1871 1872 1873 1874 1875 1876 1877 1878 1879 1880
German occupation forces begin to evacuate France following the death January 9 of the exiled Napoleon III from bladder disease at age 64. Parlement's monarchist majority condemns the Thiers government. Thiers resigns May 24 and is succeeded promptly by Marshal MacMahon, now 64, who is elected almost unanimously. The last German soldiers cross back into Germany September 16 (see 1877). A military court sentences Marshal Bazaine to degradation and death December 10 for having surrendered ignominiously at Metz in 1870, but Marshal MacMahon commutes the sentence to 20 years' imprisonment and Bazaine will escape in August of next year.
Irish-born Greek freedom fighter Sir Richard Church dies at Athens March 30 at age 88 (approximate).
Saxony's king Johann dies October 20 after a 19-year reign and is succeeded by his son Albrecht, now 45, who distinguished himself as a military leader in the Seven Weeks' War of 1866 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. Named commander of German occupation forces in France 2 years ago and promoted to field marshal of the German Army, Albrecht will reign until his death in 1902.
The Three Emperors League (Dreikaiserbund) is created as a loose defensive alliance that joins the German kaiser, Austro-Hungarian emperor, and Russian czar, but the rivalry between the Russian chancellor Aleksandr M. Gorchakov and the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck will help to derail the alliance.
Spain's Amadeo I abdicates in disgust February 11 after a 2-year reign in which he has been opposed as a "foreigner" while trying to cope with assassination attempts, Carlist uprisings, Cuban separatism, intraparty disputes, and republican conspiracies; the first Spanish Republic is proclaimed that night by the radical majority in the cortes elected last year, the foreign minister Emilio Cistelar y Ripoli, 40, becomes prime minister, and he tries to organize a centralized government, but the second Carlist civil war continues (see 1874).
British diplomat Sir Henry Lytton Bulwer dies at Naples May 23 at age 71, having outlived his younger brother, the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton.
Spanish authorities seize the Cuban ship Virginius in international waters October 31 and summarily execute 36 of her crew and 15 passengers, including some U.S. and British citizens as the Ten Years' War continues between Cuban rebels and Spain (see 1869). The ship belongs to some Cuban revolutionaries at New York. She has fraudulently flown the U.S. flag and carried U.S. registration, the incident threatens to provoke a conflict between Spain and the United States, but Secretary of State Hamilton Fish averts hostilities. Spain agrees November 27 to return the ship with apologies, will pay an indemnity of $80,000 in 1875 to the families of the dead Americans, pay a similar indemnity to Britain, but welshes on her promise to punish the officers responsible.
New York's Boss Tweed goes on trial January 7, the proceedings end in a hung jury, but a second trial on fraud charges begins November 19 and this time Tweed is convicted on 204 of 220 counts, sentenced to 12 years' imprisonment, ordered to pay a fine of $12,750, and given a tongue-lashing by the judge (see 1871). Respectable businessmen in the city are at least as guilty as Tweed for the crimes committed (see crime, architecture, 1875).
Further evidence of corruption in the Grant administration continues to emerge (see 1868). Vice President Schuyler Colfax has been implicated in the Crédit Mobilier scandal that came to light last year and was not renominated. Secretary of the Treasury George S. Boutwell resigns March 16 after 4 years in office and returns to the Senate (see 1874).
Former Canadian prime minister Sir George Etienne, Baronet Cartier, dies at London May 20 at age 58.
Prince Edward Island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence joins the 6-year-old Dominion of Canada July 1.
A Canadian order-in-council August 30 establishes the North-West Mounted Police. White wolf hunters from Montana Territory have killed 36 Assiniboine in retaliation for stealing horses (the Cypress Hill Massacre); the "mounties" are ordered to halt the trading of liquor and arms with the Native Americans of the Northwest Territory. Their motto will be, "We always get our man."
Canada's first prime minister Sir John Macdonald resigns November 7 following charges of corruption in the last election and scandalous revelations involving the projected transcontinental railway. Scottish-born financier and shipowner Sir Hugh Allan, 63, received the charter for the Canadian Pacific last year and it has come out that as a member of a Chicago financial syndicate he contributed $300,000 last year to Sir John's Conservative Party election campaign; Scottish-born fur trader and Conservative House of Commons member Donald A. Smith, 53, has withdrawn his support, contributing to the fall of the Conservative ministry. Sir John's successor is Scottish-born politician Alexander Mackenzie, 51, who will serve until 1878 as the nation's first Liberal prime minister, but Sir John will win reelection in 1878 and serve until his death in 1891.
Russian troops under the command of General Konstantin P. Kaufmann occupy the Central Asian khanate of Khiva between Bukhara and the Caspian Sea, gaining all of its territory north of Amu Darya (see Bukhara, 1868). Kaufmann will occupy the khanate of Kokand northeast of Bukhara in 1875, Russia will annex it in 1876, but Britain fears encroachment on her interests in Afghanistan, London will protest Russian expansion in Turkistan, Aleksandr II will reject Kaufmann's plans for further expansion, and the general will turn his attention to land reform and other reforms as he devotes his efforts to becoming an able administrator.
China's Qing dynasty emperor Tongzhi (Tung-chih) assumes personal control of the government upon turning 17 April 27, ending the regency that has ruled since he ascended the imperial throne at age 6. He grants an audience to representatives of foreign governments and for the first time in Chinese history does not require the traditional ceremonial kowtowing as an indication of subservience (see 1875).
Japan's Meiji government gives approval August 18 to a proposal by Gen. Takamori Saigo that he visit Korea, whose government has refused to recognize the new Japanese regime. Toshimichi Okubo, Tomomi Iwakura, and some other officials return from a visit to Europe (see 1871) and veto the idea of invading Korea, insisting that domestic reform and development should take precedence over any expansionist efforts. Formerly resistant to Western influences, they have seen enough on their visit to make them more receptive to such influences. When those in favor of the invasion press Koshaku Sanjo Sanetomi to obtain the emperor's approval, he relinquishes his position to Iwakura, who defeats the projected military action.
Okinawa in the Ryuku Islands comes under Japanese suzerainty after centuries of joint rule by China and daimyos from Kyushu. It will become a prefecture of Japan in 1879 (see 1874).
Admiral Charles Rigault de Genouilly dies at Barcelona May 4 at age 66, having initiated French military presence in Cochinchina (Vietnam) (see 1867). The governor of Cochinchina Admiral Marie-Jules Dupré tries to take advantage of an unauthorized attempt by trader Jean Dupuis to open the Red River to commerce with China; colonial administrator Francis Garnier, now 34, sails from Shanghai to Saigon in August with orders to extricate Dupuis from the Hanoi region, but Dupré gives him secret instructions to establish a French presence there. Garnier reaches Hanoi November 5, forces a confrontation with Vietnamese officials, leads an attack on the Hanoi citadel November 20, and overcomes a superior force; Vietnamese general Nguyen Tri Phuong is taken prisoner and dies at Hanoi November 20 at age 67, having torn at his bandages and starved himself in a traditional Vietnamese expression of moral and political protest. Garnier's troops seize other positions in the Red River Delta, but the Vietnamese enlist the support of Liu Yung-fu's Black Flag bandits, they attack the Hanoi citadel December 21, and Garnier is killed (see 1882).
Zanzibar's public slave markets close June 5 by order of the sultan Barghash Sayyid, who acts under British government pressure to prohibit the export of slaves (see Livingstone, 1871; Berlin Conference, 1884).
Puerto Rico's Spanish colonial government abolishes slavery (see 1870); Chinese, Corsican, German, Irish, Italian, Lebanese, and Scottish emigrants have made their way to the island and intermarried with the existing population, leaving only about 5 percent of the population pure African.
Divorced women in Britain gain the right to claim custody of their children.
A Japanese law enacted in May gives women the right to divorce (see 1870). Another law provides that a woman without a husband or son may be a koshu (head of household) on a temporary basis until she marries a man who will adopt her family name (a muku-iri) or until her daughter marries such a man (see 1878).
Susan B. Anthony goes on trial at Canandaigua, New York, June 18 for voting in last year's election. The judge refuses to let her testify in her own defense, saying that women are not competent to do so, and he directs the jury to find her guilty. Fined $100 plus costs, Anthony announces, "I shall never pay a penny of this unjust claim," and she never will.
Social reformer Sarah Moore Grimké dies at Hyde Park, outside Boston, December 23 at age 81.
Port Moresby is founded on the Pacific island of New Guinea by Royal Navy captain John Morseby, who names it after his father, Admiral Sir Fairfax Moresby, now 87, who has been admiral of the fleet since 1870 and who half a century ago suppressed the slave trade at Mauritius. Captain Moresby raises the British flag on the island's south coast, but London refuses to support him unless Australia's colonial governments agree to assume responsibility for the territory's administration (when some colonies demur, London disavows Moresby's action).
Explorer-missionary-physician David Livingstone dies at Old Chitambo May 1 at age 60. His servants bury his heart, wait some weeks for his body to dry in the sun, and transport it to the coast, meeting en route a Royal Geographic Society expedition led by former Royal Navy officer Verney Lovett Cameron, 28, who has worked to suppress the East African slave trade and is proceeding west from Zanzibar. Cameron recovers some of Livingstone's papers at Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika (see 1875), Livingstone's body is carried to England for burial in Westminster Abbey; Northwest Passage pioneer Sir Robert J. Le M. McClure dies at London October 17 at age 66.
The Fourth Coinage Act makes gold the sole U.S. monetary standard. Passed by Congress February 12, it establishes the Bureau of the Mint, places all mint and assay office activities under control of the new Treasury Department bureau, stops coinage of 412.5-grain silver dollars, and authorizes only 420-grain trade dollars for export. The act inadvertently makes trade dollars legal tender in amounts up to $5, but a joint resolution of Congress in late July 1876 will deprive the trade dollar of its legal status (see Bland-Allison Act, 1878).
Demonetization of silver comes amidst new silver discoveries in Nevada (see 1872). J. W. Mackay, James G. Fair, James C. Flood, and William T. O'Brien have spent 10 months following a narrow vein of ore until it widened into a vein 300 feet wide. They open the new Big Bonanza vein February 5 in the Panamint Mountains, and it is the biggest silver strike since the Comstock Lode of 1859. Temperatures in the mine are so high that workers can stand the heat for only 15 minutes at a time and must then rest for 30, but the Big Bonanza will yield $150 million for Mackay and Fair, who will establish the Bank of Nevada with Flood at San Francisco in 1878. The Comstock Lode has yielded more than $120 million in silver, $80 million in gold (a millionaire miner named John Percival Jones has become a U.S. senator from Nevada). The U.S. silver yield reaches $36 million for the year, up from $157,000 in 1860, and will continue to mount, but although gold production is declining from its 1854 peak the Nevada mines will have produced $397 million worth of ore by 1882.
"The country is fast becoming filled with gigantic corporations wielding and controlling immense aggregations of money and thereby commanding great influence and power," reports a congressional investigating committee: "It is notorious in many state legislatures that these influences are often controlling."
Congress formally censures Rep. James Brooks (D. N.Y.) and Rep. Oakes Ames (R. Mass.) in connection with last year's Crédit Mobilier scandal. House investigators have established that Ames distributed Crédit Mobilier stock to some congressional colleagues, including Rep. James G. Blaine (R. Me.) and Rep. James A. Garfield (R. Ohio), all of whom received substantial dividends. There is evidence that former vice president Schuyler Colfax also received stock (he denies it) and there is no doubt that he received a $4,000 campaign contribution from a contractor who supplied envelopes to the government while Colfax was chairman of the House Committee on Post Offices and Post Roads. Brooks dies of fever at Washington, D.C., April 30 at age 62, having contracted malaria in India last year while on a world tour; shovel maker Ames returns to his native Easton, Massachusetts, and dies there May 8 at age 69, having risked his fortune to support construction of the Union Pacific Railroad and thereby multiplied that fortune (he leaves an estate valued at about $6 million that is so encumbered with debts that his son Oliver III, now 42, is obliged to put up his own fortune as collateral to satisfy the creditors). But while enormous corruption and waste attended the building of the great transcontinental rail line, it will turn out that Congress invested wisely when it loaned the Central Pacific and Union Pacific $64,623,512 in 1868 and 1869: when the 30-year bonds that it authorized mature in 1898 and 1899, the federal government will receive $63,023,512 of principal plus $104,722,978 in interest, a total of $167,746,490 at a time when dollars will actually be worth more than they were in the inflationary post-war years of 1868 and 1869.
The U.S. Supreme Court rules April 14 in the Slaughterhouse Cases that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution is to be only narrowly interpreted (the court upholds a Louisiana supreme court's ruling that supported a law enacted by that state's legislature in March 1869). Justice Salmon P. Chase joins in the dissent but dies at New York May 7 at age 65.
Germany adopts mark coinage. Austria adopts the decimal system for her coinage, following the example of Germany and Italy, whose unification has made it imperative to standardize the coinage systems of their constituent nations and city-states (see Vienna Coin Treaty, 1857). The United States adopted decimal coinage in 1792 and Mexico in 1862, Siam will do so in 1889, Japan and the Ottoman Empire in 1891, Egypt in 1892, Tunis in 1895, Russia in 1900, but Britain will cling to her arcane system of guineas, pounds, sovereigns, crowns, half crowns, shillings, pence, and farthings until 1971, with 4 farthings to the pence, 12 pence to the shilling, 20 shillings (or 240 pence) to the pound, 1 pound plus 1 shilling to the gold guinea.
Financial panic strikes Vienna in May and soon spreads to other European money centers.
The Victoria government at Melbourne passes Australia's first factory act to protect female and juvenile mill hands and maintain safe and sanitary working conditions.
Britain's "golden age" comes to an end after 23 years as Germany and the United States challenge British industrial preeminence.
European investors withdraw capital from the United States, and the Wall Street banking house Jay Cooke & Company that has been financial agent for the Northern Pacific Railway fails September 18. Black Friday on the stock exchange sends prices tumbling September 19, the exchange closes for 10 days, and by year's end some 5,000 business firms have failed, millions of working Americans are obliged to depend on soup kitchens and other charities, tens of thousands come close to starvation.
The Greenback Party claims that a shortage of money is the cause of hard times. If the government will issue greenbacks until as much money is in circulation as in the boom times of 1865 the country will again enjoy prosperity, say the Greenbackers, who have been organized by Midwesterners and who also demand control of the corporations, honesty in government, conservation of natural resources, and wide-scale reforms.
The panic on Wall Street accompanies a $20 million failure that nearly wipes out the fortune of Sen. William Sprague (D. R.I.), now 43, who has attacked on the Senate floor what he called the grip of capital and industry on the government and faced charges that he engaged in illicit cotton trading in Texas during the War of the Rebellion. Three trustees chosen by his creditors refuse to act unless they receive protection against personal liability for their conduct of the business, so Providence lawyer Zechariah Chafee, 58, agrees December 1 to accept responsibility as trustee of the Sprague properties.
New York's Lord & Taylor moves uptown from its Grand Street and Broadway location to a new building at the southwest corner of Broadway and 20th Street, New York's first iron-frame building with steam elevators (see 1860). The five-story (including attic) store, designed by James H. Giles with mansard roof, dormer windows, and display windows, is lighted with gas chandeliers. It will be extended to Fifth Avenue and will house the growing fashion emporium until 1914.
New York merchant R. H. Macy permits Bavarian-born merchant Isidor Straus, 28, and his brother Nathan, 25, to rent 2,500 square feet of space in the store's basement for a china-and-crockery department (see 1869). The Straus brothers' father, Lazarus, emigrated in 1852, worked as a peddler in backwoods Georgia, sent home for his wife, Sara, and their four children in 1854, moved with his family to New York after the Civil War to escape anti-Semitism in Talbotton, Georgia, and bought a small china and crockery wholesale firm in lower Manhattan (see 1874).
Electricity drives machinery for the first time in history, at Vienna.
Wall Street's financial panic enables Henry Clay Frick to acquire most of the coal and coke land in the region of Connellsville, Pennsylvania, that can be operated at a profit, and when Pittsburgh steel mill operators discover that Connellsville coke is the best coke for steelmaking, the price of coke will rise from $1 per ton to $5 (see 1870). Frick will have gained control of 80 percent of the Connellsville coke output, will be a millionaire by age 30, will be offered a general managership by steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, and will organize the Carnegie Company, whose basic unit will be the Homestead Works (see 1892).
Thaddeus Lowe of 1866 artificial ice fame discovers a process for manufacturing water gas that will greatly enhance use of gaslight illumination (see technology [coke oven], 1897; Welsbach mantle, 1885).
Russia's Baku oil fields increase production as Alfred Nobel of 1866 dynamite fame and his brother Ludwig invest capital to build a refinery that will make Baku the world's leading petroleum producer (see 1871; 1901).
Service begins January 1 on a new Mexican railroad between Veracruz and Mexico City as the legislature gives out concessions to railroad and telegraph-line builders in an effort to modernize the country (see political events, 1846). British capital has built the rail link that connects the capital to the coast.
Cornelius Vanderbilt of the New York Central gains control of the rail line between New York and Chicago by leasing the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern, formerly headed by his son-in-law Horace F. Clark (see 1869; Clark, 1872), but Clark dies at New York June 19 at age 57 after heading the Union Pacific for less than a year and Jay Gould acquires his first Union Pacific shares (see Vanderbilt, 1877).
The Hoosac railroad tunnel is completed in the Berkshires of Massachusetts after 22 years of construction with hand tools and nitroglycerin blasting. It will remain for some years the longest tunnel in the world.
Wall Street's financial panic deals a heavy blow to Ben Holladay, who acquired the Russell, Majors and Waddell transcontinental freight firm in 1862, made a fortune before selling out in 1866, and has sold his steamship interests to finance a new Oregon Central Railroad. His German bondholders will force Holladay out of the company in 1876, and he will be financially ruined.
San Francisco's cable streetcar (the world's first) goes into service August 1 on Clay Street hill. London-born engineer Andrew S. (Smith) Hallidie, 37, has seen some horses killed when they slipped on wet pavement trying to pull a wagon up a hill; he has persuaded the city fathers to install the "endless-wire rope way" that he patented in January 1871 to cope with the hilly streets that defy San Francisco's eight horse-drawn lines. Huge steam-engines atop the hill generate power to pull the cars, and San Francisco will install additional cable-car lines until there are 175 miles of them (the figure will later shrink to just eight); Los Angeles, Seattle, Denver, and Omaha will follow suit (see 1894; Sprague, 1888).
The Calcutta Tramway Company begins service in the Indian city with horse-drawn cars; it will introduce electric traction in 1899.
Rochester, New York, lawyer George B. (Baldwin) Selden, 27, experiments with internal combustion engines in an effort to develop a lightweight engine that will propel a road vehicle that is more efficient than the "road locomotives" now used in some farm jobs (see 1876; energy, 1860; 1866).
The White Star liner S.S. Atlantic runs aground April 1 off Halifax, Nova Scotia. The 420-foot steamship founders, and 502 of her 931 passengers are lost.
Pompey, New York-born mechanical engineer John E. (Edson) Sweet, 40, builds the first U.S. micrometer caliper for making tools.
The M1873 Winchester introduced by the Winchester Repeating Arms Company of New Haven, Connecticut, is an improvement on the M1866 and will gain wide popularity. The company will promote it as "the gun that won the West" and in the next 40 years will sell 720,610 of the new model (see 1876).
"Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism" by James Clerk Maxwell, now 42, describes properties of the electromagnetic field and gives equations that provide a basis for the electromagnetic theory of light (see 1865; Lorentz, 1875; Hertz, 1887; Feynman, 1944).
Honesdale, Pennsylvania-born physicist Henry Augustus Rowland, 24, at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, discovers the magnetic effect of electric convection.
The thermos bottle has its beginnings in the Dewar vessel invented by Scottish chemist James Dewar, 31, who will invent the thermos flask in 1892.
German chemist Johannes (Adolph) Wislicenus, 38, discovers that two compounds may have the same chemical formula but exhibit different characteristics, a phenomenon (isomerism) that he attributes to the different molecular structure or arrangement of atoms of the two compounds (see Pasteur, 1848; La Bel, 1874).
Geologist Adam Sedgwick dies at Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, January 27 at age 87 (the university will open a museum in 1903 as a memorial to him and his work); pioneer hydrographer Matthew F. Maury dies at Lexington, Kentucky, February 1 at 67, having defected to the Confederacy in 1861, experimented with electric mines, and spent the last 4 years as professor of meteorology at the Virginia Military Institute; chemist Justus von Liebig dies at Munich April 18 at age 69; naturalist Louis Agassiz at Cambridge, Massachusetts, December 12 at age 66. He has opposed Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, believing that all the world's flora and fauna were divinely created, and favored a teleological interpretation of evolution.
"Typhoid Fever: Its Nature, Mode of Spreading, and Prevention" by English physician William Budd, 62, proves the contagious nature of the disease (see cholera, 1866; Eberth, Koch, 1880).
Italian physician-cytologist Camillo Golgi, 30, devises the silver nitrate method of staining nerve tissue, enabling him to demonstrate the existence of a nerve cell that possesses many short, branching extensions (dendrites) and serves to connect several other nerve cells. Working with rudimentary facilities at a home for incurables in Abbiategrasso, Golgi has discovered what will be called Golgi cells and his studies will lead to the establishment of the nerve cell as the basic structural unit of the human nervous system (see Ramón y Cajal, 1903)
Father Damien goes to the government hospital for lepers on the Hawaiian island of Molokai to care for victims of the disease that will be called Hansen's disease (see Hansen, 1874). Belgian missionary Joseph Damien de Veuster, 33, will contract the disease himself, will devote the rest of his life to the work, but will die in 1889.
Puerperal fever has reached epidemic proportions, reports Maine-born New York physician (Benjamin) Fordyce Barker, 55, and is 20 times more prevalent than last year, striking rich women twice as often as the poor and killing four times as many women in home deliveries than in hospitals. The fever takes 130 lives at Cincinnati, where in earlier years it never took more than 20.
German laws introduced in May under Chancellor Bismarck's Kulturkampf impose various restrictions on the Roman Catholic clergy and laity, introduce mandatory civil marriage, and undercut clerical influence in educational affairs (see 1872; 1882).
The University of California closes its Oakland campus and opens new ones at Berkeley and San Francisco (see 1857). Berkeley will award the first baccalaureates and become a leading research institution (see 1907).
The University of Mt. Allison College at Sackville, New Brunswick, opens its doors to women. It is the first Canadian college to admit women to all its courses and degrees on the same basis as men (see 1882).
Girton College opens in October on a 16-acre site about two miles from Cambridge under the direction of educational reformer Emily Davies, now 43, who established the small college for women under another name 4 years ago at Hitchin with Emily Shirreff to prepare women for the university examination. The women have excelled in the tripos (final examinations) for classics and mathematics. Equipped to accommodate about 21 students, the first building is one side of a proposed quadrangle. Davies will be mistress of the school until 1875 and Shirreff will succeed her (see 1874).
Only 16 percent of school-age Japanese girls are in elementary school as compared with 46 percent of school-age boys (see 1872; 1874).
William H. McGuffey of McGuffey's Readers fame dies at Charlottesville, Virginia, February 19 at age 78.
The Harvard Crimson has its beginnings in the Magenta, a weekly that begins publication January 24 at Cambridge, Massachusetts. A staff of 10 has defied a dean to put together the independent 10-page paper, which offers brief editorial comments, announcements, poetry, and occasional news items with two columns on a page. It will become a daily in 1883 with four columns on a page (but no graphics or pictures) and be renamed the Daily Crimson. Unlike some other universities, Harvard will provide no financial support to its school paper and will not have a journalism school, but some of the nation's foremost journalists will receive their training on the Crimson.
Former Boston Traveller reporter and New York Tribune correspondent Charles H. (Henry) Taylor, 27, becomes publisher of the 1-year-old Boston Globe, which is $100,000 in debt and losing $1,200 per week. Working 16 hours per day, he manages the editorial as well as the business side of the paper, averts bankruptcy, and will eventually make the Globe a success (see 1877).
The Detroit Evening News begins publication August 23 under the direction of London-born newspaperman James E. (Edmund) Scripps, 38, who began as a reporter for the Chicago Democratic Press in 1857. Printed initially on Detroit Free Press equipment, the four-page daily sells for 2¢ when competing papers go for 5¢. Scripps will soon obtain additional capital from his brother George and sister Ellen and set up his own printing plant (they will join him in his enterprise), and within a year the News will have twice the circulation of any other Detroit paper (seeCleveland Penny Press, 1878).
St. Nicholas Magazine begins publication under the editorship of Mary Elizabeth Mapes Dodge of 1865 Hans Brinker fame, who will run the new periodical for children until her death in 1905 at age 74. Dodge will attract work by such poets as Bryant, Longfellow, and Whittier.
Typewriter inventor Christopher Sholes aligns the letters of his 1867 machine in an arrangement that by some accounts is arbitrary although many will claim that it permits rapid fingering and minimizes jamming of keys:
QWERTYUIOP
ASDFGHJKL
ZXCVBNM
James Densmore and G. W. Yost persuade Remington Fire Arms Company to produce the machine (see 1868; 1874).
Television has its beginnings in the discovery reported by Joseph May and Willoughby Smith to engineer Josiah Latimer Clark that the electrical resistance of selenium varies according to its exposure to light, and since electricity can be transmitted from one point to another it should be possible to transmit images as well (see Nipkow, 1883).
The Brazilian Submarine Telegraph Company and the Western and Brazilian Telegraph Company are established to give the South American country instant communications to the rest of the world and her own interior.
Nonfiction: Studies in the History of the Renaissance by Oxford classicist Walter (Horatio) Pater, 34.
John Stuart Mill dies at Avignon, France, May 8 at age 66, having written, "Unquestionably, it is possible to do without happiness; it is done involuntarily by nineteen-twentieths of mankind."
Fiction: The Gilded Age by Mark Twain and Hartford Courant editor Charles Dudley Warner exposes corruption in U.S. business and politics since the Civil War; Marjorie Daw and Other People by Thomas Bailey Aldrich; Around the World in Eighty Days (Le tour du monde en quatre-vingt jours) by Jules Verne (see Nellie Bly, 1889); Monday Tales (Contes de lundi) by Alphonse Daudet; The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope.
Novelist-playwright Edward Bulwer-Lytton dies at Torquay January 18 at age 69; mystery writer Joseph Le Fanu at his native Dublin February 7 at age 58.
Poetry: Les Amours jaunes by French poet Tristan Corbière (Edouard Joachim Corbière), 28; Poems by London poet-physician Robert (Seymour) Bridges, 28; Vignettes in Rhyme by London Board of Trade member-poet Austin Dobson, 33.
Poet-novelist Alessandro Manzoni dies at Milan May 22 at age 88.
Painting: Le bon Bock by Edouard Manet; Claude Monet in his Garden at Argenteuil and Camille Monet Reading by French painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 32; Artist's Garden at Argenteuil (A Corner of the Garden with Dahlias) by Claude Monet; Souvenir d'Italie by J. B. C. Corot, now 77; Seine et Bougival (initially called Autumn: Banks of the Oise) by French painter Alfred Sisley, 33; Seduction, The Spinning Maid, Nymph & Satyr, Charity, and Petty Thieves by William Adolphe Bouguereau; A Cotton Office in New Orleans by Edgar Degas; Morning Glories by Winslow Homer; Oarsmen on the Schuylkill and The Biglin Brothers Turning the Stake by Thomas Eakins; A Portrait of Mrs. Robert Simpson Cassatt (mother of the artist) by Allegheny, Pennsylvania-born painter Mary Cassatt, 29, who has taken up residence at Paris. Sir Edwin H. Landseer dies at London October 1 at age 71.
Sculptor Hiram Powers dies at Florence June 27 at age 67, having had a severe fall.
German photochemist Hermann Wilhelm Vogel, 39, discovers that adding certain dyes to photographic emulsions will increase their sensitivity.
Gelatin emulsions go on sale at London to permit any photographer "to prepare dry plates equal in sensitiveness to the best wet plates by simply pouring on the glass an emulsion and allowing it to dry," but the product introduced in July by local photographer John Burgess is not a commercial success.
Central Pacific Railroad president and former California governor Leland Stanford asks English-born photographer Eadweard Muybridge, 43, to determine photographically whether all four feet of a trotting horse are off the ground at the same time at some point in the animal's stride (Stanford has wagered that they are) and whether its forelegs are straight when they touch the ground or whether the heel hits first (see Ducos du Hauron, 1864). Owner of the famous racehorse Occident, Stanford invites Muybridge to his 700-acre estate at Palo Alto, California, and although his experiments will be interrupted by a brief murder trial after Muybridge shoots and kills his wife's lover he will set up his apparatus (huge wooden boxes on stands, a timing mechanism, and wet plates) beside Stanford's trotting track and begin work. Occident covers 20 feet in a single stride that lasts scarcely half a second; to stop the motion, Muybridge will use a mechanical shutter triggered by a spring as the horse passes (see 1878).
Theater: The Snow Maiden (Snegurochka) by Aleksandr Ostrovsky 5/11 at Moscow's Bolshoi Theater; Thérèse Racquin by Emile Zola 7/11 at the Théâtre de la Renaissance, Paris; Irish-born Brooklyn-raised actress Ada Rehan (originally Crehan), 13, makes her stage debut at Newark, New Jersey, in Across the Continent. Her name will be misspelled when she appears at Louisa Lane Drew's Arch Street Theater in Philadelphia and she will retain Rehan as her stage name (see 1879).
Actor-playwright Charles M. Barras dies at Cos Cob, Connecticut, March 31 at age 46; actor-theater manager William C. Macready at Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, April 27 at age 83, having managed London's Covent Garden and Drury Lane theaters without financial success but with a new discipline that required thorough rehearsals to achieve a unity in which all roles were not only well played but also artistically coherent with each other; Laura Keene dies at Montclair, New Jersey, November 4 at age 53 (approximate).
Opera: Ivan the Terrible (The Maid of Pskov) 1/1 at St. Petersburg's Maryinski Theater, with music by Nikolai Rimski-Korsakov; Le Roi l'a Dit 5/24 at the Opéra-Comique, Paris, with music by Leo Delibes. German soprano Therese Malten, 18, makes her debut singing the role of Pamina in the 1791 Mozart opera Die Zauberflöte at Dresden, where she will sing for the next 30 years.
First performances: Concerto No. 1 in A minor for Violoncello and Orchestra by Camille Saint-Saëns 1/19 at the Paris Conservatoire; Symphony No. 5 by the late Franz Schubert (who wrote it in 1816) 2/1 at London's Crystal Palace; Symphony No. 2 in C minor by Anton Bruckner 10/26 at Vienna; Variations on a Theme by Haydn by Johannes Brahms 11/2 at Vienna; The Tempest (Fantasy for Orchestra after Shakespeare) by Petr Ilich Tchaikovsky 12/19 at Moscow.
Popular songs: "Silver Threads Among the Gold" by English composer Hart Pease Danks, 39, lyrics by Eban E. Rexford, 25; "Home on the Range" lyrics by Kansas homesteader Bruce (Brewster) Higley appear in the December Smith County Pioneer under the title "Oh, Give Me a Home Where the Buffalo Roam." Kansas guitarist Daniel E. Kelly writes a tune to the lyrics, U.S. composer William Goodwin will revise it, and it will be published in 1904 under the title "Arizona Annie."
The Preakness has its first running May 23 at Baltimore's Pimlico racetrack, where the 1 3/16 mile stakes race for 3-year-olds has been named for the son of Lexington, the horse that won the Dinner Party stakes on the day the track opened in October 1870. The 3-year-old bay colt Survivor wins the first Preakness by 10 lengths, its owner wins a bouquet of blackeyed susans and gains possession for 1 year of the Woodlawn Vase created in 1860 by New York's Tiffany & Company. The race's namesake will be shipped to England, the duke of Hamilton will buy the horse, and he will shoot Preakness dead in a pique (see Belmont Stakes, 1867; Kentucky Derby, 1875).
Mountain climbers scale California's highest peak for the first time August 18. Named for state geologist Josiah Dwight Whitney Jr., now 53, the 14,496-foot mountain dwarfs any other in North America outside Alaska.
The Royal Montreal Golf Club is founded in Quebec. Members who belong to the first permanent club of its kind in the Western Hemisphere play initially on Fletcher's Fields in the center of the city but urban development will soon force them to move some miles away (see Quebec, 1874).
Former world bareknuckle heavyweight boxing champion John C. Heenan dies at Green River Station in Wyoming Territory October 28 at age 40.
Japan's Empress Shōken stops staining her teeth black and wearing her hair in the traditional manner that for centuries has identified a married woman in order to set an example. Inaugurator of the new fashion has been feminist Kajiko (originally Katsuko) Yajima, 40, who married at age 25, bore three daughters, but left her husband 10 years after their marriage because he was a heavy drinker and abused her.
Provençal perfume makers at Grasse revolutionize the industry with a new process that extracts a solid essence from flower roots or from fragrant substances by placing them in contact with volatile fluids that dissolve essential ingredients and isolate them as they evaporate (see eau de Cologne, 1709). Tanners and other leather workers in the area have perfumed themselves and their leathers, gaining knowledge of making botanical essences. Essential oils will comprise 22 percent of perfume (the rest being alcohol), they will comprise as little as 4 percent of eau de Cologne, and Grasse will become a center for the perfume industry's flower and herb growing.
Levi Strauss adds copper rivets to his blue jeans (see 1853). It will later be said, jokingly, that a prospector named Alkali carried rock specimens in his pockets and had his bibless overalls riveted by a blacksmith. In fact, Strauss has been approached by Nevada tailor Jacob W. Davis with the idea of riveting the pocket corners of pants for extra strength, and Strauss patents the riveting process with Davis, copyrighting the name "Levi's" and the double-bow pattern stitched on the back pockets. The riveted denims sell at $13.50 per dozen (see 1853; 1937).
Austrian-born Sheboygan, Wisconsin, entrepreneur John Michael Kohler, 29, buys the Sheboygan Union Iron and Steel Foundry and goes into business making cast-iron and steel plowshares and other agricultural implements. Employing other immigrants as well as local workers, he will diversify into hitching posts and other castings (see bathtub, 1883).
Indiana Women's Prison opens at Indianapolis with a woman superintendent and 17 prisoners transferred from State Reformatory at Jeffersonville, where the degrading treatment of female inmates has outraged a group of Quaker women. They saw the women forced to strip naked and take outdoor baths in front of whip-cracking male guards, heard about nocturnal visits made by the guards to women's prison cells, and have demanded the construction of a separate facility for women. It is the first U.S. penal institution operated exclusively by and for women.
Dichlorodiphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT) prepared by German chemistry student Othmar Zeidler at Strasbourg will find initial use as a mothproofing agent for clothes. Zeidler has reacted chloral hydrate (the "Mickey Finn" knockout drops of the underworld) and chlorobenzene in the presence of sulfuric acid. He will describe DDT next year in the Proceedings of the German Chemical Society (Berichte der Chemischen Gesellschaft), but has no idea of the significance of his discovery (see 1939).
Four Aberdeen-Angus bulls from Scotland arrive at Victoria, Kansas, May 17, the first of the breed to reach the United States. Foreign investment capital is pouring into the U.S. cattle ranching industry; retired London silk merchant George Grant, now 51, came to America 2 years ago (see retail, trade, 1861), traveled from New England to California and back, became enamored of the virgin prairies, and convinced the Kansas Pacific Railroad to sell him 2,500 acres of its right-of-way. By last year he had acquired 69,000 acres at about 88¢ per acre, the bulls left Glasgow on the steamship Alabama April 1, the ship steamed up the Mississippi from New Orleans to St. Louis, and the bulls have come to Victoria by rail; Grant will bring over some Angus heifers in 1876, others will follow his lead, and the breed will soon be competing with shorthorns and Herefords (see 1881).
Barbed wire exhibited at the De Kalb, Illinois, county fair by Henry Rose draws scrutiny from local farmer Joseph F. (Farwell) Glidden, 60, and his friend Jacob Haish, who independently develop machines for producing coil barbed wire by the mile and obtain patents for two separate styles of the "devil's rope" that is destined to end the open range in the West; 80.5 million pounds of barbed wire will be manufactured in the next 74 years as the steel wire becomes important not only to farmers and ranchers but also to military operations (see 1867; Gates, 1875).
Philadelphia-born Minnesota politician Ignatius (Loyola) Donnelly, 41, complains that it costs as much to ship wheat from Minneapolis to Milwaukee as to ship the same wheat from Milwaukee to Liverpool. U.S. railroads are making deals `with elevator companies, commission agents, and others to control both shipping and marketing rates and forcing farmers to sell to the nearest elevator company, agent, or railroad at rates favorable to the buyer. Grain is often downgraded as No. 2 because it is said to be wet, frozen, or weedy, and is then sold as No. 1 grade to millers, say the farmers. A farmers' convention at Springfield, Illinois, attacks monopolies, calling them "detrimental to the public prosperity, corrupt in their management, and dangerous to republican institutions."
The Northwest Farmers' Convention at Chicago urges federal regulation of transportation rates, government-built and government-owned railroads, an end to corporation subsidies and of tariff protection for industry, a revision of the credit system, and the encouragement of decentralized manufacturing, demands that bankers, industrialists, and railroad operators call "un-American."
The National Grange reaches its membership peak of 750,000, but Rep. Ignatius Donnelly compares a nonpolitical farmers' organization to a gun that won't shoot (see 1868; 1876).
Good quality Werner harvesters made by a Grange factory in Iowa sell for half the price of a McCormick harvester. When 22 plow manufacturers agree not to sell plows to Granges except at retail prices, some Granges set up factories to make their own machines and break the "machinery rings" (see 1872; 1875).
Deering harvesters are introduced by entrepreneur William Deering, now 47, who has left the New York textile firm Deering Milliken and established a company at Piano, Illinois (see International Harvester, 1902).
W. W. Cargill and his brother Sam take advantage of the economic recession to buy out bankrupt grain-elevator operators at distress prices (see 1865). They have been acquiring or building elevators along the route of the Southern Minnesota Railroad across southern Wisconsin and Minnesota with funds advanced by Milwaukee banks (see 1909).
Britain receives her first wheat from India via the Suez Canal that opened in 1869. Russia has been the nation's chief source of supply, but British entrepreneurs have grown impatient at having to rely on the Russians and have worked to obtain a secure source of cheap wheat under British control, pushing canals and railroads into the Indus and Ganges river valleys.
Louisiana's sugar crop falls to less than one-third its 1853 level as a result of the Civil War and emancipation. Sugar production has shifted to Cuba, where U.S., British, and French capital have developed plantations that by 1900 will be exporting 10 times more sugar than Jamaica exported at the start of this century with only three times as much labor and five times as much investment in machinery as in land.
Rice planting increases in Louisiana as the industry shifts from South Carolina, whose fields before the Civil War grew 60 percent of the nation's crop. With slave labor no longer available, and South Carolina's swamp land unable to support the weight of heavy equipment, cheap land in Louisiana has attracted German wheat farmers from the Midwest, who adapt their wheat-growing expertise to rice cultivation, which requires less labor than sugar. In years to come Louisiana, Arkansas, California, Mississippi, Texas, and Missouri will produce virtually all of the rice grown in the United States (see Wright, 1890).
The Pekin duck introduced to Long Island March 14 by Stonington, Connecticut, sea captain James E. Palmer begins an industry. The white birds obtained from the imperial aviaries at Beijing (Peking) are a variety of mallard.
Bengal suffers a famine as rice crops fail, creating shortages that bring starvation to much of India.
The Paris Council of Hygiene rules that margarine may not be sold as butter (see 1869; New York, 1877).
Japan's Ministry of Justice issues an order making it an offense to sell spoiled or fraudulently labeled food. Government inspectors will begin checking food items next year to make sure that there are no violations (see 1880).
Piracy and native hostility end U.S. pepper trade with Sumatra after 937 voyages (see 1797; 1805).
German engineer Carl (Paul Gottfried) von Linde, 31, at Munich's Technische Hochshcule invents a continuous process of liquefying gases that will lead to the first successful compression systems for modern refrigerators (see Perkins, 1834; Gorrie, 1842; Lowe, 1865; 1895). Linde will develop a methyl ether refrigerator next year and an ammonia refrigerator in 1876.
Henri Nestlé's Infant Milk Food of 1866 is introduced in the United States (see 1875).
Coors Beer has its beginnings in the Golden Brewery opened at Golden, Colorado Territory, by Prussian-born Denver bottling-company owner Adolph (Herrman Joseph) Coors, 26, with $2,000 of his own savings and $18,000 from his partner Jacob Schueler. Having lost both his parents and changed his name from Kohrs, young Coors arrived at Baltimore as a stowaway 5 years ago and was obliged to work off the cost of his passage. The enterprise 20 miles west of Denver shows a profit in its first year, Coors will buy out Schueler by 1880 to become sole proprietor, and in the next 10 years will increase annual production from 3,500 barrels to 17,600 barrels, a figure that will grow to 48,000 barrels by 1900 as Coors promotes his brand with innovative marketing.
Adolphus Busch becomes a full partner of his father-in-law and renames the Bavarian Brewery the E. Anheuser and Company's Brewing Association (see 1865). It remains much smaller than the city's 33-year-old Lemp Brewery, which produces a far superior brew, but Busch is a born salesman. He perseveres, and the Anheuser-Busch product will gradually improve (see Budweiser, 1876).
The number of U.S. breweries peaks at 4,131.
British wine making resumes after a lapse of nearly 3½ centuries (see 1536). Having inherited the title along with a fortune and the remains of the medieval castle Coch in South Wales, the young marquess of Bute begins planting vineyards that will continue production of wine until a shortage of labor halts operations in 1915.
San Francisco's population reaches 188,000 and the city has a United States Mint, cobblestone streets, and tall redwood houses. Los Angeles remains a dusty town with fewer than 10,000 people.
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