroom, Transvaal, February 4 at age 74; Boer political leader Stephanus Jacobus Du Toit in South Africa's Cape Province May 29 at age 63 (approximate), having been instrumental in making Afrikaans the country's official language.
Egyptian nationalist Ahmad Arabi al-Misri dies at Cairo September 21 at age 72, having returned from exile by British permission 10 years ago.
Italy declares war on the Ottoman Turks September 9, lands a force at Tripoli October 5, and occupies other coastal towns. Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti, 68, has intitially resisted the war, but Italian planes bomb an oasis on the Tripoli coast November 1 (the first offensive use of aircraft), and Cairo declares martial law November 2 to quell unrest in Egypt. Austrian army chief of staff and commander in chief Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, 58, calls for war against Italy and is dismissed (but see 1914); pacifist Ernesto T. Moneta, now 78, shared the Nobel Peace Prize 4 years ago after presiding over an International Peace Conference at Milan, but he supports the war against Turkey, calling it a "civilizing mission." Rome announces annexation of Libya, Tripolitania, and Cyrenaica November 5. Constantinople refuses to recognize the action (see 1912).
A revolution begins in China that will end the 267-year-old Qing dynasty of the Manchus, propel China into the 20th century, and begin the decline of such customs as having men wear humiliating pigtails and having women's feet painfully deformed by binding them (see 1908). China is proclaimed a republic in February, revolution breaks out in October, unrest spreads through the country, young women leave a mission school to form a regiment, women go into battle at their own initiative, wearing men's clothes, and throw homemade bombs on Nanjing from a hill above the city, but bloodshed overall is minimal. Chinese revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen, 45, returns from 16 years of exile in Hawaii, England, and the United States; the first graduate of Hong Kong's new College of Medicine, Sun is elected president of the United Provinces of China December 29 by a revolutionary provisional assembly at Nanjing, and industrialist Zhang Jian (Chang Chien), now 58, serves as minister of agriculture and commerce (see 1912).
Mongolia declares her independence from China, but the Chinese will not recognize the independence of the new government at Ulan Bator until 1946 (see 1921).
Australian voters oust the Liberal Party government in October elections as drought in Western Australia hits new wheat growers; a Labor Party government headed by Jack Scaddan takes power.
Munich police begin fingerprinting gypsies (Roma) for the Central Office for Gypsy Affairs that was established in 1899 (see crime [Galton], 1885). Other German states supply names and photographs, and by 1925 more than 14,000 names will have been collected as the states and municipalities adopt measures to combat gypsies, travelers, and vagrants (see 1929).
The Mines and Works Act (Color Bar Act) adopted by South Africa's all-white Parliament bans strikes by miners and reserves skilled and semiskilled jobs in the mines of Transvaal and the Orange Free State for whites. Pushed through by trader unionists along with a Native Labor Regulation Act, it marks the beginning of racial discrimination in the country's workforce (see Gandhi, 1906; African National Congress, 1912).
Comanche chief Quanah Parker dies in his house near Fort Sill, Oklahoma, February 23 at age 65.
The first International Women's Day March 8 produces rallies in Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Switzerland to protest lack of representation by women in trade unions.
Militant English suffragists continue their campaign to win the vote. "We are here to claim our rights as women, not only to be free, but to fight for freedom," says Christabel Pankhurst in a speech March 23. Composer Ethel Smyth has joined the movement, dresses in a Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers, smokes a pipe, and heaves a paper-wrapped brick through the ground-floor window of the Home Secretary, an action that sends her for 2 months to Holloway Gaol, where she writes "The March of the Women"—battle song of the WSPU. Other militants burn the words "Votes For Women" into the turf of golf courses, temporarily ruining greens and fairways to press their point.
"Feminism is a movement that seems to me self-condemned in its very name," writes Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, 45. "It is a 'feminine' idea in the bad sense of that word. Men, too, have their particular problems, but they haven't invented 'masculinism.'" (see West, 1913).
Portuguese women get the vote April 30.
California women gain suffrage by constitutional amendment (see New York, 1917).
The National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (NAOWS) is founded at New York during a convention of state antisuffrage groups. Nursery school pioneer and philanthropist Josephine Dodge (née Jewell), now 56, heads the new organization and argues that giving women the vote will diminish their ability to effect social reforms by working in their communities.
Chicago's mayor closes the city's Everleigh Club following a campaign subsidized by rival madams to put the rich Everleigh sisters out of business (see 1900). They have published an illustrated brochure to advertise their posh bordello but are content to take their $1 million in earnings and retire to New York.
The literary magazine Seito (Bluestocking) that begins publication in September at Tokyo marks the start of a women's liberation movement launched by feminist Raicho (née Haru) Hiratsuka, 25. Her father helped draft the constitution of 1889 and the civil code that is so heavily weighted against women. Raicho has married a man 5 years her junior but has refused to register the marriage, since that would mean forfeiting all rights to her husband. She has registered her children under her own name and her husband has supported her in this, testifying that the children were his and were not illegitimate. The government had insisted that the couple was not legally married, but the issue has been decided in Hiratsuka's favor. Seito will be suppressed after its February 1916 issue and the status of Japanese women will remain low (see 1919).
China's political and social revolution begins the decline in selling young women into matrimony and binding girls' feet in childhood, a practice that has been popular in much of the country since the 16th century. All toes except the big toe of girls aged four to six, sometimes younger, are bent under the foot and pulled back toward the heel by binding them so tightly that toes may putrefy and sometimes even drop off. The foot is painful for a year, until it is withered into a stump, making walking difficult without assistance. Often a foot is broken or permanently crippled, and once maimed it cannot be unbound without great pain. Especially in northern China, where fewer women are needed to work in the rice fields, girls' feet are subjected to the painful deformation partly to symbolize women's dependence on men, partly to signify a family's wealth and status (although many poor families bind their daughters' feet in hopes that it will make the girls more attractive to rich suitors), and partly because men find the gait of woman taking tiny, delicate steps on "lily feet" erotic (somewhat like the gait of Western women wearing high heels); to touch such a foot is, for a Chinese man, comparable to touching a woman's breast in Western society (see 1919).
Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen arrives at the South Pole December 14 with four fellow Norwegians and 17 ravenous huskies (see Northwest Passage, 1906; Shackleton, 1909). Now 39, Amundsen left Norway in June of last year aboard the old Nansen ship Fram, telling no one except his brother that he intended to reach the South Pole instead of drifting across the North Pole. He and his men have survived on seal blubber, appeasing the sledge dogs by killing one and feeding it to the others, and are the first to reach the Pole, having discovered a 500-mile-long range of mountains with peaks rising above 13,000 feet that they have named after Norway's Queen Maud. Five British explorers led by Robert Falcon Scott, now 43, have set up a base 60 miles farther from the Pole than the one established by Amundsen; supported by the Royal Geographical Society, they will be less lucky (see 1912).
U.S. Postal Savings service begins January 3 at 48 second-class post offices under terms of legislation signed last June by President Taft. Deposits reach $11 million in 11 months, and the money is distributed among 2,710 national and state banks.
The Principles of Scientific Management by Frederick Winslow Taylor of 1898 Taylor-White steel-making fame summarizes results of the inventor-engineer's "time and motion studies." Now 55, efficiency expert Taylor will explain his "Taylorism" to a congressional committee next year, focusing on what a working man can achieve in 10 seconds when directed by scientific principles and thereby increasing the standard of living; although the congressmen will be hostile to his theories, Taylorism will be widely adopted in industry to eliminate wasted effort and make labor more productive.
Motion Study by Fairfield, Me.-born engineer Frank B. (Bunker) Gilbreth, 43, and his Oakland, Calif.-born wife, Lillian, 33, is based on a systematic investigation and analysis of workers' motions and the amount of time it takes for a worker to carry out a specific task. The couple has applied social sciences to industrial management, with emphasis on the worker rather than on non-human factors
The Triangle shirtwaist factory on the top three floors of New York's 10-story Asch Building at Washington Place and Greene Street has a four-alarm fire March 25 that kills 141 people, 125 of them Italian and Jewish seamstresses aged 13 to 23, who are unable to escape (see 1908). Some 500 women and 50 men are employed in the factory, working from 7:30 in the morning until 6 at night, mostly for $6 to $8 per week, under conditions so crowded that their chairs are dovetailed. Factory owners Max Blanck and Isaac Harris have locked all exits to the roof lest employees steal the shirtwaists, take them to the roof, and drop them to accomplices in the street below. Oil-soaked rags and lint lie ankle deep on the floor beneath each sewing machine, and someone has apparently lighted a cigarette and carelessly thrown the match, still burning, onto the floor, which has burst into flames. Although the factory is far more modern than many of the city's sweatshops, there is no sprinkler system, a fire escape collapses, firetruck extension ladders reach only to the sixth floor, water from firehoses reaches only to the seventh floor, and screaming young girls leap or fall from the loft building, some of them holding hands, to escape the flames. Their bodies are buried in a common grave at Mount Zion Cemetery in Maspeth, Queens, and the tragedy brings new demands for better working conditions: a protest meeting at the Metropolitan Opera House in early April brings shouts of "Down with the capitalist legislature!" and the like. Settlement-house worker Henry Moskowitz introduces a resolution calling on the legislature to make a thorough investigation of safety conditions and pass tough new laws.
Britain has a nationwide strike of transport workers in August as Labour Party leader Keir Hardie exhorts workers. With famine looming, riots erupt at Liverpool August 8 and troops open fire, killing two demonstrators. Some 50,000 troops are rushed to London to restore order.
A British Trade Disputes act guarantees the right to strike and to picket peacefully.
A limited British National Insurance program legislated by Parliament in December provides unemployment insurance for 2.25 million workers in trades such as building and engineering that are especially subject to layoffs (see workmen's compensation insurance, 1897). Funded by contributions from workers, employers, and the state, the program provides benefits for a maximum of 15 weeks.
International Business Machines Co. (IBM) has its beginnings in the holding company Computing-Tabulating Recording Co. (C-T-R) created at Elmira, N.Y., by Charles R. Flint of 1892 United States Rubber Co. fame through a consolidation of the 11-year-old International Time Recording Co., the 10-year-old Computing Scale Co. of America, the 4-year-old Day Time Register Co., and the 3-year-old Syracuse Time Recording Co., all of which make time clocks for factories and offices (see Watson, 1924).
German-born metallurgist Mauricio (originally Moritz) Hochschild, 30, arrives in Chile to begin a career as ore buyer. He will pioneer in the use of low-grade tin ore not heretofore considered commercially useful, move his operations to Bolivia in 1921, and grow to control about 30 percent of Bolivian tin production (see politics, 1952).
Denver-born Washington, D.C., gold-mining heiress Evalyn Walsh McLean, 25, buys the Hope Diamond for $180,000 (see 1908). She eloped with the handsome Washington Post heir Edward B. (Beale) "Ned" McLean 3 years ago, visited Paris on her wedding trip in 1909 and paid Cartier $120,000 for the 94.8-carat Star of the East diamond, visited Paris again last year following the death of her father and received a visit from Pierre Cartier, who tried to sell her the stone; he has traveled to Washington to make the sale (see 1949).
Missouri becomes the first state to provide public aid to mothers of dependent children; 18 states will have aid-to-mothers statutes by 1913, but strict eligibility standards and the fact that few eligible women apply for assistance will make the laws applicable to only a small percentage of needy mothers (see medicine, 1921).
The National Urban League has its beginnings in the League of Urban Conditions founded at New York in October to ameliorate the economic situation of blacks. Created by a merger of the 5-year-old Committee for Improving the Industrial Conditions of Negroes in New York and National League for the Protection of Colored Women with the 1-year-old Committee on Urban Conditions Among Negroes, the interracial organization will shorten its name by 1919, and as thousands of blacks migrate later in the century from the South to northern cities, the League will help them find jobs and housing, establishing affiliates in other cities to broaden its scope.
Financier John W. "Bet-a-Million" Gates dies at Paris August 9 at age 56; Prudential Insurance Co. founder (and former U.S. senator from New Jersey) John Fairfield Dryden following gall bladder surgery at Newark November 24 at age 72, having built a $50 million fortune.
Wall Street's Dow Jones Industrial Average closes December 30 at 81.68, up slightly from 81.36 at the end of 1910.
F. W. Woolworth Corp. is founded with capitalization of $65 million (see 1896). The chain has grown to have 560 stores in America and Europe; its founder, now 61, determines to build the world's tallest building, and ground is broken November 11 for its construction (see real estate, 1913).
The U.S. Supreme Court breaks up John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company trust May 15, ruling in the case of Standard Oil Co. of N.J. v. United States. But the court rules only against "unreasonable" restraints of trade, where a company has "purpose or intent" to exercise monopoly power in violation of the Sherman Act of 1890 (Chief Justice Edward D. White writes the majority opinion but does not define "reasonable" restraint). The trust is reorganized into five separate corporations plus some smaller ones: Standard Oil of New Jersey will later be called Esso and then Exxon; Standard of California (SoCal) and Standard of Kentucky will join with SoCal to create Chevron; Standard of Indiana, of Kansas, and of Nebraska will combine to create Amoco; Standard of Ohio (Sohio), Standard of New York and Vacuum Oil will combine to create Socony-Vacuum, later Mobil, and Anglo-American Oil (see 1902). Also Atlantic Refining and Prairie Oil & Gas together will become Atlantic Richfield beginning in 1967 and then become Arco; two pipeline companies will combine with Galena-Signal Oil to create Ashland Oil; and four pipeline companies will become part of Pennzoil (see South Penn Oil, 1889). Four other Standard Oil Co. pipeline companies will become Buckeye Partners. Now worth about $300 million after having made large philanthropic gifts, Rockefeller will have a net worth of about $900 million by the end of 1913.
E. W. Marland brings in a gusher on his Oklahoma property in May (see 1908). A retired Carnegie Steel executive has provided him with new financial backing; he will open the Blackwell field next year, build a refinery at Ponca City, found Marland Oil Co. in 1920, and increase his holdings to control an estimated 10 percent of world oil production (see 1928; Slick, 1912).
An electric self-starter invented by C. F. Kettering improves automobile safety. Cadillac boss Henry M. Leland gives Kettering's Dayton Engineering Laboratories (Delco) a contract to supply 4,000 self-starters after losing a good friend who died after his jaw was broken by a crank handle while trying to start the balky engine of a woman's Cadillac (see Leland, 1909). By 1916 fully 90 percent of U.S. production cars will have electric self-starters, but they will have cranks as well; Leland's cars, like those of his competitors, will continue until next year to have kerosene headlamps (see Ford, 1919; General Motors, 1918).
The first SAE handbook on standardization is published by the 6-year-old Society of Automotive Engineers. Beginning with spark plugs and carburetor flanges, the SAE will standardize screw threads, bolts, nuts, and all other automotive components (see lubricating oil, 1926).
An appeals court reverses a lower court's decision that favored George B. Selden's 8-year-old association against Ford Motor Company, which has refused to pay royalties (see 1909). The higher court rules that the 1895 Selden patent was based on a two-cycle Brayton engine whereas Ford has been using a four-cycle Otto engine that is fundamentally different (the Selden patents are about to expire anyway). Ford has therefore not infringed on Selden's patents, says the court, and is not obligated to pay any compensation to the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers. The association has received $5.8 million from other automakers (Selden himself has received only $200,000, the rest having gone to lawyers, management executives, sales promotion, and production commissions).
Chevrolet Motor Co. is founded by former General Motors head W. C. Durant (see 1910). He teams up with racing car driver Louis Chevrolet, now 32, who has been in the United States since 1901, and they produce the first Chevrolet motorcars in a New York plant at 57th Street and 11th Avenue (see 1915).
The first Indianapolis 500 (-mile) motorcar race is held May 30.
New York removes tolls on its 8-year-old Williamsburg Bridge at midnight July 19.
The last horse-drawn bus of the London General Omnibus Company goes out of service. The city had 1,142 licensed horse-drawn buses at the end of October 1910 and the same number of motor buses, but while at least one horse-drawn bus will continue running (over Waterloo Bridge) until 1916, the horse is now rapidly being replaced by motorbuses and motorcars and trucks in major world cities.
Glenn H. Curtis receives the Collier Trophy established this year by Collier's magazine publisher Robert J. Collier for "the greatest achievement in aeronautics in America, with respect to improving the performance, efficiency, and safety of air vehicles, the value of which has been thoroughly demonstrated by actual use during the preceding year." Now 35, Collier is president of the Aero Club of America and an ardent amateur pilot.
The six-passenger Blériot Berline biplane built for Parisian Henri Deutsch de la Neurthe is the first airplane with an enclosed passenger cabin (see Bellanca, 1917).
Swabian-born coppersmith's son Ernst (Heinrich) Heinkel, 23, builds his first biplane. He saw a Zeppelin dirigible explode in flames near a landing field at Stuttgart 3 years ago, visited the International Flying Exhibition at Frankfurt a year later, saw the advances being made by French and Belgian designers, and determined to design his own aircraft, but his first plane crashed and burned.
The British White Star passenger liner S.S. Olympic arrives at New York June 21 to begin service that will continue until 1935. Harland & Wolff of Belfast has built the steel, triple-screw ship under the direction of Quebec-born shipbuilder William J. (James) Pirrie, now 64, who became an apprentice at the world's largest shipyard in 1862 and has controlled it since his late 20s. The Olympic is 852½ feet long, 92½ wide, displaces 45,342 tons, has a service speed of 21 knots, and is by far the largest liner yet built; she carries 2,500 passengers (735 in first class, 674 in second, 1,026 in third, and is the first liner to have a swimming pool; see 1913).
Railway promoter David Halliday Moffat dies at New York March 18 at age 71; a tunnel through the Continental Divide for which he has been raising money will be built with public funds in the 1920s and named in his honor.
The Santa Fe Deluxe goes into service December 2 between Chicago and Los Angeles. Passengers pay $25 extra fare each on the weekly 63-hour passenger express to enjoy services that include a barbershop, a library, a stenographer, ladies' maids, daily market reports, bathing facilities, a club car, a Fred Harvey dining car, four Pullman sleeping cars, whose compartments and drawing rooms have brass beds, and telephones at terminals en route (see 1926).
Union Carbide Co. acquires the oxygen company founded 4 years ago to supply users of oxyacetylene torches (see 1892; commerce, 1917).
Southern pine trees prove useful as pulp sources for kraft paper, a strong brown packaging paper made by a sulfate process that uses an alkaline instead of an acid (as in the sulfite process) to remove the noncellulose lignin from pulp ("Kraft" is German for strength). Pines have been used until now only for turpentine and naval stores; the discovery will revolutionize the paper industry and bring new prosperity to parts of the South.
A nuclear model of the atom proposed by Ernest Rutherford at the University of Manchester consists largely of a positively charged nucleus surrounded by electrons (see Thomson, 1897; Geiger counter, 1908; Bohr, 1913).
The Wilson Cloud Chamber invented by Scottish meteorologist-physicist Charles T. R. (Thomson Rees) Wilson, 42, will remain esssential to the study of nuclear radiation until 1952.
Budapest-born research engineer Theodore von Kármán, 30, at the University of Göttingen uses mathematics and basic science to analyze the alternating double row of vortices behind a bluff body (one having a broad, flattened front) in a fluid stream, pioneering modern fluid mechanics.
Mme. Curie wins her second Nobel Prize, this one for chemistry.
Honolulu-born Yale archaeologist Hiram Bingham, 35, discovers the Inca city of Macchu-Pichu July 24 at an altitude of 7,972 feet in the Peruvian Andes while searching for the legendary Inca stronghold Vilcabamba. Jungle growth covers the long-deserted city that escaped notice by the Spanish conquistadors, but a local innkeeper has agreed to show Bingham some ruins (granite blocks chiseled from the mountain) in exchange for a silver dollar. Bingham's missionary grandfather developed a written language out of Hawaiian; his missionary father did the same for the language of the Gilbert Islands.
Anthropologist-eugenicist Sir Francis Galton dies at Grayshott House, Haslemere, Surrey, January 17 at age 88; the first Nobel physical chemist Jacobus Henricus van't Hoff at Berlin March 1 at age 58; physiologist Henry Pickering Bowditch at his native Boston March 13 at age 70, having retired 5 years ago after being crippled by a form of paralysis agitans; physicist George Johnstone Stoney dies at London July 5 at age 85, having introduced the term electron for the basic unit of electricity.
The U.S. Supreme Court rules 6 to 3 May 29 that the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Law provision against advertising that is "false or misleading in any particular" does not apply to farfetched claims of therapeutic or curative effects. Federal agents have seized a large quantity of a worthless product sold under the name Johnson's Mild Combination Treatment for Cancer, a lower court has ruled that claims made for effectiveness are not within the scope of the 1906 act, and that ruling is upheld (see Sherley Amendment, 1912).
Paducah, Ky.-born Johns Hopkins physician Bertram M. (Moses) Bernheim, 31, introduces laparoscopic surgery to the United States, using a proctoscope ½-inch in diameter and ordinary light for illumination (see Kelling, 1901). He calls the minimum-access procedure organoscopy, but Swedish surgeon Hans Christian Jacobaeus, 32, of Stockholm's Karolinsky Institute performed the procedure last year on the thorax and abdomen, introducing an instrument directly into the body cavity without using a pneumoperitoneum needle, and he coins the term laparothorakoskopie (see endoscopy, 1932; de Kok, 1977).
Dementia Praecox; or the Group of Schizophrenias (Dementia Praecox oder Gruppe der Schizophrenien) by psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler expands on his 1908 paper with the observations that the mental illness is not a single disease, does not always progress to full dementia, and is sometimes curable. Bleuler will be credited with introducing the concepts of autism (loss of contact with reality, often through indulgence in wild fantasy) and ambivalence (the coexistence of mutually exclusive contradictions within the psyche).
Pediatrician and bacteriologist Theodor Escherich dies at Vienna February 15 at age 53, having discovered E. coli bacteria in 1885
Kentucky-born Chicago Pentecostal preacher William H. Durham, 38, returns to Los Angeles to test his ideas at the Azusa Street church opened in 1901. Durham first heard about evangelist William J. Seymour's revival meetings at L.A. 5 years ago, visited it in March 1907, received baptism, and began a Pentacostal periodical in 1908; although rejected by Seymour and most white Pentecostalists he persuades Seymour's mostly black Azusa Street Mission to let him take its pulpit while Durham is out of town. Seymour hears of Durham's innovations, returns to L.A., and locks Durham out of the church, but Durham has gained a following and opens his own L.A. mission (see 1912).
Literacy in England reaches 99 percent for both sexes, up from 55 percent for women and 70 percent for men in 1850. In many other countries, women remain largely illiterate.
Women account for 11 percent of students at Canadian colleges and universities (see 1882). By 1998 women will account for 52 percent of Canada's college undergraduates, 55 percent of university undergraduates.
The Carnegie Corporation of New York created with a $125 million gift from Andrew Carnegie has a mission to encourage education (see Carnegie Foundation, 1905). Fewer than 5 out of 100 Americans go to college after reaching age 18 and the percentage among women is even lower (see medicine, 1910).
Sears, Roebuck president Julius Rosenwald says, "As an American and as a Jew, I appeal to all high-minded men and women to join in a relentless crusade against race prejudice, indulgence in which will result in the blotting out of the highest ideals of our nation." In many of the Southern states, half of all blacks are illiterate (the literacy rate among whites is four to five times higher), twice as much money is spent to educate whites as blacks, the school year for blacks is often as short as 3 months, teachers in black schools are often uneducated themselves, and school buildings for blacks are dilapidated. Now 49, Rosenwald begins working with Booker T. Washington to build schools for black pupils in Alabama (see Rosenwald Fund, 1917).
The Katharine Gibbs School has its beginnings in the Providence School for Secretaries opened by Rhode Island widow Gibbs, 46, who has sold her jewelry to raise the start-up funds and joined with her sister Mary to open what will become America's most prestigious commercial education facilities, with schools at Boston, New York, and other East Coast cities. Lacking any experience but with two sons to support, Gibbs has recognized the need for a school that she will develop to include not only secretarial courses but also courses in business law and liberal arts, although for most women the only job opportunities are as nurses, secretaries, receptionists, and schoolteachers (the schools will later teach hotel and restaurant management.
Psychologist Alfred Binet dies at Paris October 18 at age 54 while working to revise and update the IQ test he devised with Théodore Simon 6 years ago (see Goddard, 1912; Terman, 1916).
The Masses begins monthly publication at New York in January from offices in Nassau Street. Max Eastman and others have founded the literary and political journal, whose ownership is on a cooperative basis and whose powerful graphics advance the cause of class warfare, satirizing bourgeois values. Contributors from the start include Illinois-born author-cartoonist Arthur Henry "Art" Young, 45, who came to New York in 1888, enrolled at the Art Students League, studied at Paris, worked at Chicago, established residence in Washington Square 15 years ago, and produced comic drawings for Judge, Life, and Puck before being invited by Arthur Brisbane to draw cartoon illustrations for editorials in Hearst's New York Evening Journal and Sunday American. Once a Republican, he has refused since last year to draw cartoons for ideas that did not coincide with his own anticapitalist views (see 1913).
The Typographers Association of New York is founded to represent Linotype operators in dealings with management (see 1884). The union will continue for 87 years as its members hammer hot molten lead from the machines into place in giant 40-pound blocks to create plates for printing presses.
The Daily Herald begins publication at London January 25 with salacious material that will make it the first paper to sell 2 million copies (seeSun, 1964).
The London Observer that began publication in 1791 is acquired by John Jacob Astor, grandson of Viscount Astor of Hever Castle (see 1899; 1922).
The Official Secrets Act passed by Parliament August 22 makes it a criminal offense to publish any official government information without permission. Home Secretary Winston Churchill has pushed through the measure, which permits the government to open the mail of suspected German espionage agents (see politics, 1914). No British journalist will defy the law until 1977, and it will not be amended until 1989.
Parliament votes to give Britain's postal service a monopoly in the operation of telephone services (see 1912).
The first direct telephone link between New York and Denver opens May 8.
Olivetti Co. is founded at Ivrea west of Milan in the Piedmont by electrical engineer Camillo Olivetti, 43, who has designed and built the first Italian typewriter. Few Italian firms have accepted steel-nibbed pens, much less typewriters, but by year's end Olivetti has received an order for 100 machines from the Italian Navy, and by 1933 his plant will be producing 24,000 machines per year. The company will sell its typewriters in 22 foreign countries, but most will be sold through Olivetti retail shops in Italy.
The S. I. Newhouse publishing empire has it beginnings at Bayonne, N.J., where a local judge Hyman Lazarus has acquired a controlling interest in the foundering Bayonne Times as payment for a legal fee and sends his office boy Solomon Irving Neuhaus (later Samuel I. Newhouse), 16, to take charge, offering him half the paper's profits in lieu of salary. By the time he is 21 young Newhouse will have earned a law degree at night school and be earning $30,000 per year from the newspaper (see 1922).
Comic strip pioneer Winsor McCay's "Little Nemo in Slumberland" resumes as a Hearst syndicate strip September 3 under the title "In the Land of Wonderful Dreams" (see 1905). It will continue as such until December 21, 1913.
New York World publisher Joseph Pulitzer dies at Charleston, S.C., October 29 at age 64 (see 1905). His will provides for the endowment of a Columbia School of Journalism and for Pulitzer prizes (see 1913; World-Telegram, 1931).
The New York Times Book Review becomes simply the Review of Books and appears on Sundays beginning January 29 instead of in the Saturday edition as it has since October 1896 (see best-seller list, 1942).
The New York Public Library main branch is dedicated May 23 on Fifth Avenue between 40th and 42nd streets with ceremonies attended by dignitaries who include President Taft, the library's board president John Bigelow, 93, and its director John Shaw Billings, who sketched a plan for the building on a postcard in 1897 (see 1895). Built in 9 years at a cost of $29 million and opened to the public May 24 (between 30,000 and 50,000 people come through its doors that day), it is one of the first large buildings to be fully equipped with electric lights. Its main reading room (Room 315) on the third floor, created at the suggestion of Dr. Billings, is 297 feet long and 78 feet wide, its 17-foot high windows overlook Bryant Park, and its long tables have 676 seats lighted not only from the windows but also by bronze chandeliers and table lamps. Five subterranean floors of stacks house catalogued books that readers can order by means of an innovative delivery system employing pneumatic tubes (within 55 years the public catalogue will contain some 10 million cards, requiring 419,228 cubic feet of space; they will be photographed and bound into an 800-volume dictionary catalogue that takes up only 13,095 cubic feet). Stone lions sculpted by Edward Clark Potter, 53, guard the entrance to the $9 million Vermont white marble palace designed in Beaux-Arts style by Thomas Hastings of Carrère and Hastings (Carrère has died March 1 at age 52, never having gained full consciousness after the taxicab in which he was riding on the night of February 12 was struck by a motorcar). The library replaces the Croton Aqueduct Distributing Reservoir that stood on the spot from 1842 to 1902 (it took 500 workers 2 years to dismantle the reservoir).
Nonfiction: Chief Problems of the Doctrine of International Law (Hauptprobleme der Staatsrechtslehre) by Prague-born legal philosopher Hans Kelsen, 29; Soul and Form (Seele und die Formen) by Budapest-born Marxist philosopher György Lukács, 26, whose essays establish his reputation as a critic; Philippe II et la Franche-Comté: étude d'histoire politique, religieuse et sociale by French historian Lucien (Paul Victor) Febvre, 33; Siren Land by Austrian-born Scottish author (George) Norman Douglas, 42.
Fiction: Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig) by Thomas Mann; Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton, who has sold her Lenox, Mass., country house, divorced her manic-depressive husband (he embezzled her trust fund to buy a house for his mistress), and moved to France; Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad; The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux; Death of a Nobody (Mort de quelqu'un) by French novelist Jules Romains (Louis Farigoule), 26; Zuleika Dobson by English critic-essayist-caricaturist Max Beerbohm, 39, a younger half brother of actor Sir Herbert Beerbohn Tree. He has lived at Rapallo, Italy, since 1910 and his satire about an adventuress at Oxford will be his only novel; Sanders of the River by Edgar Wallace; The Passionate Elopement by English novelist-playwright (Edward Montague) Compton Mackenzie, 28; Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill and The Gods and Mr. Perrin by Hugh Walpole; The Wild Geese (Gan) by Japanese surgeon-novelist Ogai Mori, 49, whose 1909 autobiographical work Vita Sexualis (Ita Sekusuarisu) attacked the naturalist contention that man has no control over his sexual instinct; Jennie Gerhardt by Theodore Dreiser; In a German Pension (stories) by New Zealand-born writer Katherine Mansfield (Kathleen M. Beauchamp), 22, who left home for London 3 years ago, lived a bohemian life, married, divorced after 3 weeks, found herself pregnant by another man, was put up at a Bavarian hotel by her mother, and miscarried; Mother by San Francisco-born novelist Kathleen Norris (née Thompson), 31, whose novels will be serialized in women's magazines for more than 30 years; The Innocence of Father Brown (short stories) by G. K. Chesterton, whose detective hero is modeled on his friend Father O'Connor, who will receive Chesterton into the Church in 1922; Nonsense Novels by Stephen Leacock includes "Q: A Psychic Pstory of the Psuper Naatural," "Gertrude the Governess; or, Simple Seventeen," "Caroline's Christmas," and "Hoodoo McFiggin's Christmas."
Poetry: The Everlasting Mercy by John Masefield; Jamaica Songs by Jamaican poet Claude McKay, 22, who has been taught to incorporate native dialect into his work; "Lepanto" (ballad) by G. K. Chesterton; "The Female of the Species" by Rudyard Kipling: "But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail./ For the female of the species is more deadly than the male."
Juvenile: Mother Carey's Chickens by Kate Douglas Wiggin; Jim Davis by John Masefield; The Tale of Timmy Tip-toes by Beatrix Potter; The New Girl at St. Chance and A Fourth-Form Friendship by Angela Brazil.
Author-illustrator Howard Pyle travels to Italy to study the old masters but dies of renal colic at Florence November 9 at age 58.
Painting: The Red Studio and The Blue Window by Henri Matisse, who discards perspective, eliminates shadows, and makes no distinction between line and color; The Accordionist and Still Life with a Bottle of Rum by Pablo Picasso; Still Life with Banderillas and Man with a Guitar by Georges Braque; Gabrielle with a Rose by Pierre Auguste Renoir; Church at Chatillon by Maurice Utrillo; I and the Village by Marc Chagall, who arrived at Paris last year; The Beach (La plage) by Maurice Denis; In the Plaza: Women at a Balustrade by Kees Van Dongen; Woman Reading at a Window by English painter Gwen (Gwendolen) John, 35, whose younger brother is the better known painter Augustus John; Two Girls in White Dresses by John Singer Sargent; Nude with Mauve Stockings, Dead City III, and Two Women by Egon Schiele; The Crossing by Romaine Brooks.
Sculpture: Warsaw-born Paris painter-turned-sculptor Elie Nadelman, 29, visits London to attend an exhibition of his work and meets Polish-born cosmetician Helena Rubinstein, who buys all of his pieces and will encourage him to emigrate to New York (see 1915); Russian Dancers by New York-born sculptor Malvina (Cornell) Hoffman, 16, whose father died 2 years ago. Her mother took her to Europe, where she has studied under Auguste Rodin.
Theater: The Deep Purple by Paul Armstrong and Wilson Mizner 1/9 at New York's Lyric Theater, with Richard Bennett, Catherine Calvert, 152 perfs. (the play makes Mizner a lot of money, and he calls his new profession "telling lies at two dollars per head"); The Rats (Die Ratten) by Gerhart Hauptmann 1/13 at Berlin's Lessingtheater; The Scarecrow by New York-born playwright Percy (Wallace) MacKaye, 35, 1/17 at New York's Garrick Theater, 23 perfs.; The Boss by Edward Sheldon 1/30 at New York's Astor Theater, with Holbrook Blinn, 88 perfs.; A Pair of Drawers (Die Hose) by Leipzig born playwright Carl Sternheim, 32, 2/15 at Frankfurt-am-Main's Schauspielhaus; As a Man Thinks by Augustus Thomas 3/13 at Nazimova's 39th Street Theater, New York, with Walter Hale, Chrystal Herne, 128 perfs.; Mrs. Bumpsted-Leigh by New Britain, Conn.-born playwright Harry James Smith, 31, 4/3 at New York's Lyceum Theater, with Mrs. Minnie Maddern Fiske, 64 perfs.; Fanny's First Play by George Bernard Shaw 4/19 at London's Little Theatre, with Christine Silve, Harcourt Williams, Reginald Owen, 622 perfs.; The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian by Gabriele D'Annunzio 5/22 at the Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris, with music by Claude Debussy. Ballet dancer Ida Rubinstein plays the lead role but D'Annunzio's works were placed on the index of forbidden books by the Vatican in early May and the archbishop of Paris warns Roman Catholics not to attend performances on threat of excommunication; Disraeli by Louis Napoleon Parker 9/18 at Wallack's Theater, New York, with George Arliss, 280 perfs.; The Return of Peter Grimm by David Belasco 10/17 at New York's Belasco Theater, with David Warfield, 231 perfs.; The Garden of Allah by English novelist Robert Smythe Hichens, 47, and Mary Hudson 10/21 at New York's Century Theater, is based on Hichens's 1905 novel, 241 perfs.; The Cartridge (Die Kassette) by Carl Sternheim 11/24 at Berlin; Everyman (Jedermann) by Hugo von Hofmannsthal 12/1 at Berlin's Zirkus Schumann; Oaha, the Satire of Satire (Oaha, die Satire der Satire) by Frank Wedekind 12/23 at Munich's Lustspielhaus; Kismet by English-born playwright Edward Knoblock, 37, 12/25 at New York's Knickerbocker Theater, with Otis Skinner, 184 perfs.
Japanese actress Sumako Matsui (Masako Kobayashi), 25, plays the role of Ophelia in a translation of the 1602 Shakespeare tragedy Hamlet in what is called New Theater (Shingeki). Men have played female roles until now and will continue to do so in the Kabuki theater.
Films: D. W. Griffith's Fighting Blood and The Lonedale Operator, both with Chicago-born actress Blanche Sweet (originally Daphne Wayne), 16; William Humphreys's A Tale of Two Cities with Maurice Costello, Norma Talmadge, 18; André Calmettes's Madame Sans-Gêne with Gabrielle Réjane, now 55.
Bell & Howell's Albert S. Howell develops a continuous printer that makes copies of motion pictures automatically and economically to permit mass distribution (see 1909).
Keystone Co. is founded in California by Canadian-born motion picture pioneer Mack Sennett, 27, who changed his name from Mikall Sinnott when he came to New York in 1904 to begin a stage career in burlesque and the circus. Sennett has been working with D. W. Griffith at Biograph Studios in New York and takes with him the petite, New York-born Biograph comedienne Mabel (Ethelreid) Normand (originally Fortescue), 19 (see Chaplin, 1913).
Opera: Der Rosenkavalier (The Knight of the Rose) 1/26 at Dresden's Hofoper, with Spanish soprano Conchita Supervia, 15, singing the role of Octavian, music by Richard Strauss, libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal; Natoma 2/8 at New York's Metropolitan Opera House, with Mary Garden, John McCormack, music by Victor Herbert; L'Heure Espagnole 5/19 at the Opéra-Comique, Paris, with music by Maurice Ravel; The Jewels of the Madonna (I Gioielli della Madonna, or Der Schmuck der Madonna) 12/23 at Berlin's Kurfuersten Oper, with music by Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari. Maggie Teyte begins an engagement with the Chicago Opera company that will continue until 1914.
Librettist Sir William Schwenck Gilbert of Gilbert & Sullivan fame dies at Harrow Weald, Middlesex, May 19 at age 74.
Ballet: Le Spectre de la Rose at Monte Carlo's Théâtre de Monte Carlo, with music by the early 19th century composer Carl Maria von Weber, choreography by Michel Fokine; Petrouchka 6/13 at the Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris, with Waslaw Nijinsky dancing the title role opposite Tamara Karsavina, music by Igor Stravinsky, who departs from his earlier romanticism to introduce bitonality and employ syncopation with unconventional meters.
First performances: Prometheus, the Poem of Fire by Aleksandr Skriabin 3/15 at Moscow's Bolshoi Theater, in a pioneer multimedia effort to blend color and music; Symphony No. 4 by Jean Sibelius 4/3 at Helsinki; "Valses Nobles et Sentimentales for Piano" by Maurice Ravel 5/9 at the Salle Gaveau, Paris; Symphony No. 2 in E flat major by Sir Edward Elgar 5/24 at a London music festival.
Stage musicals: Peggy 3/4 at London's Gaiety Theatre, with Gabrielle Ray, London-born actress Phyllis Dare (originally Phyllis Haddie Dones), 20, book by George Grossmith Jr., music by Leslie Stuart, 270 perfs.; The Pink Lady 3/13 at New York's New Amsterdam Theater with Ogden, Utah-born ingénue Hazel Dawn, 19, music by Ivan Caryll, 312 perfs. (the hit makes pink the year's fashion color); La Belle Parée 3/20 at Lee Shubert's Winter Garden Theater, with Russian-born blackface minstrel singer Al Jolson (originally Asa Yoelson), 24, vaudeville entertainer George White (originally Weitz), 21, music by New York composer Jerome (David) Kern, 26, and others, lyrics by Edward Madden and others, 104 perfs.; The Ziegfeld Follies 6/26 at the Jardin de Paris atop the New York Roof with Bert Williams, Harry Watson Jr., the Dolly Sisters [Viennese dancers Jennie (Jan Szieka Deutsch) and Rosie (Roszka Deutsch), both 18], Sydney, Australia-born comedian Leon Errol, 29, music by Hungarian-born composer Sigmund Romberg, 23, and others 80 perfs.; Around the World 9/2 at New York's Hippodrome, with music and lyrics by London-born songwriter Manuel Klein, 34, 445 perfs.; The Mousmé 9/9 at London's Shaftesbury Theatre, with music by Lionel Monckton and Howard Talbot; The Fascinating Widow 9/11 at New York's Liberty Theater, with Massachusetts-born female impersonator Julian Eltinge (originally Wiliam Dalton), 28, music by F. A. Mills and Jean Schwartz, book by Otto Hauerbach, 56 perfs.
Onetime musical comedy star Ed Harrigan of Harrigan & Hart dies at his New York home June 6 at age 67.
Popular songs: "Alexander's Ragtime Band" by Irving Berlin popularizes the ragtime music pioneered by Scott Joplin in 1899; "Everybody's Doin' It" by Irving Berlin popularizes the Turkey Trot dance invented by dancer Vernon Castle and his 18-year-old bride Irene Foote Castle; "I Want a Girl Just Like the Girl that Married Dear Old Dad" by Harry Von Tilzer, oedipal lyrics by Will Dillon, 34; "Memphis Blues" by Florence, Ala.-born cornetist-composer W. C. (William Christopher) Handy, 38, who adapts a campaign song he wrote in 1909 for a Memphis mayoralty candidate. Handy has assimilated black spirituals, work songs, and folk ballads with a musical form called "jass" and has employed a distinctive blues style with a melancholy tone achieved by the use of flatted thirds and sevenths; "All Alone" by Albert von Tilzer, lyrics by Will Dillon; "When I Was Twenty-One and You Were Sweet Sixteen" by Egbert Van Alstyne, lyrics by Henry H. Williams; "Goodnight Ladies" by Egbert Van Alstyne, lyrics by Henry Williams; "Oh, You Beautiful Doll" by Nathaniel Davis Ayer, 24, lyrics by Seymour Brown, 26; "My Melancholy Baby" by Erne Burnett, 27, lyrics by Maybelle E. Watson that will be replaced next year with new lyrics by George A. Norton, 33; "Down the Field" (Yale football march) by Stanleigh P. Freedman, Yale '05, lyrics by his former roommate Caleb W. O'Connor; "Little Grey Home in the West" by English composer Hermann Lohr, 40, lyrics by Miss D. Eardley Wilmot, 28; "Roamin' in the Gloamin'" by Scottish songwriter and music hall entertainer Harry Lauder (MacLennan), 41; "A Wee Doch-an-Doris" by Harry Lauder, lyrics by Gerald Grafton.
Musician-composer James A. Bland dies in obscure impoverishment at Philadelphia May 5 at age 56; songwriter Karl Hoschna at New York December 23 at age 34.
Yacht skipper Charles Barr sits down to breakfast with his wife's family at Southampton, England, January 24 and dies of a heart attack at age 46.
Tony Wilding wins in men's singles at Wimbledon, Mrs. Chambers in women's singles; Bill Larned wins in U.S. men's singles, Hazel Hotchkiss in women's singles.
Mountain climber Edward Whymper dies at Chamonix, France, September 16 at age 71.
Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics win the World Series, defeating John McGraw's New York Giants 4 games to 2.
Harvard freshman Charles Brickley, 18, begins a notable football career by kicking four field goals to defeat a Princeton eleven 12 to 0.
Game manufacturer and publisher Milton Bradley dies at Springfield, Mass., May 30 at age 74.
Lee Riders have their beginnings in the H. D. Lee garment factory built at Salina, Kansas, by the H. D. Lee hardware store, whose notions department carries overalls made by an eastern supplier who is usually late in his deliveries. Henry David Lee, 62, made a fortune in the late 1880s by selling his Ohio kerosene plant to John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Co. He moved West to regain his health and started a bank, flour mill, ice plant, and wholesale hardware company; he went into the wholesale grocery business in 1889, and by the turn of the century his H. D. Lee Mercantile Co. was the largest wholesale grocer and jobber in the Midwest, supplying customers with everything from canned beans and salmon to horse collars. The new garment factory produces overall, jackets, and dungarees of blue denim that will be called Lee Riders beginning in the 1920s (see 1926).
Cooper Underwear Company president Henry Cooper commissions Saturday Evening Post artist J. C. Leyendecker to paint a series of color illustrations for use in advertisements promoting the revolutionary new Kenosha Klosed Krotch union suit introduced last year. The first such ad appears in the Post May 6 and sales boom (see 1919).
The Ball of the Thousand and Second Night given by Paris couturier Paul Poiret at his home Brétard attracts the haute monde to a Persian-costume event that scandalizes the city (the host wears a turban, his wife a gold tunic and chiffon pantaloons, and women guests appear in culottes, long trousers, oriental gowns, and overalls; see 1908). Having introduced the hobble skirt that frees the waist but confines the ankles and restricts a woman's gait to mincing steps, Poiret creates the Lampshade (a tunic wired to make its hem stand out); he engages painter Raoul Dufy to design bold fabrics for cloaks, shawls, and dresses, establishes a design school (L'Ecole Martine) for talented working-class girls, launches a line of cosmetics, perfumes, and toiletries that he names for his daughter Rosine, and visits Russia (see 1912).
Nivea creme has its beginnings at Hamburg, where the 29-year-old German cosmetics firm Beiersdorf AG creates a skin moisturizer employing the first water-soluble emulsifier. Owner Oskar Troplowitz has seen an opportunity to make Eucerit into consumer products that will eventually be sold in some 150 countries worldwide (Beiersdorf will make adhesive tape and bandages in addition to its skin-care products).
Kohler Manufacturing Co. of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, introduces a one-piece built-in bathtub with apron (see agriculture, 1883). Founder's son Walter Kohler now heads the company and will be elected governor of the state, as will his son and namesake as they pioneer color-coordinated fixtures to build a privately-held company that will grow to have a line of products with worldwide sales.
The Supreme Court breaks up James B. Duke's 21-year-old tobacco trust May 29, ruling in the case of United States v. American Tobacco Co., inititated by former U.S. attorney general Charles J. Bonaparte, who left the cabinet 2 years ago. Emerging from the trust are American Tobacco, P. Lorillard (see 1789), Liggett & Myers (see 1822), R. J. Reynolds, and British-American Tobacco Co. (see 1902; Brown & Williamson, 1927). The American Snuff Co. has been part of the tobacco trust and breaks into three equal parts—American Snuff, G. W. Helme, and United States Tobacco (see 1822), the latter having snuff brands that include Copenhagen and Bruton. R. J. Reynolds is now stronger than ever and prepares to compete with American Tobacco in the cigarette business (see Camels, 1913).
A Chicago jury convicts burglar Thomas Jennings February 1 of having murdered suburban homeowner Clarence B. Hiller September 19 of last year on the basis of fingerprint evidence found at the scene of the crime (see Galton, 1885). Jennings had been released from prison on parole a few weeks earlier, his fingerprints were on file, they matched those found in some fresh paint on Hiller's porch, Jennings will appeal his case to the Illinois Supreme Court, but the higher court will uphold his conviction in the first U.S. conviction based on fingerprints.
A black woman is raped and then hanged at Okemah, Oklahoma, after allegedly having shot a sheriff. Florida adopts a statute making it "unlawful to publish or broadcast information identifying [a] sexual offense victim"; the law will stand for 80 years before being ruled unconstitutional.
A sensational murder trial at Naples ends with the conviction of Camorra members (see 1830); the secret criminal association's candidates failed 10 years ago to win the city's municipal elections, authorities suppress it, but the Camorra will continue to exercise clout in the region (see politics [Mussolini], 1922).
German architect Walter A. (Adolf) Gropius, 28, designs a steel skeleton building for the Fagus factory at Alfeld; its only walls are glass "curtain walls." Gropius will create a stir with his model factory at the 1914 Werkbund Exhibition at Cologne (see Bauhaus, 1918).
Rome's Victor Emmanuel II monument is completed after 28 years of construction. Designed by Giuseppe Sucani, the ornate structure symbolizes the achievement of Italian unity in 1861.
The seven-story Looshaus designed by Adolf Loos is completed at Vienna with unadorned façades pierced by plain square windows.
Frank Lloyd Wright completes Taliesin on 200 acres of land in the Helena Valley at Spring Green, Wisconsin, that were given to him by his mother (see 1909). The sprawling house makes optimum use of its natural surroundings, and Wright gives it a name based on that of a Welsh Druid bard who sang about the glories of nature. His erstwhile neighbor Edwin Cheney obtains an uncontested divorce in August from Wright's mistress, Mamah, and gains custody of the two Cheney children (see 1914).
Bombay's Taj Mahal Hotel opens on Apollo Bunder Pier to commemorate the visit of Britain's new king George V and his queen, Mary. Built by Sir J. N. Tata, it has electric lights and appliances that include electrically heated irons, dishwashing machines, a machine for sharpening knives, silver burnishers, an in-house soda-water factory, and a main dining room that accommodates several hundred.
The Suvretta House opens in December outside St. Moritz, Switzerland, on Silvaplana Lake with views of the Corvatsch and the valley stretching south to Italy. Kaspar Badrutt of 1896 Palace Hotel fame began construction in the spring, he promises English guests that if they come for the holidays and are disappointed he will pay all their expenses, the guests are delighted (some stay until March), and the new hotel will grow to have 220 rooms with a kitchen rivaling those of the Palace, the Kulm, and the Carlton.
A paper presented to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers by Willis H. Carrier will be the basis of modern air conditioning (see 1902). "Rational Psychometric Formulae" is based on 10 years of work that have initiated a scientific approach to air conditioning (see Carrier Corp., 1915).
Forest Physiography by Waterloo, Ont.-born geographer Isaiah Bowman, 33, is the first detailed study of the physical geography of the United States.
The Appalachian-White Forest Reservation Act (Weeks Act) signed into law by President Taft March 1 authorizes the federal government to purchase up to 75 million acres of land to protect watersheds from development and fire. Congress has passed the measure in response to last year's devastating forest fires in the northern Rockies; it appropriate funds to control the sources of important streams in the White Mountains and southern Appalachians (see Appalachian Trail, 1921; Clarke-McNary Act, 1924).
Roosevelt Dam on the Salt River in Arizona Territory is completed by the Bureau of Reclamation as part of the first large-scale irrigation project. The 284-foot high rubble masonry arch has a crest length of 1,125 feet, creates a reservoir with a capacity of 1.64 million acre-feet, and will make the Phoenix area a rich source of fruits and vegetables.
China's Yangzi (Yangtze) River floods its banks in early September, killing an estimated 100,000.
The Pribilof Island seal population that had fallen to 2.5 million when Alaska was acquired by the United States in 1867 falls to 150,000 following years of operations by the Alaska Commercial Co. The United States, Canada, Japan, and Russia sign an International Fur Seal Treaty agreeing to save the seals from extinction. Sale of their pelts is forbidden, killing on the high seas is banned except in the case of native Aleuts, management of the harvest is instituted, Canadians and Japanese accept 15 percent of the Russian and U.S. harvest in return for an agreement to stop their own operations, seal populations will rebound, and the agreement will also bring a recovery of the northern California sea otter, thought earlier to be extinct (its numbers have been reduced to between 1,000 and 2,000).
The Columbia River salmon catch reaches a record 49 million pounds that will never be reached again (see 1866; 1938).
U.S. agricultural pioneer Seaman A. Knapp dies at Washington, D.C., April 1 at age 77. He has had more than 700 instructors traveling through the southern states, working to make agriculture more profitable and conditions of rural life more attractive.
Albert I of the Belgians grants Lever Brothers head W. H. Lever, Lord Leverhulme, a Belgian Congo concession to develop a plantation of 1.88 million acres on condition that Lever pay minimum wages and establish schools and hospitals. Leverhulme has bought 200,000 acres in the Solomon Islands of the Pacific and planted 17,000 acres of coconut palms; he founds Huiléries du Congo Belge and plants oil palms to create oils for his soaps and margarines (see Lux flakes, 1906; Rinso, 1918).
New Hampshire-born inventor Benjamin Holt, 62, devises a caterpillar tread for an improved combine that harvests, threshes, and cleans wheat (see 1904; 1905; Industrial Commission, 1901). His tread will be used also in earth-moving equipment and military tanks (see politics, 1917).
Famine reduces 30 million Russians to starvation. Nearly one-fourth of the peasantry is affected, but 13.7 million tons of Russian grain, mostly wheat, are shipped abroad (see 1920; 1947).
Polish biochemist Casimir Funk, 27, at London's Lister Institute introduces the word vitamines. If the enzymes discovered by the late Wilhelm Kuhne in 1878 are to work properly they sometimes require coenzymes, Funk discovers, and he calls these coenzymes "vitamines" in the mistaken belief that they all contain nitrogen and are all essential to life (see 1912; Drummond, 1920).
The Chemistry of Food and Nutrition by Columbia University chemist Henry C. (Clapp) Sherman, 35, reports findings that adult protein requirements are 75 grams per day—somewhere between the 60 grams favored by W. O. Atwater (see 1895) and the 125 grams favored by Russell H. Chittenden (see 1904). Sherman has actually come to the conclusion that half a gram of protein per kilogram of body weight per day is sufficient for an adult but has doubled that amount to provide a margin of safety (he recommends two to three grams per kilogram of body weight for growing children and adolescents). His book becomes the new gospel of dietitians and home economists (see 1914).
The Fasting Cure by novelist Upton Sinclair enjoys some popularity with faddists. Sinclair has moved to California.
Crisco is introduced August 15 by Procter & Gamble Co. of Cincinnati; made from linseed oil, it is the first solid hydrogenated vegetable shortening (see Normann, 1901). P&G promotes the product with advertisements calling it "a Scientific Discovery Which Will Affect Every Kitchen in America," but finds that women who have been taught to cook with butter and lard are reluctant to accept free one-and-a-half-pound cans of the product. The company issues a pamphlet in Yiddish after finding that its biggest users initially are Orthodox Jews, who are delighted to have a shortening that contains neither lard nor butter and can thus be used at any meal without violating kosher dietary laws, but Crisco will not enjoy much commercial success until wartime shortages of lard develop later in this decade.
Mazola salad and cooking oil is the first corn oil available for home consumption. Made by Corn Products Refining Co. at its corn-oil refinery on the Illinois River at Pekin, Ill., it will be distributed in Europe as Maizena.
Domino brand sugar is introduced by the American Sugar Refining Co. (see 1907; Jack Frost, 1927).
Prohibitionist Carry Nation dies at Leavenworth, Kansas, June 9 at age 64.
The first canned chili con carne and tamales are produced at San Antonio, Texas, by William Gebhardt, who will receive 37 patents for his mechanical innovations (see 1896).
Battle Creek, Mich., plants produce corn flakes under 108 brand names, but Kellogg's and Post Toasties lead the pack (see 1906). W. K. Kellogg buys out the last of his brother's holdings in the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Co., going $330,000 into debt in order to gain virtually complete ownership of the company that will become Kellogg Corp. (see 40% Bran Flakes, 1915).
James D. Dole's Hawaiian Pineapple Co. packs more than 309,000 cases, up from fewer than 234,000 last year (see 1908). Dole hires Henry Ginaca, a young mechanical draftsman, to design a high-speed peeling and coring machine that will permit mass production of canned pineapple (see 1930).
Stainless steel is patented in America. Resistant to rust and impervious to food acids (it contains about 12 percent chromium), it will be used in cooking utensils beginning in 10 years (see 1921).
New York's Ellis Island has a record 1-day influx of 11,745 immigrants April 17 (see 1892). Two steamship companies have more than 5,000 ticket agents in Galicia alone, some Germans buy tickets straight through from Bremen to Bismarck, N.D., and the U.S. population is at least 25 percent foreign-born in nearly every part of the country outside the South.
The U.S. population reaches 94 million while Britain has 40.8 million (36 million in England and Wales), Ireland 4.3, France 39.6, Italy 34.6, Japan 52, Russia 167, India 315, China 425.
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