1871 1872 1873 1874 1875 1876 1877 1878 1879 1880
China's Qing dynasty emperor Tonghzi (Tung-chih) dies at his native Beijing (Peking) January 12 at age 19 scarcely 2 years after taking control of the government. In his 12-year reign the Taiping Rebellion was finally suppressed, the Nian Rebellion crushed, the finances of the empire restored, and attempts made to recruit able men into the government. The dowager empress Cixi served as co-regent until 1873 and in order to regain her regency she breaks sacred dynastic law of succession by adopting her nephew Zaitian, a cousin of Tonghzhi, who formally ascends the throne February 25 at age 4 and will reign until 1908 as the emperor Guangxu (Kuang-hsü). General Zuo Zong-tang (Tso Tsung-tang), 63, moves to suppress the Tungans of the Northern Tian Shan, who have been in revolt since 1862.
The murder of a British legation official (Augustus Raymond Margary) by native bandits near the Sino-Burmese border February 21 increases tensions between Beijing and London.
Gen. Sir James Hope Grant dies at London March 7 at age 66, having gained renown for his actions in the Sepoy Rebellion and the Second Opium War.
A French republican constitution finalized July 16 provides for a bicameral legislature (Chamber of Deputies and Senate) with a president to be elected for a 7-year term. Marshal MacMahon will continue as president until he resigns in 1879.
Bosnia and Herzogovina in the Balkans rise against the Turks until the Ottoman sultan Abdul Aziz meets insurgent demands and promises reforms, but he reappoints the reactionary former grand vizier Mahmud Nedim to his former position (see 1872; 1876).
The Suez Canal completed in 1869 comes under British control November 27 through the efforts of Prime Minister Disraeli, who has obtained a loan from the merchant banking house of Rothschild to outbid French investors and buy up 176,752 shares in the Universal Suez Company from the profligate Egyptian khedive Ismail (see 1863). Ismail is deep in debt and has secretly appealed to the British prime minister September 30 when Parliament was not in session, Disraeli has put up the British Government itself as security for the £4 million loan (N. M. Rothschild charges 2½ percent interest on the advance plus 5 percent interest per year), and he creates international consternation by purchasing control of the strategic waterway, which he regards as Britain's lifeline to India (see 1888; Ismail, 1879).
Portugal and the Transvaal Republic reach an accord that provides for commercial relations between the two and construction of a railroad between Lourenço Marques in Mozambique and the Transvaal.
The Society of True South Africans founded by South African pastor Stephanus Jacobus Du Toit, 28, begins publishing books in Afrikaans and rallying Boer political consciousness (see 1879).
Ecuador's dictator Gabriel García Moreno is assassinated on the steps of the government palace at Quito August 6 at age 53 by a group of young liberals after a remarkable 15-year period of autocratic rule (see 1861). Exiled pamphleteer Juan Montalvo proclaims, "My pen has killed him." But while the García Moreno regime has been oppressive at times, it has given the urban classes a strong sense of nationalism, built hospitals, roads, and schools, started a railroad between Quito and Guayaquil, and introduced agricultural reforms that have included the planting of eucalyptus trees from Australia to resist erosion in the Sierra, where poor Indians have cut down the original ground cover for fuel.
Former Confederate general (and 1860 presidential candidate) John C. Breckenridge dies at Lexington, Ky., May 17 at age 54; former president Andrew Johnson at his daughter's house near Carter Station, Tenn., July 31 at age 66 following a series of strokes; former Confederate general George E. Pickett at Norfolk, Va., October 25 at age 50.
President Grant opens Oregon Territory to white settlement; it has been occupied under an 1855 treaty by the Nez Percé (see Chief Joseph, 1877).
Comanche chief Quanah Parker ends his resistance to settlement of the Texas prairie by white ranchers (see 1874). The chief brings his warriors into a reservation established by the government.
Some 850 Cheyenne surrender to U.S. Army forces March 6 and turn over Catherine and Sophia German, who were taken nearly 6 months ago along with their two younger sisters (see 1874). One of the girls is reportedly pregnant and the surviving members of the German family are reunited at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Colonel Nelson Appleton Miles, 35, secures a congressional appropriation of $10,000 to set up a fund for their care.
Congress passes a Civil Rights Act March 1 that guarantees blacks equal rights in public places and bans their exclusion from jury duty. The new law will be widely flouted in both the North and South (see Supreme Court decision, 1883).
Tennessee enacts the first "Jim Crow" law, a measure prejudicial to blacks (see 1880; Theater, 1832). Legislatures of former Confederate states will enact similar laws, mandating segregation of "coloreds" from "whites" in the use of public facilities such as drinking fountains, hospitals, hotels, restaurants, restrooms, and schools (see Florida, 1887).
Journalist-explorer Henry M. Stanley encounters hostile tribesmen as he continues his journey across Africa (see 1874); 21 of his men have died, 89 have deserted, eight are so ill that they must be left behind, and he loses another 24 men in battle against the hostiles. His bearers have dragged a 40-foot boat, the Lady Alice, 720 miles inland, and when he circumnavigates Lake Victoria he comes close to death at the hands of other natives (see 1877).
Explorer Verney Lovett Cameron reaches the west coast of Africa near Benguela November 7, having established the outlet of Lake Tanganyika to be a tributary of the Congo River (the Lukuga), traced the Congo-Zambezi watershed for hundreds of miles, and become the first man to cross equatorial Africa from sea to sea.
Santa Monica, California, is laid out on the Pacific Coast near Los Angeles. Taking its name from a local spring (Las Lágrimas de [the tears of] Santa Monica), it is promoted as an ocean resort and port terminus of the Los Angeles-to-Independence Railroad.
A new Factory Act adopted by Parliament regulates employment of women and children in Britain's textile mills. Lancashire-born home secretary Richard (Assheton) Cross, 52, has pushed through the legislation and also obtains passage of a Public Health Act, a comprehensive sanitary code, and two statutes that reinterpret former prime minister Gladstone's 1871 trade union legislation to make them more favorable to unions.
Britain's Trades Union Congress admits its first female delegates.
Clipper ship owner William Henry Aspinwall dies of a heart attack at his New York home January 18 at age 67, having built a fortune in the China trade; financier and merchant John Cleve Green dies at New York April 29 at age 75, having made a vast fortune in the Chinese opium trade and railroad investments. He has given about $500,000 to the College of New Jersey (later Princeton) and made other philanthropic donations.
U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Benjamin H. Bristow receives advice from St. Louis Democrat owner George W. Fishback on how to crack the corrupt and powerful Whiskey Ring that has been evading taxes (see 1874). Using detectives from outside the department who receive instructions in a cipher not used by the department, Bristow accumulates massive evidence of fraud. His agents seize suspected distilleries and rectifying houses May 10 at Chicago and Milwaukee as well as St. Louis. They find incriminating books and papers, and within a year Bristow's lawyers will have instituted action to recover $3,150,000 in taxes, indicted 176 men on civil and criminal charges, and obtained sentences for 110 of them.
Prudential Insurance Company of America is founded at Newark, New Jersey, under the name Prudential Friendly Society by Maine-born insurance agent John Fairfield Dryden, 36, with backing from local investors. It will change its name in 1877, grow by selling sickness and accident insurance, and will sell ordinary life insurance beginning in 1886 (see 1896).
A Russian railroad line reaches Sevastapol in the Crimea, spurring developing of the seaport.
The Pullman Company's contract with the Michigan Central Railroad expires, drawing room car designer Webster Wagner wins the contract to run his cars on the route, and he provides Commodore Vanderbilt with cars for through service between New York and Chicago (see 1867), but when he uses Pullman-designed equipment on Vanderbilt's Lake Shore and Michigan Southern line the Pullman Co. files suit for breach of contract (see 1882).
The New York Central lowers its tracks down New York's Fourth (Park) Avenue into a giant ditch after years of complaints about accidents. Completed after 3 years of excavation, the ditch will soon be covered over for most of its length south of 96th Street (see Grand Central, 1913).
The 24-year-old S.S. Pacific leaves Victoria, British Columbia, November 4 carrying a cargo of coal, potatoes, and gold; she collides with the S.S. Orpheus off Cape Flattery, Washington, killing 275 passengers and 20 crew members. Only two survive in the heavy seas.
Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel of 1866 dynamite fame discovers blasting gelatin (see energy [Baku oil fields], 1873; Nobel prizes, 1901).
London-born metallurgist Sidney Gilchrist Thomas, 25, pioneers cheaper steel production by discovering a way to eliminate the phosphorus impurity found in some iron ores (see Bessemer, 1856). Working at the Royal School of Mines while holding a menial job as police-court clerk, Thomas finds that if he lines a Bessemer converter with a strong basic substance such as burned limestone, the phosphorus will combine with the furnace lining and be eliminated as slag. Helped by his cousin Percy Gilchrist, he will perfect his product, apply for a patent in 1877, and see his process become commercially viable in 1879.
Theoretical Kinematics: Outline of a Theory of Machines by German mechanical engineer Franz Reuleaux, 45, at Berlin's Royal Technical Institute provides the basics of machine theory and will be translated into French, Italian, and English.
Providence, Rhode Island-born Stevens Institute of Technology mechanical engineering professor Robert H. (Henry) Thurston, 35, establishes the first mechanical laboratory.
Boston tool designer Leonard Bailey terminates his contract with Stanley Rule and Level Company (see 1871). The company has gone into production with the No. 110 plane patented by Justus Traut, Bailey claims that this has reduced his royalties, he will soon develop the Victor design to compete with Stanley's planes, but Stanley will prevail in several patent-infringement suits, Bailey will sell his Victor design to the Bailey Wringing Machine Company of Woonsocket, Rhode Island, and he will move to Woonsocket to manufacture Victor and Defiance brand planes and tools. Stanley will become sole agent for Victor planes in 1880, more suits for patent infringement will follow, as will charges of industrial espionage, and Stanley will purchase the Victor production facility in 1884, only to discontinue the line.
Hartford, Connecticut-born inventor Frank S. (Stephen) Baldwin, 37, obtains a patent for an "arithmometer" that can add, subtract, multiply, and divide (see 1642; Pascal, 1692; 1833; 1842); the prevailing economic recession prevents him from finding investors who will back him in manufacturing the machine (see Bolle, 1887; Monroe Calculator, 1913).
Inventor Sir Goldsworthy Gurney dies at Reeds, Cornwall, February 28 at age 82, having been knighted in 1863 for his work in improving the lighting and ventilation of the House of Commons; sewing machine inventor Isaac Merrit Singer dies at Torquay, England, July 23 at age 64, having seen his machines replace laborious hand stitching in countries worldwide.
A doctoral thesis by Dutch physicist Hendrik Antoon Lorentz, 21, at the University of Leyden refines the 1873 electromagnetic theory of James Clerk Maxwell to explain the reflection and refraction of light.
Physicist William Crookes invents the radiometer, an instrument for measuring radiant energy in any part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
A paper published by Ferdinand J. Cohn on the classification of bacteria introduces the term bacillus (see 1872).
Geologist Sir Charles Lyell dies at London February 22 at age 77 while revising his classic Principles of Geology.
The Fiji Islands lose 40,000 of their 150,000 inhabitants in a measles epidemic following the return of the Fiji king from a visit to New South Wales.
The practice of osteopathy is founded by Virginia-born Kirksville, Missouri, physician Andrew Taylor Still, 47, who lost three of his children to spinal meningitis in 1864. He has convinced himself that all diseases are caused by abnormalities in or near bodily joints (the abnormalities will later be called osteopathic lesions or spinal joint subluxations) (see 1892).
Kalamazoo, Michigan, inventor George F. Green patents an electric dental drill. He will assign his patent on "electro-magnetic dental tools" for sawing, filing, dressing, and polishing teeth to Samuel S. White of Philadelphia, whose company will become the leading U.S. producer of dental equipment, but use of electric drills will await the development of lighter engines and less expensive batteries (see 1957).
Vaseline petroleum jelly is introduced by Chesebrough Manufacturing Company, whose English-born U.S. founder Robert Augustus Chesebrough, 38, will make kerosene and lubricating oils until 1881 but confine himself thereafter to producing petroleum jelly.
Phillips Milk of Magnesia is introduced by New York entrepreneur Charles H. Phillips, whose antacid and laxative product will be sold for well over a century.
Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by New England healer Mary Baker Eddy, 54, claims that biblical teachings helped her recover from the effects of a bad fall. Sickly since childhood, she found a "science" in the healings of Jesus as related in the New Testament and began a Christian Science movement in 1866 (see 1879).
The Theosophical Society is founded by charismatic Ukraine-born U.S. mystic Helena Blavatsky (née Helena Petrovna Hahn), 44, who at age 17 married a Russian military officer and provincial vice governor, separated from him a few years later, arrived at New York in steerage 2 years ago, claims to have received knowledge from "masters" on a trip to Tibet, and has charmed millionaire Colonel Henry Steel Olcott into abandoning his family to devote all his time (and money) to his spiritualist studies with her. Chaired by Olcott, the Society has as its avowed purpose the encouragement of the "universal Brotherhood of Humanity" and the revelation of "unexplained laws of Nature and the psychical powers latent in man" (see 1884).
University of California president Henry Durant dies at Oakland January 22 at age 72.
Wellesley College for Women opens September 8 outside Boston in a lavishly landscaped park around 400-acre Lake Waban at Wellesley, Massachusetts, with a main building whose central hall has a four-story glass-roofed central hall (see 1870). It has an initial enrollment of 314 and a faculty made up entirely of women (its president will always be a woman) (see 1882).
Smith College opens at Northampton, Massachusetts, 24 hours after the opening of Wellesley, but with only 14 students (see 1871). Smith is the first U.S. women's college whose admissions standards and curriculum are the equivalent of those at male institutions (see Vassar, 1865; Bryn Mawr, 1885).
Elisha Gray of Western Electric Company files a patent application February 23 for a multiple harmonic telegraph (see 1874), but Alexander Graham Bell, 28, creates an electric telephone that will revolutionize communication. The Scottish-born inventor came to the United States in 1871 as a teacher of speech to the deaf, using his father's method of "Visible Speech" (sign language) at the Clarke school established at Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1867 and the American Asylum for the Deaf at Hartford, Connecticut. South Danvers, Massachusetts-born leather merchant Thomas Sanders, now 35, engaged Bell in late 1873 to give lessons in Visible Speech to his 5-year-old hearing-impaired son George. Bell has been living with the boy and his mother at a grandmother's house in Salem, and he conceived the idea of "electric speech" last year while visiting his parents at Brantford, Ontario. He has signed an agreement February 27 with Sanders and Clarke School chairman Gardiner G. Hubbard, now 52, to obtain financing for his experiments (see education [Hubbard], 1867). While trying to perfect a method for carrying more than two messages simultaneously over a single telegraph line, Bell hears the sound of a plucked spring along 60 feet of wire June 2 in the attic of Charles Williams's electrical shop at 109 Court Street, Boston. The spring has been plucked by Bell's young assistant Thomas A. Watson, a machinist who is trying to reactivate a harmonic telegraph transmitter, one of several whose reeds or springs are each tuned to a different signal frequency: a contact screw has been screwed down so far that a circuit has been left unbroken that should have been broken only intermittently, and a current is being transmitted that corresponds to a reed in Bell's room. When the sound of the plucked spring sets off a vibration in his eardrum he recognizes its significance and realizes that a speaking telephone can be achieved by means of a simple mechanism (see 1876).
Inventor Thomas A. Edison perfects the first duplicating process to employ a wax stencil. Having developed quadruplex telegraphy, Edison has been experimenting with paraffin paper for possible use as telegraph tape and will receive a patent next year for "a method of preparing autographic stencils for printing." Edison will improve the process and obtain a second patent in 1880 (see Mimeograph, 1887; phonograph, 1877).
New York printing press manufacturer Richard M. Hoe invents a high-speed newspaper folding apparatus (see 1870).
The Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram begins publication at Alexandria August 5. Lebanese Christians Bishara and Salim Takla have started the four-page weekly tabloid; it will become a daily in 1881, a broadsheet in 1881, and move its operations to Cairo in November 1900.
The Statesman begins publication at Delhi under the direction of English-born publisher Robert Knight, whose sons Paul and Robert will take over the newspaper after his death in 1890. The first paper to sell for 1 anna (others cost 4), it will maintain its price for 67 years and will be published at Calcutta (Kolkata) as well as at Delhi.
The Brazilian newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo has its beginnings in the paper A Provincia de São Paulo founded by 17 men with the slogan "Representation and Justice." It works to abolish slavery and will soon be taken over by Julio de Mesquita, who will publish it until his death in 1927.
The Chicago Daily News begins publication under the direction of men who include former Chicago Tribune reporter Melville Elijah Stone, 27. The four-page, five-column paper is the city's first penny daily; the competition charges a nickel, and since so many things are priced at 5¢ not many pennies are in circulation; Stone convinces some local merchants to price goods at $1.99, $2.99, and so forth, arguing that impulse buyers will think they are getting bargains, and when the merchants complain that they lack pennies to make change Stone travels to Philadelphia and returns with several barrels of pennies purchased from the U.S. Mint. Financier Victor F. Lawson will become business manager next year, attract well-known writers, and wind up owning two-thirds of its stock. The paper will have a circulation of more than 200,000 by 1888, when Lawson acquires full ownership; Frank Knox will buy the paper in the early 1930s, and publication will continue until 1978.
N. W. Ayer & Son offers advertisers "open contracts" that give them access to the true rates charged by newspapers and religious journals (see 1868). Rates have been set up to now by advertising agents who charged whatever the traffic would bear, but Ayer will act as the advertiser's agent rather than the newspaper's agent (see Rowell, 1869; Batten, 1891; ANPA resolution, 1893).
Former journalist and businessman Duff Green dies at Dalton, Georgia, June 10 at age 83; telegraphy pioneer and physicist Sir Charles Wheatstone at Paris October 19 at age 73.
The first American-made Christmas cards appear at Boston (see Cole, 1843). German-born lithographer Louis Prang, 51, has been publishing $6 reproductions of famous works of art ("chromos") since 1865. He makes the cards for the English trade, but he will now concentrate on introducing Christmas cards in America, developing a market that he will dominate until 1890, when cheaper imports from Germany will put him out of business (see Hallmark, 1910).
Nonfiction: Lombard Street by Walter Bagehot; Thrift by Samuel Smiles; Winter Sunshine by naturalist John Burroughs is based on observations made on a visit to England and establishes his reputation (he has lived since 1873 on a farm at Esopus, N.Y.).
Fiction: The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope, whose work reflects observations made on a journey he made through the northern states during the American Civil War.
Poet-novelist-clergyman Charles Kingsley dies at Eversley, Hampshire, January 23 at age 55; poet-historian-political philosopher Edgar Quinet at Versailles March 27 at age 72.
Painting: Boating at Argenteuil and Woman with a Parasol—Madame Monet and Her Son by Claude Monet; Mademoiselle Legrand and Les Grands Boulevards by Pierre-Auguste Renoir; The Little Bridge by Camille Pissarro; Floor-Scrapers by Paris-born painter-art collector Gustave Caillebotte, 27, who met Monet and Renoir last year and will be the chief financial backer, organizer, and promoter of Impressionist exhibitions for the next 6 years, using his family money to buy Impressionist works; The Gross Clinic by Thomas Eakins; Mountain of the Holy Cross by Thomas Moran; Quatre Bras, 1815 by Elizabeth Thompson; The Gleaners by Jean-François Millet, who dies at Barbizon January 20 at age 60; Jean Baptiste Camille Corot dies at Paris February 22 at age 78.
Sculpture: Germany's 56-foot tall statue Hermanns-Denkmal in the Teutoberger Forest of Lower Saxony is dedicated to celebrate the triumph of the Germanic chieftain Arminius over the Roman legions of Varus about 75 miles away in 9 A.D..
The Hermes produced by the Greek sculptor Praxiteles in the 4th century B.C. turns up in excavations at Olympia.
The Great Chac-Mool reclining limestone figure from the Maya-Toltec civilization of the 10th to 12th centuries A.D. in Yucatán is discovered at the entrance to a temple at Chichén-Itzá (see science, 1904).
Sculptor Jules Carpeaux dies at Courbevoie October 12 at age 48.
German-born U.S. photographers David Bachrach, Jr., 30, and Edward Levy, 29, patent a photoengraving process that will be the basis of an industry. Bachrach will establish the portrait photography firm Bachrach, Inc. Levy and his brother Max will patent an etched glass grating or screen for making halftone engravings (see 1880; Ives, 1886).
England's Royal Shakespeare Company has its beginnings in the Shakespeare Memorial Company founded at Stratford-upon-Avon as the resident, seasonal acting ensemble for the Memorial Theatre that will open in 1879. It will receive a royal charter in 1925 and rename itself in 1961.
Theater: Our Boys by English playwright H. J. (Henry James) Byron, 40, 1/16 at London's Vaudeville Theatre, 1,362 performances (a new record that will stand for years); The Shaughrann by Dion Boucicault 11/14 at Wallack's Theater, New York, with Boucicault, H. J. Montague, Ada Dyas; Wolves and Sheep (Volki i ovsty) by Aleksandr Ostrovsky 12/8 at St. Petersburg's Alexandrinsky Theater.
The Paris Opéra opens with a concert 1/5 and presents its first opera (Fromental Halévy's La Juive) 1/8 on the largest stage of its kind in the world. Designed in Beaux-Arts style by Paris-born architect (Jean-Louis) Charles Garnier, 49, whose design won a competition 15 years ago, the building has been completed at a cost of 50 million francs and is occupied mostly by foyers, galleries, and staircases that provide settings for tête-à-têtes (its huge stage takes up less than one-third of its interior space). Garnier calls acoustics a "bizarre science" and writes, "Nowhere did I find a positive rule to guide me. I must explain that I have adopted no principle, that my plan has been based on no theory, and that I leave success or failure to chance alone." Paris hails his structure as a worldly counterpart to the 530-year-old Notre Dame Cathedral.
Opera: Carmen 3/3 at the Opéra-Comique, Paris, with music by Georges Bizet, libretto by Ludovic Halévy and Henri Meilhac. Girls from a cigarette factory smoke on stage in Act I and the heroine sings the "Habanera"; Trial by Jury 3/5 at London's Royalty Theatre begins a 21-year series of comic Gilbert & Sullivan operettas with librettos by W. S. Gilbert, music by Arthur S. Sullivan, 300 perfs.
A new Vienna Opera House opens with a performance of the 1814 Beethoven opera Fidelio.
Composer Georges Bizet dies of heart disease and a throat ailment at Bougival, near Paris, June 3 at age 36.
First performances: Danse Macabre (symphonic poem) by Camille Saint-Säens 1/24 at Paris; Symphonie espagnole for Violin and Orchestra by French composer Edouard (-Victor-Antoine) Lalo, 52, 2/7 at Paris with violinist Pablo Sarasate; The Moldau (Vltava) (symphonic poem) by Bedrich Smetana 4/4 at Prague; Concerto No. 1 for Piano and Orchestra by Petr Ilich Tchaikovsky 10/25 at Boston's Music Hall with Hans von Bülow as soloist; Concerto No. 4 in C minor by Camille Saint-Säens 10/31 at Paris; Symphony No. 3 in D major by Petr Ilich Tchaikovsky 11/19 at Moscow.
The Boston Symphony has its genesis in the Boston Philharmonic Club founded by German-born conductor Bernhard Listemann, 34 (see 1881).
Canadians play their first organized indoor ice hockey match March 3 at Montreal's Victoria Skating Rink (see 1843; Stanley Cup, 1893).
The Kentucky Derby has its first running at Louisville's new Churchill Downs (a small chestnut colt named Aristides wins the 1½-mile stakes race). Local promoter M. Lewis Clark returned from a trip to England a few years ago with plans to establish a series of races that will be comparable to the Derby Stakes at Epsom Downs, the Oaks, and other English racing classics. Held on the first Saturday of each May, the stakes race for 3-year-olds will be shortened to 1¼ miles and join with the 1 3/16-mile Preakness Stakes inaugurated in 1873 and the 1½-mile Belmont Stakes begun in 1867 to make up the Triple Crown of U.S. horse racing.
St. Louis baseball player Charles Waite takes the field wearing a thin, flesh-colored glove much like those worn by gentlemen when holding the reins of their buggy horses (see catcher's mitt, 1869). Some other players consider Waite's glove effeminate, and spectators jeer, but by the end of this decade more and more players will be adding pads to old winter mittens and creating leather "mitts" to protect them from hard-hit balls (see overhand pitching, 1884).
The first roller skating rink opens August 2 in Belgravia, London (see Plimpton, 1863).
Shropshire-born physician's son Captain Matthew Webb, 27, sets out to be the first to swim the English Channel; he makes his first attempt August 12 and goes well over half way before turning back out of consideration for his companions who are in danger of having their small boat swamped by rough seas; he tries again August 24 and crosses from Dover to Calais August 24 in 22 hours. News of his feat electrifies the country (see Ederle, 1926).
The first Harvard-Yale football game is held November 12 at New Haven under "concessionary rules" that permit running with the ball and tackling (see 1874). Final score: Harvard 4 touchdowns and 4 goals, Yale 0 (see Walter Camp, 1889).
Golfer Thomas "Old Tom" Morris dies at St. Andrews, Scotland, December 25 at age 54, having won the British Open four times (1861, 1862, 1864, and 1867). His son Thomas Jr. ("Young Tom") now 25, has also won it four times (in 1868, 1869, 1870, and 1872; there was no tournament in 1871).
Craftsman-poet-wallpaper designer William Morris of 1866 Morris chair fame reestablishes his company under his own name at London March 31. He will open a shop in Oxford Street in 1877 and in the next 8 years will make Morris & Company one of Britain's most fashionable and commercially successful interior designers and manufacturers of textiles, furniture, stained glass, and tiles, producing them in his own workshops and making them available through his shop.
Alabama-born New York belle Alva Ertskin Smith, 22, is married April 20 to William Kissam Vanderbilt, 26-year-old grandson of railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, now 80 (see 1883).
Hoopskirts go out of fashion in America after nearly half a century as bustles come in to supplant them (although not all women have worn hoopskirts and nobody has ever worn them all the time). The caged crinoline whose invention is credited to Charles Frederick Worth has had a bell-shaped framework formed from a series of horizontal hoops and suspended from the waist to support the weight of overskirts, but the hoops have become so large as to require at least 25 yards of material for a single dress, and the weight of so much fabric has so taxed the strength of a young woman with the 18-inch waist mandated by fashion that she has often worn supporting pads to relieve her back by throwing some of the weight onto the backs of her hips. The gathers of the skirt have gradually been pushed forward, and the "back pannier," which has bunched the skirt over the rear of the hoops, has evolved into the bustle.
R. J. Reynolds Company has its beginnings in a Winston, North Carolina, factory set up by former tobacco peddler Richard Joshua Reynolds, 25, who has amassed $7,500 in capital working in partnership with his father. With an investment of $2,400, he builds a 36- by 60-foot frame structure and equips it with a few crude pieces of machinery, uses the rest of the money to buy leaf tobacco, and begins manufacturing pipe tobacco from burley leaf (Winston has become a center for bright tobacco production) (see 1889; Slade brothers, 1852; Prince Albert, 1907).
Richmond, Virginia, tobacco merchants Lewis Ginter and John F. Allen go into partnership to produce cigarettes from domestic bright tobacco. The cigarettes have a light smoke and a cheap price that soon wins them wide popularity (see 1888).
U.S. cigarette production reaches 50 million but will increase rapidly after 1882 when a cigarette manufacturing machine invented 3 years ago comes into commercial use. The machine feeds tobacco to a ribbon of paper as it is drawn from a spool, the edges pass over a gummed wheel, and a continuous cigarette is produced that the machine then cuts into separate lengths.
The Jukes, a Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease, and Heredity by English-born sociologist Richard Louis Dugdale, 33, purports to be an extensive criminal-genealogical study of seven generations of a depraved U.S. family descended from a mid-18th century Dutch tavern keeper. A functionary of the Prison Association of New York, Dugdale has plowed through arrest records and interviewed prisoners, wardens, and inmates of asylums and poorhouses. He concludes that the Jukes have cost the public $1.3 million and that their immorality is hereditary (see Kallikaks, 1912).
Brooklyn, New York, Congregational minister Henry Ward Beecher wins acquittal July 2 when a sensational 6-month adultery trial ends in a hung jury. Now 62, Beecher has clearly been guilty of having sex with a parishioner's wife in the late 1860s, and while his older sisters Catharine and Harriet have staunchly defended his innocence in the affair, his younger half-sister Isabella Beecher Hooker has publicly questioned it.
New York authorities release onetime political boss William M. "Boss" Tweed from prison after he has served a brief term for larceny and forgery (see 1873). They rearrest him in a civil action brought by the state to recover his loot, but he escapes from jail in December, flees to Cuba, and proceeds to Spain disguised as a sailor. Recognized from a Thomas Nast cartoon, he is apprehended and returned to New York, where he will die in prison in 1878 at age 55.
New York's "Tweed" Courthouse is completed north of City Hall at a cost of $13 million. The estimate had been $250,000 but Boss Tweed's cronies have run up huge bills, including $179,729 for three tables and 40 chairs, nearly $361,000 for a month's work by a single, solitary carpenter.
Parliament passes the Artizans' and Labourers' Dwellings Improvement Act. Also known as the Cross Act, it has been pushed through by home secretary Richard Assheton Cross and empowers municipalities to buy slum dwellings, demolish them, and replace them with suitable housing.
Bangkok's Oriental Hotel opens on the Chao Phya River.
A magnificent new Palmer House opens in Chicago to replace the hotel owned by merchant Potter Palmer that burned in the 1871 fire. The new hotel has a mammoth barbershop with silver dollars embedded in its floor and a lavish dining room with dishes that include broiled buffalo, antelope, bear, mountain sheep, boned quail in plumage, blackbirds, partridge, and other "ornamental dishes" (see 1925).
The United States Hotel opens at Saratoga Springs, New York, with nearly 1,000 rooms for the summer season. The new hotel calls itself the world's largest.
San Francisco's Palace Hotel opens October 2 with 755 20- by 20-foot rooms, 437 baths, five elevators, seven iron stairways, and a crystal roof over its inner court. Built on a wrought-iron skeleton, the new hotel is supplied with water from four artesian wells (see 1906).
Arbor Day April 22 encourages Americans to plant trees on the open prairie. Nebraska agriculturist J. Sterling Morton, 43, has dreamed up the idea and within 12 years 40 states will have made April 22 an official Arbor Day (see Poetry [Kilmer], 1913).
Earthquakes in Colombia and Venezuela May 16 take 16,000 lives.
Buffalo (bison) herds on the Western plains diminish drastically as market hunters kill the animals for their hides and continue to decimate what has for thousands of years been the major source of food, fuel, and clothing for the Plains Indians, whose various tribes have participated in the killing (see 1870). President Grant vetoes a bill that would protect the bison from extinction (see 1879).
The U.S. Fish Commission plants Atlantic salmon in inland lakes (see shad, 1871). Land-locked salmon will be an important U.S. game fish and food fish (see carp, 1879).
The end of Comanche resistance opens the Texas prairie to settlement by white ranchers.
Illinois-born promoter John Warne Gates, 20, puts on a demonstration at San Antonio to show that barbed wire is safe and effective. He turns the main plaza of the town into a giant corral that can hold long-horned cattle (see Glidden, Haish, 1873). Barbed wire will begin the end of the open range in America and launch the career of "Bet-you-a-million" Gates (see 1877; 1898).
U.S. Grangers fail in a scheme to produce farm equipment (see 1872). The Grange has bought up patents for cultivators, seeders, mowers, reapers, and many other machines and implements and has begun to manufacture them, but the effort falls victim to patent suits, lack of capital, defective machines, and lack of cooperation in a society of rural individualists.
Combines come into use on some U.S. wheat farms.
The first American state agricultural experiment station is established July 20 at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.
Luther Burbank establishes a nursery at Santa Rosa, California, with money obtained from the sale of his 1872 Burbank potato. He will develop new forms of food and ornamental plant life by selection and cross-fertilization (see Shull, 1905).
A Chinese orchardman in Oregon develops the Bing cherry.
Apples ripen for the first time in Washington's Yakima Valley.
Navel oranges produced at Riverside, California, are the first ever seen in the United States and will be called Washington oranges (because the first trees came from Washington, D.C.) as the seedless winter-ripening fruit proliferates to dominate California groves. The U.S. Department of Agriculture received a dozen budded seedlings from Bahia, Brazil, in 1871, and Riverside growers Jonathan and Eliza C. Tibbetts obtained two of the trees from the USDA 2 years ago (see Orange Growers Protective Union, 1885; Valencias, 1906).
A new British Sale of Food and Drugs Law tightens restrictions against adulteration, making any adulteration injurious to health punishable with a heavy fine (see 1872); it makes a second offense punishable with imprisonment if the seller is proved to have guilty knowledge of the adulteration.
British sugar consumption rises to 60 pounds per capita, up from 47 in 1872 (see 1889).
Berlin chemist Ferdinand Tiemann, 27, patents a process for making synthetic vanillin, the key flavor ingredient in natural vanilla beans.
B&M Baked Beans are the world's first canned baked beans. Burnham & Morill Company of Portland, Maine, has produced them for use by men in its fishing fleet.
A machine is invented to strip the kernels from corn cobs. It will lead to wide-scale canning of sweet corn (see Minnesota Valley Canning, 1903).
Ferdinand Schumacher introduces Steel Cut Oats, a new product whose flaky composition gives it a uniformly acceptable taste and consistency (see 1856). Schumacher uses a new machine invented largely by his employee Asmus J. Ehrrichsen, whose process is the first real innovation in milling oats, employing a series of horizontal knife blades to cut the hulled oats (groats) into a meal that has little or none of the floury residues that have made oatmeal pasty, lumpy, and glutenous. Another Schumacher employee, William Heston, improves on the Ehrrichsen-Schumacher process and obtains patents which he licenses Schumacher to use while reserving the right to use the new process himself (see Quaker, 1877).
English flour miller Joseph Rank begins a business at Hull that will grow to become the nation's largest milling enterprise. By 1914 it will own large mills in the docks of Hull, London, Barry, and Birkenhead.
Société Anonymé Lactée Henri Nestlé is founded at Vevey, Switzerland, in January by businessmen Jules Monnerat, 55; Samuel Roussy (Monnerat's nephew), Emil Louis Roussy, 33, and Gustave Marquis, who pay 1 million Swiss francs, outbidding Geneva bankers to acquire the operation which is selling hundreds of thousands of tins of baby food each year and is the town's foremost enterprise (see 1866). The bankers have offered nearly as much, but the Vevey businessmen offer more, providing Nestlé and his wife with a splendid coach and a team of horses to sweeten their proposition, and they change the name March 8 to Farine Lactée Henri Nestlé (see 1890).
The first milk chocolate for eating is invented at Vevey by the Nestlé shopman in collaboration with the foreman of Daniel Peter's chocolate factory (see Cadbury, 1847). They hit upon the idea of mixing sweetened condensed milk with chocolate and create a product that meets with immediate commercial success (see Hershey, 1893).
Cadbury's opens a large factory outside Birmingham at a place it calls Bournville (to give it a French sound; the best chocolates still come from France) (see 1866).
The average British working-class family spends £15 to £20 per year on alcohol; some families spend a third or more of their income on drink.
A British Trade Marks Act goes into effect; the first trademark registered is for Bass & Company Pale Ale made at Burton-on-Trent in Staffordshire since 1777.
French wine producers have their best vintage in history, despite encroachments in some areas by grape phylloxerae (see 1872; 1876).
U.S. tea imports reach 59 million pounds, up from 20 million in 1862, as import duties are removed.
Hires Rootbeer has its beginnings in a recipe for an herb tea discovered by Philadelphia pharmacist Charles Elmer Hires, 24, who takes his bride on a wedding trip to a New Jersey farm. The tea is made from 16 different wild roots and berries that include juniper, pipsissewa, spikenard, sarsaparilla, wintergreen, and hops. Hires takes the recipe back to Philadelphia and begins experimenting with improved formulas (see 1876).
New York Condensed Milk Company begins selling fluid milk in addition to its condensed milk (see 1858; 1885).
New York's first Chinese general store opens at 8 Mott Street. Named for butcher-innkeeper James Mott, it sells groceries, herbs, and medicines to serve a Chinatown population that has grown as more and more Chinese have arrived in the city to escape mistreatment in the western states (see 1847). The area bounded by Baxter Street, the Bowery, Canal Street, and Chatham Square will become a Chinese enclave whose restaurants will include some of the best in the city (see Chinese Exclusion Act, 1882).
German embryologist Oskar (Wilhelm August) Hertwig, 26, at the University of Jena concludes that fertilization of the female egg is accomplished by a single male cell. He has worked with sea urchins (Arbacia punctulata), whose female produces roughly a million eggs per season (see Fol, 1879).
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