1869
1861 1862 1863 1864 1865 1866 1867 1868 1869 1870
The world grows smaller with the completion of the Suez Canal and a transcontinental U.S. rail link.
Chiefs of Japan's four great clans surrender their territories to the Meiji emperor in March (see 1868). Mitsuhito makes the Satsuma, Choshu, Tosa, and Hizen daimyo governors of their former provinces in July but with only one tenth of their old revenue (see 1871). Scholar Masujiro Omura is appointed minister of military affairs and draws up plans that would completely eliminate the samurai as a warrior class and substitute a French-style military system with conscription for the new Imperial Army. He is attacked by some samurai while talking with friends in his Kyoto hotel room September 5 after inspecting sites for military schools, shuts himself up in a bathhouse, but dies of blood poisoning November 5 at age 45.
Hyderabad's Mahbub Ali Pasha begins a 42-year reign as Nizam of a country as large as France in central India's Deccan plateau. A benevolent Muslim despot, the Nizam will order his nobles and landlords to stop collecting rents when times are bad and will offer state grain reserves when harvests are poor so that none will starve, whether Hindu or Muslim.
General Hugh Gough, 1st Viscount Gough, dies at St. Helens, near Dublin, March 2 at age 89, having led the British to victories that resulted in the annexation of the Punjab; former Conservative Party three-time prime minister Edward Stanley, 14th earl of Derby, dies at London October 23 at age 70, having helped to abolish slavery in Britain's colonies and guided the transfer of India's administration from the East India Company to the crown, passage of the Reform Bill of 1867, and removal of discrimination against Jews for membership in Parliament.
Greece agrees to evacuate Crete following a Turkish ultimatum (see 1908). Former grand vizier Mehmed Fuad dies at Nice February 12 at age 63.
Opposition to France's Napoleon III grows in response to his autocratic rule and failures in foreign affairs. His government receives 4,438,000 votes in the national election, but when he sees that his opponents have received 3,355,000 he recognizes a need for change (see 1870).
Cuban insurgents continue the uprising that began in October of last year. The revolutionary government elects Carlos de Céspedes president in April, a new constitution adopted in April emancipates the island's slaves, but Spanish troops arrive in force to quell the movement, and slavery will continue until 1886 (see 1873).
President Grant assumes office March 4 and his supporter Elihu Washburne assumes office as secretary of state March 5, but Washburne resigns March 10 (his appointment was a courtesy designed to give him prestige at Paris), vacates the office March 16, is appointed minister to France March 17, and will serve as such until the fall of 1877.
Former U.S. presidential candidate John Bell dies near Dover, Tennessee, September 11 at age 73; former president Franklin Pierce in obscurity at his Concord, New Hampshire, retirement home October 8 at age 64, having drunk himself to death following the death of his wife, Lucretia; former secretary of war Edwin M. Stanton dies of a heart attack at Washington, D.C., December 24 at age 55—4 days after the Senate has confirmed his appointment to the Supreme Court.
Boston expands by annexing Dorchester, having annexed Roxbury 2 years ago. It will annex Charlestown in 1873 (see fire, 1872).
The Red River Rebellion led by Louis Riel, 25, captures Fort Garry (Winnipeg) and establishes a provisional government. A Canadian of mixed Irish and Indian blood, Riel has inherited from his father the leadership of Manitoba's Métis (half-breeds), who believe that the 2-year-old Dominion government has designs on their rights and land titles (the government has purchased 95 percent of the Northwest Territories from the 299-year-old Hudson's Bay Company for $1.5 million). The Blackfoot chief Crowfoot (Isapo Muxka) refuses to join in the rebellion and will be honored by Prime Minister Macdonald for his loyalty to the queen. Riel's government is short-lived but it will be revived (see 1885).
San Francisco has street riots July 13 against Chinese laborers (see Los Angeles, 1871; Chinese Exclusion Treaty, 1880; Chinese Exclusion Treaty, 1881).
Britain's Contagious Diseases Act permits police constables to arrest female prostitutes but takes no action against their male customers (see 1959).
The Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill demands the emancipation of women and their acceptance on terms completely equal with men (see 1866). Mill's wife, Harriet, has had a great influence on the work, which contains the line, "To understand one woman is not necessarily to understand any other woman." Writing July 14 to Scottish philosopher Alexander Bain, 51, Mill says, "The most important thing women have to do is stir up the zeal of women themselves."
Tokyo authorities issue an order in August requiring all prostitutes confined to the Yoshiwara, Shinagawa, Shinjuku, and Itabashi districts; Osaka authorities permit reopening of the city's red-light districts.
The American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) is founded at Boston by Lucy Stone and her husband, Henry Blackwell, who favor obtaining suffrage on a state-by-state basis in opposition to Susan B. Anthony's demand for a more radical approach. Anthony breaks with the 3-year-old American Equal Rights Association to campaign and lecture on the need for a constitutional amendment that would give all U.S. women the right to vote. She and Elizabeth Cady Stanton found the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), which gains support from Isabella Beecher Hooker. Castigating men who refuse to support woman suffrage, Stanton says that women are held in slavery by their constant fear of rape and recommends that every woman buy a big Newfoundland dog for protection, carry a gun, and learn to use it. She gains support from her husband for her proposal that the AWSA membership should be limited to women, convincing him that women can do the job better alone, but Anthony antagonizes Frederick Douglass and many others in May by saying at the American Equal Rights Association meeting at New York that "Sambo" is not yet ready for voting rights. Douglass acknowledges the good treatment he has received from Anthony and Stanton but declares that the cause of equality for former slaves must be paramount for this generation and that the issue of woman suffrage can be postponed (see 1872).
The 22-man legislature of the new Wyoming Territory adopts a constitution December 10 at Cheyenne with a provision giving women the right both to vote and to hold office. Upstate New York-born local suffragist Esther Hobart Morris (née McQuigg), 55, has just moved to the territory and has given a tea party September 2 for legislative candidates, extracting promises from both Democrats and Republicans to support woman suffrage; it is the first time anywhere in the world that men have given women the right to vote (see Utah, 1870).
"The only good Indians I ever saw were dead," says Civil War general Philip H. Sheridan while on a tour of the West. The Comanche chief Tochoway (Turtle Dove) has introduced himself saying he was a "good Indian."
The Charity Organisation Society is founded by English reformers Octavia Hill, now 30, and Edward Denison to investigate living conditions among the poor who live in the densely crowded environments of London, Manchester, and other other large cities (see 1864; National Trust, 1895).
New Mexico Territory pioneer William Bent dies May 19 at age 59 after 10 years of ranching on the Arkansas River.
New York-born geologist John Wesley Powell, 35, sets off from Green River in Utah Territory May 24 with eight companions in four boats and a 10-months' supply of rations to explore the Green and Colorado Rivers. An army survey party went by steamboat up the Colorado from its mouth for a short distance in 1857 and found it unnavigable ("The region . . . is of course altogether valueless," Lieut. Joseph Ives reported), and no white man has seen what later will be called the Grand Canyon since Coronado's expedition discovered it in December 1540. Major Powell has determined to study it; a minister's son who balked at following his father's profession, he volunteered for the Union Army in April 1861, lost his right arm below the elbow in 1862 after a Confederate bullet shattered the arm as he raised it to lead a charge at Shiloh, but he has led summer expeditions into the Colorado Rockies for the past 2 years between teaching terms at a college in southern Illinois. One of his party's flimsy wooden boats is smashed in a run down some rapids 80 miles from Green River, and the mishap takes with it one third of the group's food supply. Dampness and mold consume much of the remaining rations, there is little game to be found and no fish in the muddy river, the men come close to starvation, three quit on the 98th day and try to hike out of the canyon (they will never be seen again), the six survivors reach safety the next day (August 30), having come more than 900 miles, and Powell reaches Salt Lake City, where his arrival is reported by the Deseret News. Reported lost several times, he becomes a national celebrity, embarks on a lecture tour, receives $10,000 from Congress to conduct a survey of the Colorado plateau, and will bring artists and photographers out west to see what he will call the Grand Canyon after completing a second expedition in 1872. Its geology has proved to him that the earth is millions—perhaps tens of millions—of years old (see environment, 1878).
New York Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett mounts an African expedition to locate Scottish missionary David Livingstone (see 1855). Now 28, Bennett succeeded his father to the paper's editorship 2 years ago; he commissions Welsh-born newspaper correspondent Henry Morton Stanley (originally John Rowlands), 28, to find Livingstone (see 1871).
An article headed "The Pacific Railroad Ring" by Boston lawyer Charles Francis Adams Jr., 33, appears in the January issue of the North American Review with allegations that members of the Crédit Mobilier "are in Congress; they are trustees for the bondholders; they are directors; they are stockholders; they are contractors; in Washington they vote the subsidies, in New York they receive them, upon the plans they expend them, and in the 'Crédit Mobilier' they divide them" (see 1867). Only seven of its 91 stockholders are actually in Congress, but the Crédit Mobilier last year paid stockholders $12.8 million in cash dividends plus $4 million Union Pacific stock, having distributed $24.8 million in Union Pacific (UP) stock in 1867 while finding excuses not to pay the thousands of workers engaged in building the transcontinental railroad. A grandson of the late president John Quincy Adams, young Adams fought at Antietam and Gettysburg, rising from first lieutenant to colonel, and remained with his black 5th Massachusetts Cavalry regiment in preference to accepting a high staff position; he is appointed to the newly-formed Massachusetts Board of Railroad Commissioners (see Nonfiction, 1871). Crédit Mobilier founder Thomas C. Durant tries to oust Grenville Dodge from his position as chief engineer of the UP, stockholders call a meeting in early March to discuss Dodge's fate, but financier James Fisk has bought a few shares of Union Pacific, obtains the assistance of New York politicians who include Tammany Hall boss William Tweed, gets a prominent judge to declare the UP bankrupt, has the judge appoint a receiver in the person of Tweed's son and namesake, gets an order that allows him to send in sheriffs to break up the stockholders' meeting March 10 at the Fifth Avenue Hotel with warrants to arrest the directors (see politics [New York Times exposé], 1871).
U.S. Secret Service director William P. Wood quits his job after 4 years, disgruntled at receiving only $5,000 for cracking the currency counterfeiting case of William Brockaway (he had sought the $20,000 reward offered for Brockaway's arrest and conviction).
The Goldman, Sachs investment bank has its beginnings in an office opened at 30 Pine Street by German-born entrepreneur Marcus Goldman, who came to America in 1848 and has given up his Philadelphia retail establishment to start a New York "note-shaving" firm that buys promissory notes from retail jewelers and resells them to commercial banks and other investors.
Wall Street has its first financial panic September 24, ruining small speculators who have gone short on gold and are forced to cover their positions. Financiers Jay Gould, James Fisk, and other freebooters try to corner all the gold available in New York, driving the price up to $162 per ounce by noon. President Grant's brother-in-law is among those who have joined Gould and Fisk in the scheme, which comes close to destroying half the banks and businesses in New York on "Black Friday" before Secretary of the Treasury George S. Boutwell steps in and begins selling government gold, bringing the price down to $133 within 15 minutes. Gould and Fisk have done nothing illegal and are not prosecuted, but the Stock Exchange outlaws issuing shares in secret (see 1873).
Railroad executive-turned-financier Henry Clark Stimson of 8 Wall Street is wiped out by the market collapse and withdraws from business, supporting his family on his own small savings and his wife's modest inheritance. His son Louis Atterbury Stimson, now 25, will follow his example in 1871, selling his seat on the exchange to take his wife and two young children to Europe, where he will study medicine.
The Royal Bank of Canada has its beginnings in the Merchants Bank of Halifax, established in Nova Scotia. It will adopt the name Royal Bank of Canada in 1901, establish headquarters at Montreal, and grow through acquisitions and mergers to have an international presence.
Itochu Corp. has its beginnings in the textile wholesale company C. Itoh founded at Osaka by entrepreneur Chubei Ito, now 26, who has been trading linen since he was 15. It will be the first Japanese trading company (shosha) to do business in China and grow to become a giant concern with more than 1,000 subsidiaries worldwide trading everything from coal and steel to food products and apparel.
An African shepherd boy on the banks of the Orange River discovers a large diamond that he trades to a Boer settler for 500 sheep, 10 oxen, and a horse (see 1867). The rough stone weighs about 84 carats, will be cut to 48 carats, called the Dudley diamond after its purchase by the earl of Dudley, and be known also as the Star of South Africa. News of the find sets off a rush to the diamond fields (see 1870).
Merchant-philanthropist George Peabody dies at London November 4 at age 74. He has contributed $2.5 million to the city for construction of workers' housing, Oxford University has given him an honorary degree, the British honor him with a state funeral at Westminster Abbey, and his body is shipped home on the British warship Monarch for burial at his native South Danvers, Massachusetts, which is renamed Peabody in his honor.
The Noble Order of the Knights of Labor is founded at Philadelphia in December by union organizers who include Cape May, New Jersey,-born Uriah (Smith) Stephens, 48. The Garment Cutters' Association organized by Stephens in 1862 has been dissolved under pressure from Philadelphia employers. The Knights of Labor is a secret society, and its founding follows the death of National Labor Union president William H. Sylvis at Philadelphia July 27 at age 40 (see 1866; AF of L, 1886).
New York's R. H. Macy Co. racks up sales of more than $1 million and employs 200 people (see 1867). Store superintendent Margaret Getchell has attracted crowds with stunts such as dressing a pair of cats in dolls' clothing and letting them sleep in the twin cribs that she has installed in a show window (see Straus, 1873).
Boston's Shreve, Crump & Low opens at 226 Washington Street, corner of Winer, Summer, and Washington, under the direction of jewelers William P. Shreve, Charles H. Crump, and George D. Low, whose predecessor firms date to 1796. Shreve is a nephew of Banjamin Shreve, whose Jones, Shreve, Brown & Co. has had a handsome establishment at the corner since 1854 and has long employed Crump (see Davis Cup, 1900).
T. Eaton Co., Ltd., opens December 8 at 178 Yonge Street, Toronto, with prices clearly marked and no bartering or credit allowed. Irish-born merchant Timothy Eaton, 35, has had a general store at St. Mary's; his new dry goods store will grow to become the largest Canadian retail enterprise after the Hudson Bay Company, with branches throughout the Dominion.
Pennsylvania drillers meet at Oil City February 1 and form the Petroleum Producers' Association to protect their interests (see 1859). Oil wells in the state produce 4.8 million barrels of crude oil (see Rockefeller, 1868; Rockefeller, 1870).
The Avondale mine disaster September 6 will stand as the worst such accident in the annals of anthracite coal mining; a fire breaks out in a shaft at the Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, facility, cutting off the miners' escape route and their only source of air. Nearly 15 men and boys have been dying for every million tons of coal mined in America, and although state legislatures will enact laws to improve safety, underground coal mining will remain one of the world's most hazardous occupations (see commerce [strike], 1877; commerce [UMW], 1890).
Nantucket's last whaling ship leaves port November 16. The island's sandbar has made it difficult for large ships to enter its harbor for nearly 35 years; New Bedford, New London, and Sag Harbor have long since become more important whaling ports, the Oak will never return to Nantucket, but although the growing use of petroleum has decreased demand for sperm oil there is still a demand for whalebone to use in corsets, and whalers will continue to prowl the seas for sperm whales into the 1920s.
The Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads join up May 10 at Promontory Point near Ogden in Utah Territory with a ceremony that is celebrated with parades in cities throughout the country. Under the direction of engineer Grenville M. (Mellen) Dodge, now 38, the Union Pacific has been built 1,090 miles west from Omaha, largely with Irish labor, using $27 million in government loans on 13 million acres of public lands; a major general in the Civil War, Dodge has used mainly Irish labor but also thousands of Mormons, blacks, Germans, and Italians—men who served on both sides during the war. The Central Pacific has been built 680 miles east from Sacramento with similar government loans and land grants, largely with Chinese labor, and the road is completed 7 years short of the deadline set by Congress, ending operations of Wells Fargo's Holladay Overland Stage Co. Central Pacific workers have laid a record 10 miles of track in 1 day; racing to meet the Union Pacific crews, trackmen laid 35,200 60-pound rails April 28 and spiked some 24,000 six-by-eight cross ties, each eight feet long, to cover the 10 miles. Promoter Thomas C. Durant joins with Leland Stanford in driving the golden spike that links the two railroads, and scheduled train service begins 5 days later, reducing travel time between New York and San Francisco to just 8 days, down from a minimum of 3 months (and often two or three times that long). A faction headed by Oakes Ames ousts Durant from the presidency of the Union Pacific later in May. It cost about $1,000 to reach California from the East Coast 10 years ago; first-class passengers now pay only $150 to enjoy the comfort of Pullman sleeping cars on the cross-country trip, and by June of next year the fare will have come down to $136 for first class, $110 for second class, $65 for third (emigrant) class. Emigrants initially pay $75 to sit on unpadded wooden benches in crowded, unsanitary cars.
The Virginia & Truckee Railroad founded by Bank of California officers William C. Ralston, 43, William Sharon, 48, and Darius Ogden Mills will produce $100,000 per month in dividends for its three owners beginning in 1873, when the Big Bonanza vein opens to increase production of silver from the Comstock Lode discovered in 1859. The railroad will go into receivership in 1937 and be abandoned in 1950.
British engineers in India continue to expand that country's rail network, which now has more than 5,000 miles of steel track, up from scarcely 200 in 1858.
Kansas City's Hannibal Bridge opens in July (see Quincy bridge, 1868). Designed by Paris-born civil engineer Octave (Alexandre) Chanute, 37, who was chief engineer of the Chicago & Alton Railroad from 1863 to 1867, the ornate iron structure has seven limestone and concrete piers, stretches a full mile, and is the first permanent bridge across the Missouri River; an average of 18 trains per day are soon using it, and drivers of horse-drawn vehicles pay tolls to use it when trains are not running. James Frederick Joy of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy has built it for the Hannibal & St. Joseph, and it will be replaced in 1916 by a carbon-steel bridge (see Chanute, 1894).
Cornelius Vanderbilt consolidates the Hudson River and New York Central railroads to gain a monopoly in rail transport between New York and Buffalo (see 1867; Lake Shore and Michigan, 1873).
A cog railway reaches the summit of New Hampshire's 6,293-foot Mount Washington July 3. Designed by New Hampshire-born inventor Sylvester Marsh, now 66, the railway opened August 14 of last year, using technology pioneered by John Blenkinsop and Matthew Murray at an English colliery in 1812. Ninth of 11 children, Marsh left home at age 19, walked 117 miles to Boston, moved to Chicago in 1833 when it had only 300 inhabitants, made a small fortune as a meat packer, made more by inventing and patenting a grain-drying kiln, retired at age 52, and moved to Jamaica Plain outside Boston. Unable to sit still, he patented a cog rail in 1861, bought an inn and 16,000 acres of land at Crawford Notch a few years ago, and has devised special engines for ascending the highest peak in the northeastern United States.
Overland Mail Co. founder John Butterfield dies at Utica, New York, November 14 at age 67.
The Glory of the Seas launched by Boston's Donald McKay of 1851 Flying Cloud fame is his last sailing ship; it will remain in service until 1923.
New York shipbuilder William H. Webb closes the shipyard he started in 1836, having built more vessels than any other American, including warships for France, Italy, and Russia. His clippers, schooners, packets, sidewheelers, and steamships have been innovative and varied in design, and he has built ironclads as well as wooden ships, but although he will continue his shipping interests until 1872 the shift from wood to iron has discouraged him from continuing the yard.
The clipper ship Cutty Sark launched in England sails for Shanghai to begin a 117-day voyage with 28 crewmen to handle the 10 miles of rigging that control her 32,000 square feet of canvas. Built for the tea trade, the ship has a figurehead wearing a short chemise, or "Cutty Sark."
Marine engineer John Elder dies at London September 17 at age 45, having invented the compound steam engine that enables seagoing vessels to make long voyages without refueling.
The Suez Canal opens to traffic November 17, linking the Mediterranean with the Gulf of Suez at the head of the Red Sea. The empress Eugénie has traveled to Cairo in October to represent France at the ceremonies inaugurating the canal, which is hailed as the eighth wonder of the world. The canal is 103 miles long, more than 196 feet wide at its narrowest point, 38 feet deep, and by ending the need to circumnavigate Africa brings Oriental ports 5,000 miles closer to Europe, 3,600 miles closer to America. It is too narrow and shallow for clipper ships, but steamships find it ideal (see 1875; Lesseps, 1859; Brostrom, 1870).
Britain's Prince of Wales imports a low, light, four-wheeled French carriage that has been called a victoria since at least 1844. Usually pulled by one or two horses, the doorless vehicle seats two passengers on a forward-looking seat covered with a folding top, or calash, and has a removable, elevated coachman's seat above the front axle. A Grand Victoria has a rumble seat for two additional passengers, and another model with a panel boot will be called a cabriolet.
French inventor Eugene Meyer creates the world's first tensioned wire spoke wheel; able to support more than 300 times its own weight, it requires little maintenance, is easy to repair, and will replace the wooden-spoke wagon wheel now in common use (see Starley, 1870; 1876).
U.S. Baptist minister Jonathan Scobie at Yokohama invents the rickshaw to transport his invalid wife about town. Improved models will provide employment for Scobie's converts and the ginrickshaw will be popular in many Oriental cities.
Washington, D.C., paves Pennsylvania Avenue with wooden blocks for a mile between 1st Street and the Treasury Department building at 15th Street.
Steelmaker Alfred Krupp introduces the open-hearth process into Continental Europe (see 1861; Krupp, 1862).
Smith & Wesson Co. acquires rights to a shell-ejecting device patented in January 1865 by William C. Dodge. The company's sales have declined since the end of the Civil War (see 1870).
Glass maker Deming Jarves dies at his native Boston April 15 at age 77, having broken the British monopoly in lead glass and made Sandwich glass a rival to anything made at Pittsburgh or in Britain. His son John died of tuberculosis 6 years ago.
A metal-planing machine patented July 28 by machine-tool manufacturer Francis A. Pratt of the 9-year-old Hartford, Connecticut, firm Pratt & Whitney will help build the company, whose management hires Worcester Warner to design gear-cutting machines, hires Ambrose Swasey to build telescopes (see 1880), and is incorporated in the state of Connecticut with a capitalization of $300,000. Pratt will patent a gear cutter in 1884 and a milling machine in 1885, and the company will become a major producer of engines as well as machine tools (see commerce, 1901).
Stanley Rule & Level Co. of New Britain, Connecticut, buys the patent rights and business of Leonard Bailey, who has invented the first metal plane (see Stanley Bolt Manufactory, 1969). The Stanley-Bailey plane is cheap enough for the average craftsman to buy, has a cutter that can be adjusted easily by turning a nut, and is much easier to sharpen than the wooden planes now widely used.
German physicist Johann Wilhelm Hittorf, 45, publishes laws that he has worked out governing the migration of ions (charged atoms or molecules), a significant step toward understanding electrochemical reactions. Hittorf has measured the changes in the concentration of electrolyzed solutions and used these as the basis for computing the relative carrying capacities (transport numbers) of many ions (see Kohlrausch, 1874).
"On the Space-Theory of Matter" by English mathematician-philosopher William K. (Kingdon) Clifford, 25, of Trinity College, Cambridge, posits the idea that matter and energy are simply different types of curvature of space (see Einstein, 1905). Clifford has been influenced by the non-Euclidean geometric thinking of the late Bernhard Riemann and Nikolai Lobachevsky.
The "Tyndall effect" discovered by Irish scientist John Tyndall, 49, ascribes the blueness of the sky to a scattering of the sun's rays (the diffusion of light) by large molecules and dust. The bluish plane polarized by these molecules will be called Tyndall blue. Tyndall will use infrared and scattering-measurement instruments to monitor London's air quality. His lectures will draw large crowds, but he will antagonize clergymen by defending Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and openly opposing what he considers the anti-intellectual, anti-scientific bias of Christianity.
Zoologist Ernst Haeckel coins the word ecology to mean environmental balance (see 1866). Now 35, Haeckel is the first German advocate of Charles Darwin's organic evolution theory, which will be defended in America beginning next year by Massachusetts-born philosopher and mathematician Chauncey Wright, now 39, in a series of articles entitled "The Limits of Natural Selection" for the North American Review (see Huxley, 1870).
"The Lichens as Parasites of Algae" ("Die Clechten als Parasiten der Algen") by Swiss botanist Simon Schwendener, 40, at Basel shows that lichens are a composite algae and fungi (see Reinke, 1894).
Basil-born student Johann Friedrich Miescher, 23, examines pus obtained from open wounds at a surgical clinic and discovers a substance containing both phosphorus and nitrogen in the nuclei of white blood cells. Working under physiologist chemist (Ernst) Felix Hoppe-Seyler, 43, he determines that the substance comes from cell nuclei (see DNA, 1870).
Physiologist-poet Jan Evangeliste Purkinje dies at Prague July 28 at age 81; chemist Thomas Graham at London September 11 at age 63 (he has been master of the mint since 1855); microscope developer Joseph Jackson Lister dies at West Ham, Essex, October 24 at age 83.
Hereditary Genius by English scientist Francis Galton, 47, helps establish the science of eugenics.
Nature begins publication November 4 at London with astronomer Joseph Lockyer as editor. The 40-page "weekly illustrated journal of science" leads off with an essay by T. H. Huxley, now 44, and will gain worldwide circulation and influence.
German medical student Paul Langerhans, 22, discovers tiny cells in the pancreas that produce glucagon and insulin, ductless gland secretions essential to normal human metabolism (they will be called hormones beginning in 1904 and the cells will be called the islets of Langerhans) (see 1860; 1889).
Massachusetts establishes the first state board of health.
The Harvard Medical School rejects a demand by Harvard's new president Charles William Eliot that students be given written examinations. "A majority of the students cannot write well enough," says the dean, but Eliot will elevate standards at the medical school.
Canandaigua, New York-born Chicago Episcopal priest Charles E. (Edward) Cheney, 33, joins with other evangelicals in signing the "Chicago Protest" February 18. The document condemns "unprotestantizing" tendencies in the Church, an ecclesiastical court tries Cheney on charges of having omitted the word regeneration from the baptismal office of the Book of Common Prayer, and he is convicted and suspended. A second trial ends with his being deposed for having continued to officiate despite his suspension, but a civil court will overrule the ecclesiastical court's order of deposition.
A Philadelphia rabbinical conference chaired by Samuel Hirsch of the Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel proclaims that the dispersal of the Jews (the Diaspora) was part of a divine plan to lead all nations of the world to the true knowledge and worship of God (see 1866). Hirsch favors a radical Reform Judaism and will be among the first to suggest that services be held on Sundays.
The bishop of Main Wilhelm E. Ketteler delivers a sermon outside Offenbach July 25 urging reforms such as higher wages, shorter working hours, and prohibition of child labor in factories (see 1864); at the Fulda conference of German bishops in September he says the Church must intervene in the name of faith, morality, and charity to make sure that working people have legal protection.
The Vatican Council convened December 8 by Pope Pius IX is the first great meeting of bishops since the Council of Trent that met from 1545 to 1563 (see 1870).
Harvard University names MIT chemistry professor Charles William Eliot, 35, president, and Eliot begins a 40-year career in which he will contain all undergraduate studies within the college while developing graduate and professional schools. Eliot visited Europe 2 years ago and has just published two articles in the Atlantic Monthly under the title "The New Education: Its Organization." New York lawyer Christopher Columbus Langdell, 43, will be named dean of the Law School next year and introduce the "case study" method of teaching law. Eliot will organize a graduate school of arts and sciences in 1890 and make the Divinity School nonsectarian.
Howard College holds its first classes at Washington, D.C., where it was organized by the Freedmen's Bureau 2 years ago.
Cambridge University agrees to offer an examination for women at the university level following petitions by women who include Jemima Clough (see 1867; 1871).
Japan's first public elementary school opens in May at Kyoto.
The American Museum of Natural History opens at New York's 21-year-old Arsenal on the west side of Fifth Avenue at 64th Street. Founded last year at the instigation of scientist Albert Bickmore, the new museum exhibits specimens (see 1877).
Telegraphers at Promontory Point in Utah Territory flash the word Done to both east and west coasts May 10, thereby signaling completion of the first transcontinental railroad.
Cyrus Field completes a cable connection between France and Duxbury, Massachusetts. His 1858 cable ceased to operate after a few weeks but his new one embodies technical improvements that will make it a great success. French interests complete an undersea cable connection in late July between Brest, France, and Duxbury, Massachusetts, via St. Pierre, Miiquelon, and Sydney, Nova Scotia (see 1866). Promoted by Julius Reuter and German-born Belgian banker Baron Emile d'Erlanger, the new telegraph line laid by the Great Eastern and five other ships for La Société du Câble Transatlantique Française also proves successful, and although the two cables laid 3 years ago will cease to work in 1872 and 1877, four other cables will be in operation by that time. By the mid-1880s some 107,000 miles of undersea cables will be linking all parts of the world (see wireless, 1901; telephone, 1927).
John Pender establishes the British Indian Submarine Telegraph Co. with a view to laying a cable to the Indian subcontinent. The new company lays the first Asian submarine telegraph cable between Singapore and Hong Kong (see Eastern Telegraph, 1872).
Japan's first telegraph line opens between Tokyo and Yokohama.
Former U.S. postmaster general Amos Kendall dies at Washington, D.C., November 12 at age 71, having retired in 1860 with a fortune made from Samuel F. B. Morse's telegraph.
The 29-year-old Melbourne Herald becomes an evening paper beginning January 4. The Weekly Times begins publication under different ownership and will be acquired by the Herald in 1892 (see Murdoch, 1921).
The Charlotte Observer has its beginnings in the Daily Carolina Observer launched May 22 and the Daily Observer launched July 10. The two will merge as the Daily Charlotte Observer March 31, 1872, and the paper will grow to have wide influence in the South.
George P. Rowell's American Newspaper Directory provides advertisers with the first data on estimated circulation of newspapers (see 1867). The open, accurate list of American newspapers helps stabilize the value of space rates, but agents continue to set rates in the nation's papers (see Ayer, 1875; Printers' Ink, 1888; Audit Bureau of Circulation, 1914).
German-born Harper's Weekly cartoonist Thomas Nast, 29, draws the first of many caricatures attacking New York's Tweed Ring, a group headed by State Senator William M. "Boss" Tweed, now 46, that includes the city comptroller, city chamberlain, and Mayor Abraham Oakey Hall, 43 (the group has been bilking the city treasury out of millions of dollars). Nast has been with the Weekly since 1862 after 3 years with the New York Illustrated News. The New York Times will join in the attack on the Tweed Ring, and its ringleaders will be arrested late in 1871 (see donkey symbol for Democratic Party, 1870).
Nonfiction: "The True Story of Lady Byron's Life" by Harriet Beecher Stowe in the Atlantic Monthly magazine refutes vicious interpretations of the character of the poet's late widow, representing her as a Christ-like figure who saved a tormented genius, but her revelation of the secret confided in her by Lady Byron (that Lord Byron was guilty of incest) raises a storm of fury on both sides of the Atlantic (see 1870).
"The Great American Novel" by novelist John William DeForest in the January 9 issue of The Nation urges full-bodied realism in U.S. fiction but notes that society is changing too quickly to be understood as a whole, making it difficult to achieve such realism.
Fiction: A Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert; The Man Who Laughs (L'homme qui rit) by Victor Hugo; Letters from My Mill (Lettres de mon moulin) by Alphonse Daudet; Phineas Finn and He Knew He Was Right by Anthony Trollope; Lorna Doone by R. D. Blackmore; Innocents Abroad; or, The New Pilgrim's Progress by Mark Twain, whose book has sales of 70,000 copies and produces so much money that the Clemens family will be able to settle in style next year at Hartford, Connecticut; "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" by Bret Harte.
Poetry: "Cain" by Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle; The Ring and the Book by Robert Browning.
Poet-statesman Alphonse de Lamartine dies at Paris February 28 at age 78; poet-critic Charles A. Sainte-Beuve at Paris October 13 at age 64.
Juvenile: Luck and Pluck by Horatio Alger; Little Women: Or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy by Louisa May Alcott, now 37, whose book will give the Alcotts financial security.
Painting: After the Bath by French painter (Hilaire German) Edgar Degas, 35; The Sisters by French painter Berthe Morisot, 28; Long Branch, New Jersey by Winslow Homer.
Sculpture: The Dance by Jules Carpeaux, who has created the sculptural group for the façade of the Paris Opéra and is upset when it is criticized as immoral.
Louis Ducos du Hauron develops the so-called trichrome process of color photography (see 1868). He describes his results in Colors in Photography: Solution of the Problem (Les Couleurs en photographie: Solution du problème), which he will follow next year with Colors in Photography: Color Reproduction with Carbon Pigments (Les Couleurs en photographie et un particulier Phéliochromie au charbon), but Ducos du Hauron will derive little benefit from his photographic inventions, and the dream of color photography will remain unrealized until the next century (see Kodachrome, 1935).
Crimean War photographer Roger Fenton dies at London August 8 at age 50.
Theater: The League of Youth (De unges forbund) by Norwegian playwright Henrik (Johan) Ibsen, 41, 10/18 at Kristiania's (Oslo's) Kristiania Theatre.
First performances: Symphony No. 4 in C minor (Tragic) by the late Franz Schubert (1816) 2/26 at London's Crystal Palace; Symphony No. 2 (Antar) by Russian composer Nikolai Andreievitch Rimski-Korsakov, 25, 3/22 at St. Petersburg; Concerto in G minor for Piano and Orchestra by Edvard Grieg 4/3 at Copenhagen; Mass in E minor by Anton Bruckner 9/30 at the still incomplete Linz Cathedral; Liebeslieder Walzer by Johannes Brahms 10/6 at Carlsruhe.
Vienna's Staatsoper (State Opera House) opens off the Karntner Ring Strasse with 2,263 seats.
Composer Hector Berlioz dies at Paris March 8 at age 65, having said, "Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils"; Louis Moreau Gottschalk dies at Tijucas, Brazil, December 18 at age 40.
Opera: La Diva at the Théâtre de Variétés, Paris, with Hortense Schneider in the title role, music by Jacques Offenbach, libretto by Ludovic Halévy and Henri Meilhac; Das Rheingold 9/22 at Munich, with music by Richard Wagner.
Operatic prima donna Giulia Grisi dies at Berlin November 29 at age 58.
The Folies-Bergère opens May 1 at a new Paris theater that becomes one of the city's first music halls. Its mixed program of operetta and pantomime will give way in time to revues that will build its reputation as the top Paris nightspot (see 1887).
Popular songs: "Sweet Genevieve" by U.S. composer Henry Tucker, 43, lyrics by George Cooper, 31; "Shoo Fly, Don't Bother Me" by U.S. composer Frank Campbell, lyrics by Billy Reeves.
The Cincinnati Red Stockings complete an undefeated season, winning 56 games and tying one. Their catcher Doug Allison has asked a saddlemaker to produce a leather mitt for him, but most catchers and other players regard the mitt as unmanly (see 1875). First professional baseball team, the Red Stockings will remain undefeated until they fall to the Brooklyn Athletics June 14 of next year (see 1867; National League, 1876).
Rutgers defeats Princeton six goals to four November 6 in the first intercollegiate football game, which is actually a form of soccer with 25 men on a team (see 1863). Boys from the College of New Jersey at Princeton have come to New Brunswick for the game (see "Boston Game," 1874).
The Cardiff Giant "discovered" at Cardiff, New York, is a huge stone figure of a man measuring 10 feet 4½ inches long and weighing nearly 3,000 pounds. Buried secretly by a group of promoters who claim the figure is a petrified man from biblical times, the figure is exhibited at Syracuse, Albany, New York City, and Boston; thousands pay $1 each to view the Cardiff Giant, its promoters cite Genesis 6:4 ("There were giants in the earth in those days"), and the hoax takes in a number of eminent men before it is exposed.
Pattern maker Ebenezer Butterick relocates his factory from Fitchburg, Massachusetts, to Brooklyn and his partner J. W. Wilder starts a magazine to compete with that of Mrs. Demorest and stimulate pattern sales (see 1867). The Metropolitan (later the Delineator) will be so successful that E. Butterick & Co. will sell 6 million patterns in 1871 and by 1876 will have branches at London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna.
The first chewing gum patent is issued December 28 to William Finley Semple for a "combination of rubber with other articles, in any proportions adapted to the formation of an acceptable chewing gum" (see Curtis, 1848; Adams, 1872).
Britain abolishes debtors' prisons.
New York gets its first luxury apartment building (the term apartment house will not come into use until about 1880) at 142 East 18th Street, between Third Avenue and Irving Place, close to fashionable Stuyvesant Square. Developer Rutherfurd Stuyvesant (originally Stuyvesant Rutherfurd), 29, changed his name in order to comply with the will of his mother's great-uncle Peter Girard Stuyvesant and inherit large real estate holdings; he met architect Richard Morris Hunt, now 43, in Paris last year, and Hunt has designed the new five-story walk-up Stuyvesant apartment house, which is modeled on Parisian apartment buildings, complete with concierge, a red-brick exterior, and a high, sloping mansard roof. Rents for six to seven rooms with bath range from $83.50 to $125 per month, depending on size and location, which is far beyond the means of New York's boarding-house and tenement-dwelling masses. Most respectable families live in brownstone row houses, and one New Yorker says, "Gentlemen will never consent to live on mere shelves under a common roof," but within 50 years few New Yorkers, even among the rich, will still live in private houses. The Stuyvesant family will own the building until 1954, and it will stand until late 1957.
Cairo's Mena House hotel opens to serve guests who were invited to the opening of the Suez Canal.
Nashville's Maxwell House opens in Tennessee. Built at the start of the Civil War, the structure has served as barracks, prison, and hospital (see food [coffee], 1893).
Gypsy moths (Porthetria dispar) brought to Medford, Massachusetts, by French naturalist Leopold Trouvelot escape, and their larvae (which feed on leaves) will defoliate American woodlands as the moth population explodes in the next 20 years. Trouvelot had hoped to start a New England silk industry.
Daily weather bulletins are inaugurated by U.S. astronomer Abbe Cleveland, 30, the first U.S. Weather Bureau meteorologist. Her reports help farmers.
The first U.S. plow with a moldboard entirely of chilled steel is patented by James Oliver, now 46, who has established the Oliver Chilled Plow Works at South Bend, Indiana (see 1855).
U.S. wheat growers produce 290 million bushels, up from 70 million in 1866.
The Appleby binder patented by Wisconsin inventor John Francis Appleby, 29, is based on an idea Appleby had 12 years ago for an automatic mechanism that would knot the twine used to bind sheaves of harvested grain. Appleby invented a repeating rifle while serving in the Union Army, patented it in 1864, sold the patent for $500, and has used the money to finance development of his concept. His patented binder is the prototype of the Appleby knotter, which by the turn of the century will be used on nine-tenths of the world's machine-bound grain, but initially it employs wire rather than twine (see 1872).
Viniculturist Count Agoston Haraszthy de Mokcsa dies at the Hacienda San Antonia, near Corinto, Nicaragua, July 6 at age 57 (approximate). He lost his California landholdings 3 years ago and has purchased a large sugarcane plantation.
The coffee rust Hamileia vastatrix appears in Ceylon plantations and will spread throughout the Orient and the Pacific in the next two decades (see 1825). It will destroy the coffee-growing industry, and soaring coffee prices will lead to wide-scale tea cultivation (see 1884; tea consumption, 1898).
Hippolyte Mège-Mouries produces the first commercial margarine (see 1867). French chemist Michel (Eugene) Chevreul, now 85, isolated a substance from animal fat in 1813 that formed pearly drops and thought it was a new fatty acid; he named it margaric acid, from the Greek for pearl (margaron), and although it later turned out that there was no such thing as margaric acid, Mège-Mouries used an extract of animal fat that supposedly contained a large amount of this "acid," which inspired him to name his product margarine. It is patented in England under the name "butterine" (see Jurgens, 1871).
A British Customs Duty Act abolishes even nominal duties on food imports (see 1850).
Sainsbury's has its beginnings in a dairy shop opened at 173 Drury Lane, London, by merchant John James Sainsbury and his wife, Mary Ann, to sell butter, milk, and eggs. Walls, counter-fronts, and floor are covered in easy-to-clean patterned tiles at a time when most food shops have wooden counters and sawdust-covered floors (see self-service store, 1950).
The A&P gets its name as the 10-year-old Great American Tea Company is renamed the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company to capitalize on the national excitement about the new transcontinental rail link. Proprietors George Huntington Hartford and George F. Gilman attract customers by offering premiums to lucky winners, use cashier cages in the form of Chinese pagodas, offer band music on Saturdays, and employ other promotional efforts while broadening their line of grocery items to include coffee, spices, baking powder, condensed milk, and soap as well as tea (see 1871).
The impressive stamina of the Chinese workers who built the Central Pacific will be credited by many to the fact that they ate a balanced diet and drank only tea, while their largely Irish counterparts, who built the Union Pacific, lived on beans, bully beef, and whiskey.
The transcontinental railway will permit shipment of California grain, fruit, and vegetables to Eastern markets in less than a week. Shipping 15,660 nautical miles via Cape Horn (13,436 miles via the Straits of Magellan), took up to 120 days, and although some shipping lines have used the Panama Railroad across the Isthmus since 1855, many California shippers continue to send cargo around the tip of South America (see Tehauntepec National Railroad, 1906; Panama Canal, 1914).
Boston gets its first shipment of fresh meat from Chicago by way of a refrigerated railcar developed last year by William Davis, but railroads resist losing their traffic in live animals bound for eastern markets (see Swift, 1877).
Armour & Co. adds beef to its line of pork products (see 1868). Armour will start handling lamb next year (see chill room, 1872).
Campbell Soup Co. has its beginnings in a cannery opened at Camden, New Jersey, by Philadelphia fruit wholesaler Joseph Campbell and tinsmith-icebox maker Abram Anderson, 35. They pack small peas and fancy asparagus (see 1894).
H. J. Heinz Co. has its beginnings at Sharpsburg, Pennsylvania, where local entrepreneur Henry John Heinz, 24, goes into business with partner L. C. Noble to pack processed horseradish in clear bottles, competing with horseradish packed in brown or amber bottles to disguise the fact that it often contains turnip fillers. Heinz has employed several local women for nearly a decade to help him supply Pittsburgh grocers with the surplus from his garden (see ketchup, 1876).
Welch's Grape Juice has its beginnings at Vineland, New Jersey, where dentist and Methodist minister Thomas Bramwell Welch develops a temperance substitute for the intoxicating wine used in his church's communion service. He picks 40 pounds of Concord grapes from his backyard, pasteurizes the juice in his wife's kitchen, bottles it, and begins selling "unfermented wine" to nearby churches (see 1896; Concord grapes, 1853).
A National Prohibition Party is founded in September at Chicago (see WCTU, 1874).
California wineries produce 4 million gallons, up from about 58,000 in 1850. Within 20 years they will be producing more than 20 million gallons, despite infestations of grape phylloxera (see 1870).
Japan's Kirin Brewery is founded at Yokohama under the name Spring Valley Brewery by U.S. entrepreneur William Copeland.
The concept of bottled beer is introduced by English brewer Francis Manning-Needham, whose hygienic, reusable containers will quickly be adopted by Bass, Whitbread's, and other major brewers to supplement the kegs which they deliver by wagon to Britain's pubs, inns, hotels, and taverns.
A speaker at the annual meeting of the British Medical Association condemns "beastly contrivances" for limiting the numbers of offspring (see U.S. "Comstock Law," 1872).
Pope Pius IX declares abortion of any kind to be an excommunicatory sin (see 1870; 1930).
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