1870
1861 1862 1863 1864 1865 1866 1867 1868 1869 1870
France's Napoleon III appoints a new minister of justice January 2 (see 1869). Marseilles-born Emile Olivier, 44, heads a new government whose members are selected from the parlement's majority leaders. He draws up a new constitution that gains approval from nearly 70 percent of voters in a plebiscite, and he devises a compromise between imperial autocracy and parliamentary democracy, but Olivier's plans to reform education, labor, and law will come to nought.
Spain's Isabella II, now 39, is persuaded to abdicate June 25 at Paris after a 27-year reign (see 1868). As head of the house of Hohenzollern, Prussia's Wilhelm I has persuaded the Hohenzollern prince Leopold, 35, to withdraw his acceptance of the Spanish crown following French protests. France's Napoleon III has wired Wilhelm (who is taking a cure at Ems) demanding a letter of apology and demanding that Wilhelm prohibit Leopold from accepting any future offer of the Spanish crown. Count von Bismarck makes the Ems telegram public with Wilhelm's permission, leaving out some details unsuitable for publication but making it clear that Napoleon has tried to humiliate the kaiser and that Wilhelm has refused Napoleon's demands. Isabella's 12-year-old son Alfonso succeeds in name only; the duke of Aosta, 25-year-old son of Italy's Victor Emmanuel II, is induced to accept the crown, but before he can reach Spain the prime minister Juan Prim y Prats is assassinated by his political opponents at Madrid December 30 at age 56 (see 1871).
British foreign secretary George Villiers, 4th earl of Clarendon, tries to induce Prussia to accept a reduction in armaments but dies at his native London June 27 at age 70.
France declares war on Prussia July 19 as Napoleon III tries to make a preemptive strike on the premise that the best defense is a good offense, but his generals are unable to concentrate their forces, which must travel by rail to regional depots, and the result is chaos; three Prussian armies use railroads and telegraph communications to invade France, they move halfway across the country in 1 month, and while French forces invade the Saar Basin and gain a victory at Saarbrücken they are no match for the Prussians, who have won support from Bavaria. Their generals force Emile Olivier to resign as minister of justice August 9 after only 7 months in office, and the empress regent Eugénie designates Charles Cousin-Montauban, now 74, prime minister; socialist Paule (Paulina) Mink (née Mekarska), 31, organizes the defenses of Auxerre, and Marshal Achille Bazaine, now 59, is given command of the 130,000-man Army of the Rhine August 12 as it falls back from Metz toward Verdun; he is intercepted near Vionville by the 30,000-man army of General Constantine von Alvensleben, and the Prussians triumph over the French in the Battles of Mars-la-Tour and Gravelotte August 16 to 18 as the Army of the Rhine mounts a cavalry charge (at Mars-la-Tour) but fails to break through the two armies of General Helmuth von Moltke, who suffers about 16,000 casualties at Mars-la-Tour and inflicts the same number on the French. The French lose 13,000 at Gravelotte, the Prussians more than 20,000, but Count von Moltke succeeds in trapping the French in their fortress at Metz.
German revolutionary Gustav von Struve dies at Vienna August 21 at age 64, having returned to Europe in 1863 after serving in the Union Army during the Civil War.
The Battle of Metz rages from August 19 to October 27: the North German Confederation has mobilized an army of 197,000 men and 658 field and siege guns under the command of Prince Friedrich Karl; Marshal Bazain's Army of the Rhine has grown to have 173,000 men, 622 field guns, and 876 pieces of fortress artillery, but von Moltke is able to detach much of his besieging army for action at Sedan.
The Battle of Sedan September 1 ends in disaster for the French First Army Corps commanded by Marshal MacMahon, now 62 (who has been defeated at Wörth and is captured). Commanded by Field Marshal von Moltke, the North German Confederation's Third and Meuse Armies (222 infantry battalions, 186 cavalry squadrons, 774 guns) bring 200,000 men to bear on the French Army of Chalons as it marches to the relief of Metz. The French have 120,000 men (202 infantry battalions, 80 cavalry squadrons, 564 guns) but sustain 17,000 killed and wounded, 21,000 missing. MacMahon was wounded on the eve of the battle, others have succeeded to command, and Napoleon himself surrenders September 2 with 80,000 men. German casualties total 2,320 killed, 5,980 wounded, 700 missing; von Moltke marches on Paris.
The Paris mob invades the Palais Bourbon September 4, Prime Minister Cousin-Montauban's government falls after less than a month and he flees to Belgium. The empress regent Eugénie arrives in England September 8 and finds a house at Chislehurst 2 weeks later while her husband is held prisoner at Wilhelmshöhe, the Second Empire collapses, the Third Republic is proclaimed, and two German armies begin a 135-day siege of Paris September 19 (see 1871).
The French garrison at Metz sustains 38,000 casualties (including deaths from sickness) and Marshal Bazaine shocks his countrymen by surrendering October 27 with 140,000 men plus all his artillery, 72 mitrailleuses (machine guns), 300 rifles, and 56 eagles (see 1873); German casualties (including losses to disease) total 47,000.
Italian troops enter Rome following withdrawal of French troops for the Battle of Sedan; they preserve order by extending their occupation around the Vatican at the request of Giacomo Cardinal Antonelli and complete the unification of the Kingdom of Italy under Victor Emmanuel II (see 1866).
Russia's Imperial Chancellor Aleksandr M. Gorchakov takes advantage of western Europe's preoccupation with the Franco-Prussian War to renounce the prohibitions against maintaining a naval presence on the Black Sea and fortifying her coastline, prohibitions placed on his country after the Crimean War.
Irish lawyer Isaac Butt, 57, forms the Home Rule Association, a coalition of Protestants and nationalists that works for repeal of the 1801 Act of Union (see 1879; Parnell, 1881).
Paraguay's president Francisco Solano López is killed March 1 at age 43 after a 7½-year dictatorship that has brought ruin to his country; former Argentine president Justo José de Urquiza is assassinated by political rivals along with his sons at his villa in Entre Rios April 11 at age 68, and the 6-year war between Paraguay and her neighbors ends in a treaty signed June 20. Paraguay has lost 100,000 dead (90 percent of her adult males) and 65,000 wounded, reducing her population to 28,000 men and just over 200,000 women. Brazil has lost 165,000, Argentina 20,000, Uruguay 3,000; the allies take 55,000 square miles of Paraguayan territory, but rights to the vast Gran Chaco region remain a matter of dispute between Argentina and Paraguay (see 1878).
Caracas-born journalist's son Antonio Guzmán Blanco, 41, seizes control of the Venezuelan government as head of the Regeneration (Regeneración) movement. Having married into the upper-class Blanco family, he has served as a special finance commissioner to negotiate loans with London bankers, will have himself elected president in 1873, and will rule as military dictator (caudillo) until 1889, ending the country's civil war, reviving its economy, modernizing Caracas, ending the Roman Catholic Church's control of birth, education, and marriage, confiscating Church property, but using brutal means to achieve his ends.
The province of Manitoba created by the Canadian government July 15 is a 251,000-square mile section of Rupert's Land, purchased last year from the Hudson's Bay Company (see 1905; British Columbia, 1871).
A xenophobic Chinese mob at Tianjin (Tientsin) attacks a Roman Catholic orphanage June 21 and kills 24 foreigners, including the French consul, Henri Fontanier, and some French and Belgian nuns (the French Sisters of Charity) who have been accused of kidnapping children and mutilating them. Fontanier has fired into a crowd of locally prominent representatives and killed the servant of the district magistrate. Paris and Rome demand harsh punishment, European warships arrive, Chinese troops are placed on alert, and only the execution of 16 Chinese and the dispatch of an official mission to extend apologies to France avert hostilities.
Congress creates the position of solicitor-general in January and President Grant appoints Kentucky-born lawyer Benjamin H. (Helm) Bristow, 37, as the first U.S. solicitor-general. Badly wounded at Shiloh, Colonel Bristow distinguished himself in later Civil War encounters and suppressed Ku Klux Klan violence beginning in May 1866 as U.S. attorney for the Kentucky district (see 1874).
U.S. diplomat Anson Burlingame dies at St. Petersburg, Russia, February 23 at age 49; General George H. Thomas, U.S. Army, at San Francisco March 28 at age 53; Admiral David G. Farragut, U.S. Navy, August 14 at age 69 while visiting the naval yard at Portsmouth, New Hampshire; former Confederate Army general Robert E. Lee at Lexington, Virginia, October 12 at age 63. He has been president since 1865 of Washington College, which will change its name to Washington and Lee University; former Republic of Texas president David G. Burnet dies at Galveston December 5 at age 82, having lost a son in the Civil War.
The first black U.S. senator takes his seat at Washington, D.C., February 25. Mississippi voters have elected Fayetteville, North Carolina-born clergyman Hiram R. (Rhodes) Revels, 47, in January; the New York Herald has predicted that he would not be allowed to serve, but he will hold office until March 3 of next year.
Ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution is proclaimed March 30 by Secretary of State Hamilton Fish, 61. Promoted by Sen. Oliver Perry Morton (R. Ind.), 46, the amendment forbids denial of the right to vote "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude" (but see Mississippi, 1890; Louisiana, 1898; Alabama, 1901).
London and Washington conclude a convention for the suppression of the African slave trade June 3. Slavery is abolished in the Spanish colonies, including the sugar-rich island of Cuba, but it will continue in Puerto Rico until 1873. The Royal Navy in the past 60 years has obtained permssion to search foreign-flag ships for slaves (see 1861), captured 1,500 ships, landed forces in Africa to destroy slave stations, chased slavers in the territorial waters of Brazil and Cuba, and freed 160,000 slaves, losing 1,300 seamen (mostly from disease) in the process, but British diplomats have finally persuaded the Spanish and Brazilian governments to crack down on the 350-year-old trade in slaves from Africa.
Rep. Joseph H. (Hayne) Rainey, 37, of South Carolina enters the House of Representatives December 12, becoming the first black congressman.
An August act of Parliament allows women to retain money they have earned on their own rather than turn it over to their husbands. Author of the first Married Women's Property Act is Manchester barrister Richard M. (Marsden) Pankhurst (see 1882). But Queen Victoria, in her letter of May 29 to Sir Theodore Martin, has said, "The Queen is most anxious to enlist every one who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of 'Woman's Rights,' with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety."
Says Punch, the London comic weekly, "The rights of women who demand,/ Those women are but few:/ The greater part had rather staid/ Exactly as they do./ Beauty has claims for which she fights/ At ease with winning arms;/ The women who want women's rights/ Want mostly, women's charms."
Victor Hugo returns to Paris following the establishment of the Third Republic; now 68, he is hailed as a patron saint of human freedom.
A new Japanese law establishes two kinds of kinship: that between parent and child is kinship of the first degree, that between husband and wife or husband and mistress is of the second degree, and a man is permitted as many mistresses as he can afford (see 1872). Adultery is punishable in the case of wives but a husband may be punished only if his sexual partner is someone else's wife and the woman's husband takes the matter to court. A Japanese couple wishing to get married must obtain permission from all four parents and from the head of each household, the koshu, who may be a grandfather but is in any case a man; nobody can be married into the family, or adopted by anyone in the household, or divorced without permission from the koshu, who is obligated to support his grandparents, parents, wife, children, and siblings, and to provide the children with an education (see 1873).
Japan's Meiji emperor issues an edict in September ordering his subjects to take last names.
The British Red Cross is founded at London.
Evangelical Dublin-born London medical student Thomas John Barnardo, 25, opens a home for impoverished boys in the city's East End, and when one boy dies after being turned away he puts up a sign that reads, "No Destitute Child Ever Refused Admission." In the next 35 years he will raise £3¼ million to establish a network of Barnardo Homes that will rescue at least 60,000 needy boys and girls.
Explorer Ferdinand Petrovich Wrangel dies at Tartu, Estonia, June 6 (May 25 Old Style) at age 73.
The discovery of rich South African diamond deposits in "dry diggings" along the Orange, Vaal, and Harts rivers sparks a new rush to the area (see 1869; politics, 1871).
Lloyd's of London incorporates itself 182 years after its founding but remains a society of private individuals, who will increase in number to 6,000 "Names" that will include peers, members of Parliament, and cabinet ministers (see 1771). The "Names" will belong to more than 260 syndicates, with each Name having unlimited liability for the insurance written by his syndicate (see 1887).
The U.S. Supreme Court rules 5 to 3 February 7 in Hepburn v. Griswold that the Legal Tender Act of 1862 was unconstitutional and that "greenbacks" are therefore not legal tender (but see 1871).
A new Internal Revenue Act approved by Congress July 14 eliminates most excise taxes and provides for the income tax levied since 1862 to be ended in 1872.
The New York Cotton Exchange is founded by 100 firms that include the 25-year-old partnership Lehman Brothers of Montgomery, Alabama, whose Mayer Lehman is on the board of governors. The Exchange rents quarters at 142 Pearl Street but will move in 1872 to 1 Hanover Square, occupying what later will be called India House.
Spiritualist Victoria Claflin Woodhull, 32, and her "magnetic healer" sister Tennessee Celeste Claflin, 24, establish the first woman's brokerage firm. Daughters of an itinerant Ohio peddler and his spiritualist wife, they have grown up with their eight siblings in a world of medicine shows and theatrical troupes. Scandalous stories have circulated about them, but they have gained support from railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt (who once told Tennessee that he would marry her), and when their offices open February 4 at 44 Broad Street they attract a crowd of some 4,000 curious visitors. Within a few months they have raked in over $500,000.
Montana Territory merchant William Andrews Clark opens a bank at Deer Lodge in partnership with R. W. Donnell of New York and S. E. Larabie of Montana, with whom he has dealt in wholesale merchandise (see Clark, 1866; 1872). The partners will open a bank at Butte in 1877.
Workers at a North Adams, Massachusetts, shoe factory go on strike to protest low wages and the introduction of labor-eliminating machinery. The Secret Order of the Knights of St. Crispin organized at Milwaukee 3 years ago has become the largest U.S. labor organization, factory owner Calvin T. Sampson is unable to hire strikebreakers (scabs) in nearby towns, so he uses the transcontinental railroad that opened last year to bring in 75 Chinese laborers from San Francisco. A cartoon captioned "The Comet of Chinese Labor" by Thomas Nast appears in Harper's Weekly June 13 showing a comet blazing across the sky. Sampson's new workforce easily outperforms the striking members of the Knights of St. Crispin; owners of cotton, cutlery, furniture, and woolen mills in various eastern states will soon follow his union-busting example; Sampson will import another 160 Chinese in 1872, their ages ranging from 14 to 38, and the competition from cheap "Celestial" labor will bring a temporary halt by Ira Steward, Wendell Phillips, and others to obtain an 8-hour day (see 1863). Phillips runs for governor of Massachusetts, having been nominated by both the Labor Reform and Prohibition parties, but he does not share Steward's opposition to Chinese labor and fails to win election.
Fur trader-merchant Ceran de St. Vrain dies at Mora in New Mexico Territory October 28 at age 68.
Deutsche Bank is founded at Berlin late in the year in an effort by Prussian bankers to free their financial transactions from control by British and other foreign banks. "It is the purpose of the corporation to do a general banking business," says its charter, "particularly to further and facilitate commercial relations between Germany, the other European countries, and overseas markets." Prussia has no gold standard, foreign banks and companies do not accept bills of exchange made out in various kinds of currency, and foreign trade has been dependent on English intermediaries (see gold standard, 1873).
The Paris department store Samaritaine has its beginnings in a dry-goods shop opened March 21 under the direction of merchant Ernest Cognacq, 30, and his wife, Marie Louise (née Jay), 29, whose emporium will become the city's largest retailer.
New York's F. A. O. Schwarz toy shop opens at 745 Broadway, corner 9th Street. German-born merchant Frederick August Otto Schwarz, 34, has worked in the Baltimore shop of his brother Henry, he will relocate to a large store in West 23rd Street, it will net nearly $100,000 per year by 1900 selling dolls, doll houses, Kiddie Kars, rocking horses, Swiss music boxes, and the like, and it will become the world's leading toy emporium.
Standard Oil Co. of Ohio is incorporated January 10 with John D. Rockefeller as president (see 1868). He takes 2,667 shares in the $1 million company while 1,333 shares each go to his brother William, Samuel Andrews, Henry M. Flagler (who has come up with the idea of incorporating), and Flagler's wife's uncle Stephen V. Harkness, now 52, whose loans have helped Rockefeller and his associates (Harkness takes 1,334 shares, and another 1,000 go to William Rockefeller's brother-in-law Oliver B. Jennings, who went to California during the gold rush and profited by selling supplies to prospectors). The new joint-stock firm controls 10 percent of the nation's petroleum refining capacity, but it costs so little to build a refinery, and so many people have built them, that America's total refining capacity is three times as large as the amount of crude oil being pumped from the Pennsylvania fields, and oil prices plummet through the year. Standard Oil has its own barrel-making plant, warehouses, shipping facilities, and tank-car fleet, giving it an advantage over most competitors and enabling it to pay 105 percent dividends in its first year (see 1871).
Henry Clay Frick, 21, begins construction and operation of coke ovens in the Connelsville area while working for his grandfather, Abraham Overholt, who dies at age 86 after 60 years of making Old Overholt Whiskey. The Pennsylvania farmhand persuades Irish-born Pittsburgh judge-banker Thomas Mellon, 57, to loan him and his associates money for their ventures (see 1873).
The first through railway cars from the Pacific Coast reach New York City July 24 (see 1869); 72.5 million tons of goods move by rail in the United States, up from 55 million in 1860 (see 1885).
Boston interests sell a controlling interest in the Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad to New York financier Jay Gould, upsetting James Frederick Joy's plans for a through line to the Pacific using the Santa Fe route. He will head the Kansas City, St. Joseph, & Council Bluffs Railroad until 1874, but the other roads in the "Joy system" will be disposed of to other interests or be absorbed by the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy.
Construction of the transcontinental Northern Pacific Railroad begins with groundbreaking ceremonies at Duluth (see 1864). Work along the 47th parallel in Minnesota soon finds an echo at the western end of the route (see 1883; Villard, 1881).
Railroad builder Henry Meiggs completes a line from Mollendo to Arequipa, Peru, with financing from government guano and nitrate monopolies (see Chile, 1861). Peru's president José Balta and 2,000 other guests attend the opening ceremony, which is celebrated with 2 weeks of partying that costs $200,000. Meiggs will continue the road up to Puno on Lake Titicaca, crossing the Andes at 14,665 feet, build a branch line to Cuzco, and found a bank at La Paz, Bolivia. By 1873 he will have used bribery to freeze out competition and secure contracts worth at least $120 million for some 1,015 miles of standard-gauge track (see Costa Rica, 1871).
London's Tower Subway opens under the Thames August 2 (see Underground, 1863). The world's first tube railway, it has steam-operated lifts (elevators), and a steam engine powers a wire rope that shuttles a 12-seat carriage from one end of the six-foot diameter tunnel to the other, but the venture fails to attract many users, is prone to breakdowns, and closes in November. The tunnel is converted to a walkway with stairs and will remain in use until the Tower Bridge opens in 1894.
French railroad trackage increases to 11,000 miles, up from 5,918 in 1860.
Balloonist Charles Green dies of heart failure at Croydon, Surrey, March 26 at age 85, having logged more than 500 flights before his retirement in 1852.
French lawyer Leon Gambetta, 32, pioneers air travel, escaping from the besieged city of Paris by hot-air balloon October 8 to organize defenses against the Germans and lead opposition to the imperial government.
The first lightweight all-metal bicycle (and the first with wire-spoked tension wheels) is patented by Coventry sewing-machine company foreman James Starley, 40, and William Hillman, who will market their Ariel cycle in September of next year at £8 (£12 with speed-gear and center-pivot steering) (seevelocipède, 1861; sports [bike race], 1868; tensioned wheel, 1869). Nicknamed the "penny-farthing" after Britain's largest and smallest copper coins, the bicycle has a large front wheel, a small rear wheel, and a gear that allows the wheels to be turned twice with one revolution of the pedals. It bears a close resemblance to a vehicle sketched in 1493 by Leonardo da Vinci or one of his associates. Spokes made from a single reel of wire looped through holes in the rim and the hub get their tension from screws that are tightened as needed (see chain drive, 1874; tangent-tension spokes, 1876; safety bicycle, 1885).
Britain's White Star Line (Oceanic Steam Navigation Co.) begins transatlantic steamship service between Liverpool and New York (see 1868). Steamships account for 16 percent of world shipping but are often slower than clipper ships. The British liner S.S. Cambria leaves for the North Sea coast October 19 and goes down with 196 passengers and crew (see R.M.S. Oceanic, 1871).
Swedish entrepreneur Axel Ludvig Brostrom, 32, converts the sailing ship Activ into a steamship (see Suez Canal, 1869); the vessel enjoys such success that Brostrom will acquire other steamships, found the Ferm steamship company, and build vessels for carrying iron ore, thus creating Sweden's largest shipping group.
Large-scale banana traffic from the Caribbean to North American ports is pioneered by Wellfleet, Massachusetts, fishing captain Lorenzo Dow Baker, 30, who is part owner of the 70-ton two-masted schooner Telegraph of Wellfleet (see Pearsall, 1843). More and more banana cargoes from Honduras and Costa Rica have reached New Orleans, New York, and Boston since 1850, when men returning from the California gold mines developed a taste for the fruit. Baker buys 1,400 coconuts at 12 for a shilling and 608 bunches of bananas at a shilling each in Port Antonio, Jamaica, and puts in 11 days later at Jersey City, New Jersey, with the fruit beginning to turn yellow. An Italian merchant buys it at Baker's offering price of $2.25 per bunch while the coconuts sell at almost no profit (see 1871).
The steamboat Robert E. Lee reaches St. Louis July 4, having come up the Mississippi from New Orleans in a record 90 hours, 47 minutes to win a race against the steamboat Natchez that has crowded the banks of the river with spectators and bettors.
The 81-year-old German dyestuffs importing firm Leopold Casella & Co. at Frankfurt begins manufacturing synthetic dyestuffs, using methods pioneered by William H. Perkin in 1856.
Sherwin-Williams Paint Co. is founded at Cleveland by Vermont-born entrepreneur Henry A. (Alden) Sherwin, 28, who takes over a retail paint store with backing from partner Edwin P. (Porter) Williams. Williams puts up most of the $2,000 needed to acquire the store, the firm will acquire a two-story brick cooperage shop on the Cuyahoga River in 1873 to start making its own paints, and it will produce 225 tons of paint mixer in the factory's first year of operation (see grinding machine, 1876).
Maine-born Springfield, Massachusetts, inventor Margaret E. "Mattie" Knight, 32, obtains a patent for an attachment to bag-folding machines and produces the first square-bottomed paper bags, predecessors to the bags that will be used at virtually every U.S. grocery store and many other retail establishments (see 1872). At age 12 Knight witnessed an accident in a Manchester, New Hampshire, cotton mill when a shuttle slid out of its loom and pierced a man with its steel tip, promptly invented a stop-motion device that could have prevented such an occurrence, but failed to obtain a patent. An employee of the Columbia Paper Bag Co., she invented her device 3 years ago, it enables clerks to load bags without holding them erect, Knight went to Boston last year to supervise production of a prototype of her invention; another inventor saw her design and quickly patented a slight variation, she has filed suit, prevails in court, rejects an offer of $50,000 for rights to her device, and organizes her own company under the name Eastern Paper Bag Company.
The Smith & Wesson Model 3 introduced by the Springfield, Massachusetts, gunmakers is its first large (.44-caliber) revolver (see 1869). Faced with declining domestic sales, the company has authorized Henry W. Hallot to negotiate contracts in Europe, and he has developed sales agencies in Britain, France, and Germany. Featuring a "top-break" design and an automatic ejection system that permits faster loading and reloading, the new model will enjoy widespread popularity (the Russian grand duke Alexis buys several for himself and his aides, Russian government will order 20,000 in May of next year, and the resulting flood of orders from other countries will strain the company's production capacity) (see 1899).
Inventor Seth Boyden dies at Hilton, New Jersey, March 31 at age 81; inventor (and Navy Yard commander) Admiral John A. B. Dahlgren at Washington, D.C., July 12 at age 60.
B. F. Goodrich Company has its beginnings in the Goodrich, Tew & Company founded at Akron, Ohio, December 31 by Ripley, New York-born rubber maker Benjamin Franklin Goodrich, 29, with backing from local merchants. A Civil War surgeon who later went into the real estate business at New York, he (with his partners) gained control of the Hudson River Rubber Company at suburban Hastings-on-Hudson, and 2 years ago opened a plant at Melrose, New York. The new firm's first products will be firehose to replace leather hose that cracks when frozen, billiard cushions, and belting (see tires, 1899).
The Principles of Chemistry by Russian chemistry professor Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeléev, 36, at St. Petersburg contains the periodic table of elements that arranges the 63 known chemical elements according to atomic weight and valency. German chemist Julius L. (Lothar) Meyer, 60, has worked independently to make important contributions to the periodic laws, as did the late Johann Döbereiner, but it is Mendeléev who first orders the elements according to atomic weight. Beginning with lithium, he places elements with similar valencies under each other, but because so many elements remain undiscovered he leaves blanks for 29 elements not yet known but whose discovery he correctly predicts (see Dalton, 1803; germanium, 1886; Thomson, 1897).
Norwegian mathematician (Marius) Sophus Lie, 27, at Paris discovers contact transformations that make it possible to establish a one-to-one correspondence between lines and spheres, with tangent spheres corresponding to intersecting lines (see Klein, 1872).
J.F. Miescher discovers DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) but does not suspect it of being the basic genetic material involved in conveying heritable characteristics (see 1869; Mendel, 1865). He calls the new compound "nuclein," his mentor Felix Hoppe-Seyler will spend 2 years testing and confirming the discovery, Miescher will separate it into a protein and an acid molecule, and it will become known as nucleic acid, although its function in the hereditary process will remain unknown until the next century (see Kossel, 1885; Weismann, 1892; Levene, 1909; Watson, Crick, 1953).
Scientist T. H. Huxley introduces the terms biogenesis (life from pre-existing life) and abiogenesis (life from nonliving materials, previously called "spontaneous generation") in a speech that gives the first clear statement of Darwinian science in its basic outlines (see Haeckel, 1869). Huxley supports Louis Pasteur's claim to have performed experiments that disproved the notion of spontaneous generation, and refutes supporters of Darwin who have held that abiogenesis was a necessary stage in the evolutionary process (see Tyndall, 1881).
British physician Henry Maudsley, 35, observes that "the forms and habits of mutilated men approach those of women. But while woman preserves her sex, she will necessarily be feebler than man, and having her special bodily and mental characters, will have, to a certain extent her own sphere of activity" (see Anderson, 1866). Regarding a woman as a "mutilated male" permits doctors to judge her as unfit for the demands of the larger world and thus justify limiting her activities.
Obstetrician Sir James Young Simpson dies at London May 6 at age 58.
Congress reorganizes the U.S. Public Health Service established in 1798, makes the Marine Hospital Service (MHS) a bureau in the Treasury Department, requires medical officers (surgeons) to pass entrance examinations and wear uniforms, tries to eliminate political patronage from the service, and establishes the position of Surgeon General (initially Supervising General) as its head. The post will be largely ceremonial for many years until some appointees make it a bully pulpit for improving public health as the PHS expands its function to include the control and prevention of disease, conduct and fund medical research, and protect the public against unsafe food, drugs, and medical devices (see 1964).
Smith Brothers Cough Drops are patented by William "Trade" and Andrew "Mark," whose bearded faces serve as a trademark (see 1847). In 1872 Smith Brothers of Poughkeepsie, New York, will become the first company to offer "factory-filled" packages, and production of the cough drops will jump from five pounds a day to five tons.
The Vatican Council votes 533 to 2 July 18 that the pope is infallible when he defines doctrines of faith or morals ex cathedra (from his throne) (see 1869). Such dicta are "irreformable" and require no "consent of the Church." Papal nuncios have intimidated the bishops into favoring such a decree; their action produces a wave of anti-Church legislation in the German states, but theologian and historical scholar Johann von Döllinger, now 71, is among those who refuse to accept the doctrine of infallibility (see 1871; Lord Acton, 1887).
Parliament passes the United Synagogue bill after a campaign by Jews' College, London, founder Rabbi Nathan M. Adler, now 67.
A British Education Act institutes compulsory education, expanding elementary education for girls as well as boys.
Only 2 percent of Americans aged 17 and older are high school graduates, a figure that will rise to 76 percent by 1970. Sixty-seven percent of children between age 5 and age 17 are students, a figure that will rise to 78 percent by 1920 and to 87 percent by 1975.
Educator Emma Willard dies at Troy, New York, April 15 at age 83.
Wellesley College receives its charter as a women's seminary at Wellesley, Massachusetts (a part of Needham that was settled by colonist Samuel Welles in 1763 and will be incorporated as a separate town in 1881). New Hampshire-born Boston lawyer-turned-evangelist Henry Fowle Durant, 48, profited from the Civil War and has founded the school. "Women can do the work," he has said. "I give them the chance" (see 1875).
Women enter the University of Michigan for the first time since its founding at Ann Arbor in 1817. By the end of the 1870s there will be 154 U.S. coeducational colleges, up from 24 at the close of the Civil War (see Oberlin, 1833).
The donkey symbol that will identify the Democratic Party in the United States for well over a century appears January 15 in Harper's Weekly, where cartoonist Thomas Nast continues to caricature "Boss" Tweed and his cronies (see 1869). Nast has simply adapted a line, credited to the late Andrew Jackson, who was called a jackass and replied that he would rather be a kicking jackass than a stubborn mule. No Democrat will gain the presidency until 1884, but Nast will create the elephant symbol for the Republican Party in 1874.
Journalist Aleksandr I. Herzen dies at Paris January 21 at age 57, having originated the idea of peasant populism.
Pneumatic-tube messaging gets a boost from English engineer J. M. Willmott, who invents a double-sluice valve that permits dispatching of successive capsules and use of both positive pressure and vacuum to drive capsules both ways from a single pumping station. Use of pneumatic tubes will become popular to connect buildings (and offices within large buildings) in cities throughout Europe and North America: London will have more than 14 miles of such tubes for the post office alone by 1886, Parisians will pay fees to have messages (sometimes called pneumatograms) sent specifically by tube, New York's post office will operate a system from 1893 to 1953, with tubes running up and down most of Manhattan, and they will be widely used in department stores, libraries, and such not only for messages but for small parcels.
The British Post Office issues the world's first postcards October 1.
A rotary press built by Richard Hoe incorporates advances patented by William Bullock and prints both sides of a page in a single operation (see 1846; 1865; Times of London, 1866). The New York Tribune will install the new press in its pressroom (see folding apparatus, 1875).
Production of paper from pulpwood begins in New England (see Burgess, 1854; Tilghman, 1867).
Scribner's Monthly begins publication at New York with author Josiah G. Holland, now 51, as editor (see 1881).
The Revolution suspends publication at New York with outstanding debts of $10,000 (George F. Train withdrew his support last year, and the paper has refused to accept patent medicine advertising, which is the mainstay of most newspapers). Susan B. Anthony is stuck with the bills; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, disclaiming any obligation, advises Anthony to ignore the debt, give up feminist activity for a while, and amass some personal savings.
Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly begins publication May 14 at New York. "Progress! Free Thought! Untrammeled Lives! Breaking the Way for Future Generations!" shouts its masthead; backed by Commodore Vanderbilt, the paper exposes stock and bond frauds and political corruption, advocates women's rights, and promotes clairvoyant healing and free love.
The United States has 5,091 newspapers in circulation, up from 715 in 1830.
La Nación begins publication at Buenos Aires to rival the paper La Prensa founded last year. The new paper's founders include former president Bartolomé Mitre, whose descendants will control La Nación for more than a century.
The Belfast Telegraph begins publication in Ireland.
The Yokohama Mainichi Shimbun begins publication in Japan but not yet on a daily basis (see 1871).
The political and literary review The Shield (al-Jinan) begins publication at Beirut under the direction of Christian scholar Butrus al-Bustani, 51, who has produced an Arabic dictionary and will complete six volumes of an Arabic encyclopedia. Bustani believes that Arabs should study Western science and civilization.
Nonfiction: "Civilization" (essay) by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who says, "Hitch your wagon to a star;" Dictionary of Phrase and Fable by Ebenezer C. Brewer, now 60, will have sales of more than 100,000 copies; The History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada (12th volume, the first having appeared in 1856) by J. A. Froude; La Création by Edgar Quinet, whose fascination with the progress of science has restored his confidence in the general progress of mankind.
Fiction: The Earthly Paradise by William Morris is a three-volume collection of 24 classical- and medieval-style tales with illustrations by painter Edward Coley Burne-Jones, now 34, who met Morris at Oxford's Exeter College; Put Yourself in His Place by Charles Reade is about terrorist activities on the part of trade unionists; The Mystery of Edwin Drood by the late Charles Dickens; Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Vingt mille lieues sous les mers) by Jules Verne, who delights readers with Captain Nemo and his submarine.
Charles Dickens dies of a stroke at his Gadshill home in Kent June 9 at age 58 with his final novel not quite finished (he provides in his will for his longtime mistress, Ellen "Nelly" Ternan, now 31); William Gilmore Simms dies at his native Charleston, South Carolina, June 11 at age 64; Jules Goncourt at Paris June 20 at age 39, survived by his novelist brother Edmond.
Poetry: The House of Life by Dante Gabriel Rosetti, who has been persuaded to exhume the unpublished poems he buried with his wife in 1862 and whose work establishes his reputation; "Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight" by Indiana-born poet Rose Hartwick, 20, who wrote the lines on a school slate when she was 17 (published in the Detroit Commercial Advertiser, the poem is quickly picked up by other papers and will be reprinted throughout the world. Hartwick will marry Edmund Carson Thorpe next year and be remembered as Rose Hartwick Thorpe by the generations of schoolchildren who will recite her work).
Juvenile: The Story of a Bad Boy by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, who quit school at age 13 upon the death of his father and has written an autobiographical account of boyhood in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Now 33, Aldrich moved to Boston in 1865; An Old Fashioned Girl by Louisa May Alcott.
Painting: La perle by J. B. C. Corot; Modern Olympia by Paul Cézanne; Un Atelier àBatignolles by Henri Fantin-Latour; Louveciennes, the Road to Versailles and Lower Norwood, London, Snow by Camille Pissarro, who flees to England along with painter Claude Monet, 36, to escape the Franco-Prussian War; The Artist's Sister Edma and Their Mother by Berthe Morisot.
Art critic John Ruskin is appointed Slade professor of fine arts at Oxford. Now 51, he is Britain's first art professor.
The Boston Museum of Fine Arts is chartered in February (see 1909).
New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art is chartered April 13. Local real estate investor William T. Blodgett buys up three important private collections at Paris in the summer (paying $116,180 for 174 pictures), the museum will open in 1872 at 681 Fifth Avenue, and it will move the following year to a mansion in 14th Street (see 1880).
The Corcoran Gallery of Art incorporated May 14 at Washington, D.C., will open in 1872. Local banker William Corcoran, now 71, made a fortune with his partner George Riggs by raising $5 million to help the government fight the Mexican War of 1846 to 1848, retired in 1854 to devote himself to philanthropy, and supported the Confederacy in the Civil War, which he sat out in Europe. The gallery on Pennsylvania Avenue will have as its nucleus Corcoran's own personal collection (his gifts to it will eventually total $1.6 million).
Painter-turned photographer-turned painter David Octavius Hill dies at Newington, outside Edinburgh, May 17 at age 67.
Theater: London's Vaudeville Theatre opens 4/16 with a bill featuring the play For Love or Money and a version of the opera Don Carlos; The M. P. by Thomas W. Robertson 4/23 at the Prince of Wales's Theatre, London, with Squire Bancroft, Marie Wilton, and Carlotta Addison; Boris Godunov by the late Aleksandr Pushkin 9/17 at St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Theater (production has been delayed by censorship for nearly half a century).
Playwright-actress Anna Cara Mowatt dies at London (or Twickenham) July 21 at age 51.
Ballet: Coppélia 5/25 at the Théâtre Imperial de l'Opéra, Paris, with choreography by Arthur Saint-Léon, music by French composer (Clement Philibert) Léo Delibes, 34. Coppélia will be the comic classic of the ballet repertory as the 39-year-old Giselle will be its tragic classic.
Opera: Die Walküre 6/26 at Munich, with music by Richard Wagner, who marries the divorcée Cosima Liszt von Bülow.
Composer Cesare Pugni dies at St. Petersburg January 26 (January 14 Old Style) at age 67; Michael Balfe near Ware, Hertfordshire, October 20 at age 62.
First performances: Romeo and Juliet Overture (Fantasia after Shakespeare) by Petr Ilich Tchaikovsky 3/16 at Moscow; Concerto No. 3 in E flat major for Piano and Orchestra by Camille Saint-Saëns 3/17 at the Salle Playel, Paris; Siegfried Idyll by Richard Wagner 12/25 (his new wife's birthday) at the Wagners' Villa Tribschen on Lake Lucerne.
English prizefighter James "Jem" Mace comes to America and fights Tom Allen May at 10 at Kennerville, Louisana, in a match advertised as a contest for the world championship (see Marquess of Queensberry rules, 1867). The old London Prize Ring rules apply, Mace wins in 10 rounds, and he will retire late next year at age 40 (but see 1890).
The first English bid to regain the America's Cup in ocean racing won by the schooner America in 1851 ends in failure; the Cambria loses 1 to 0 to the U.S. defender Magic in New York Bay.
Scottish golfer Thomas "Young Tom" Morris, 19, wins his third consecutive British championship.
One of every three Boston families has a live-in servant, one of every four New York and San Francisco families, one of every five Philadelphia and Chicago families.
U.S. architects incorporate rear entrances, back stairways, and servants' quarters in designing middle-class houses so that domestics can perform their chores without disturbing the family.
Sandringham House is completed in Norfolk for Queen Victoria after 9 years of construction.
French citizens subscribe 40 million francs to build the Church of Sacré Coeur on Montmartre in Paris "in witness of repentance and as a symbol of hope" following the French defeat at Sedan.
The liberal government of France's foreign minister Emile Olivier forces Baron Haussmann to resign after 17 years as prefect of the Seine département. He has raised huge amounts of money through loans to finance his grand schemes to improve Paris, Boulogne, and Vincennes; critics such as Léon Say have attacked him (Say will not recognize the need for government support of public works until 1883), but Haussmann has left an indelible mark.
German-born lumberman Frederick Weyerhaeuser, 36, enters into a marketing agreement with other Midwestern lumber interests to form a syndicate. A onetime sawmill worker, Weyerhaeuser bought an ailing lumberyard in 1857 (see 1891). "Go west young man," says New York Tribune publisher Horace Greeley, who picks up a phrase first published in 1851 by John L. B. Soule in the Terre Haute (Indiana) Express. Greeley establishes the Union Colony in Colorado Territory (it will later be called Greeley). He has been inspired by his Ohio-born agricultural editor Nathan Cook Meeker, 53, who digs the territory's first irrigation canal.
Some 4 million buffalo (bison) roam the American plains south of the Platte River by some estimates, but warmer temperatures since the middle of the century have reduced the supply of grass on the prairie, cattle now compete for that grass, and tribesmen who used to kill the animals with bow and arrow now use firearms. The bison will be virtually wiped out in the next 4 years by cattle-borne diseases, Native Americans, and white market hunters, leaving perhaps half a million north of the Platte (see 1875).
Cattle drives begin on a huge scale up the Chisholm Trail from San Antonio, Texas, to Abilene, Kansas (see 1867). The overland treks will bring an estimated 10 million head up the trail in the next 20 years, and while Joseph G. McCoy at Abilene does not quite fulfill his promises to Texas cattle ranchers they do receive $20 at Abilene for a steer worth $11 in Texas and that sells at Chicago for $31.50 (see 1871).
The U.S. corn crop tops 1 million bushels for the first time (see 1885).
The U.S. cotton crop is 4.03 million bales, up from 3.48 million in 1860.
Grape phylloxerae reach California (date approximate), having traveled across the Rocky Mountains from the East Coast, but the aphids have a relatively mild effect as compared to that in Europe, where vines are more densely planted (see 1868).
The U.S. Department of Agriculture imports 300 apple varieties from Russia. Included are the Duchess, Red Astrachan, and Yellow Transparent.
The MacIntosh apple propagated from a seedling found on his Matilda Township homestead by Ontario nurseryman Allan McIntosh will become the dominant variety in New England and eastern New York.
California wheat growers produce 16 million bushels, and the $20 million they receive is twice the value of all the gold mined in California for the year (see 1868). Great wheat farms in the Livermore and San Joaquin valleys average nearly 40 bushels per acre with some producing 60 per acre.
Parisians go hungry as Prussian troops begin a 135-day siege September 19. Farmers herd thousands of cattle and sheep into the city's parks, whose trees are cut down to provide firewood. Jules Ferry, 38, is appointed mayor of Paris in November and will be remembered as "Ferry-la-Famine." By mid-December, butter sells for 35 francs/pound, up from 4 francs at the start of the siege; potatoes fetch 15 francs per bushel, up from three; rabbit meat brings 40 francs/lb., up from eight (the average workman earns only five or six francs per day). People fish for rats through gratings in the gutters, using hooks, lines, and sinkers; they eat cats, dogs, even animals from the zoo including antelope, buffalo, kangaroo, and the beloved elephants Castor and Pollux (see 1871).
Italian chemist and toxicologist Francesco Selmi, 53, coins the word ptomaine to denote certain nitrogenous compounds easily detectible by smell and in some cases poisonous. A professor at the University of Bologna, Selmi will be credited with helping to establish the science of colloid chemistry, but his word will be applied erroneously to food contaminants that are in many cases not detectible by smell.
European flour millers develop porcelain rollers. Flour from rolling mills is whiter than flour from grinding mills since the dark wheat germ is flattened by the rollers into a tiny flake that is sifted off with the bran, but while the whiter flour is reduced in nutrients the loss is significant only in areas where bread remains the major part of human diets. The porcelain rollers are widely adopted in Austria and Hungary, where hard wheats predominate (see 1839; Glasgow, 1872; Minneapolis, 1879).
Cincinnati's Gaff, Fleischmann markets compressed yeast wrapped in tinfoil that permits shipment anywhere (see 1869); the yeast becomes popular even with ultraconservative bakers (see 1876).
The U.S. canning industry puts up 30 million cans, up from 5 million in 1860, despite the fact that it employs scarcely 600 people (see 1874). A can opener patented by West Meridian, Connecticut, inventor William W. Lyman is the first with a sharp-edged cutting wheel that rolls around a can's top rim (see 1866). Lyman's design will remain substantially unchanged until 1925.
The first U.S. food trademark (#82) registered by the U.S. Patent Office is a red devil. Boston's 48-year-old William Underwood & Co. receives the trademark for the "deviled entremets" it introduced in 1867.
The French army recruits saucier Georges Auguste Escoffier, 23, of the fashionable Paris restaurant Petit Moulin Rouge as cook for the second section of the general staff of the French Army of the Rhine and given charge of provisions; he obtains a huge, superior-quality cut of beef for his horse-drawn supply wagon, spends the night roasting it, and serves it the morning of August 15 before the troops march on Gravelotte. Escoffier began his career at age 13 as an apprentice at his uncle's restaurant in Nice; he serves the officers an evening meal of sautéed rabbit on a fondant of onion purée and they proceed to gain the only French victory of the war (see restaurants, 1883).
Canadian distiller Joseph Emm Seagram, 29, joins a 19-year-old firm of Waterloo, Ontario, millers and distillers that he will own by 1883. Joseph E. Seagram and Sons will become a leading whisky maker (see Bronfman, 1928).
José Cuervo tequila is introduced by a distillery that opens in the highlands of Mexico's Jalisco state to produce the beverage from the juice of the agave plant, a spiky member of the lily family whose core (pina) is harvested when the plant is 10 years old.
Mott's Cider and Mott's Vinegar voyage around Cape Horn by clipper ship in 1,000-case lots (see 1842).
Chicago's population reaches 300,000, up from 93,000 in 1857 (see environment [fire], 1871); Kansas City's population reaches 32,260, up from 3,500 in 1865, as the year-old Hannibal Bridge across the Missouri helps attract residents.
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