1881 1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889 1890
French socialists found a Central Revolutionary Committee (Comité Révolutionnaire Central) following the death at Paris January 1 of radical socialist Auguste Blanqui at age 75 (he had spent more than 33 years of his life behind bars).
Russian troops under the command of General Mikhail D. Skobelev capture Turkmen stronghold of Gokte (or Geok-Tepe; later Gokdepe) in the Persian province of Khorasan January 24. Now 37 and known as the "white general" because he always dresses in a white uniform for battle and rides a white horse, Skobolev took command last year of the campaign against the Turkmens in the Central Asian region between the Caspian and Aral seas; he has all males in the vicinity put to death, forces the tribes into submission, and moves against Ashkhabad (later Ashgabat), wresting the region from the control of Uzbeks who have held it since the 15th century, but St. Petersburg concludes an alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary, Skobolev is recalled, and he is given command of the Minsk Army Corps.
Russia's Aleksandr II is assassinated at St. Petersburg March 13 at age 62 after a 26-year reign. A bomb tears off his legs, rips open his belly, and mutilates his face in an act organized and carried out by Sophia Perovskaya, who heads a band of Nihilist terrorists of a populist fringe group. The leadership of the People's Will (Narodnaya Volya) is arrested, and the group is taken over by Vera Nikolaevna Figner, 28, who has organized a resistance movement within the army and navy, written propaganda, and plotted to blow up the czar's train (see 1880). London authorities shut down anarchist Johann Most's 3-year-old weekly paper Die Freiheit for glorifying the assassination, and a court sentences him to 16 months' imprisonment (see 1882); the czar liberator is succeeded by his six-foot four-inch son, who was tutored beginning in 1865 by former Moscow University political philosopher Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev, now 53. Now 36, the new czar will reign until 1894 as Aleksandr III, following the reactionary advice of Pobedonostsev, who since last year has been director general of the Most Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church; Aleskandr begins a wave of repression and persecution. Statesman-explorer Graf Nikolai Muravyov dies at Paris November 30 (November 18 Old Style) at age 72.
Romania and Serbia win independence from Constantinople, and the Serbs make an alliance with Austria-Hungary. Thessaly and the Arta district of southern Epirus are awarded to Greece in May, but Prime Minister Aléxandros Koumoundhouros is frustrated in his hopes of annexing the cities of Joánnina (Janina) and Preveza; he will resign in March of next year.
Former British prime minister and novelist Benjamin Disraeli, earl of Beaconsfield, dies at his native London April 19 at age 76.
Irish nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell agitates for home rule and is imprisoned on charges of obstructing operation of a new land policy (see 1879; Boycott, 1880). From prison, Parnell directs tenant farmers to pay no rent, thus enhancing his power, but a new Land Act put through by Prime Minister Gladstone eases conditions in Ireland (see 1882).
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Noah Swayne retires January 25 at the request of President Hayes, who has promised to appoint Swayne's friend Stanley Matthews in his place. Now 76, Swayne has had an undistinguished career on the bench.
Former New York mayor Fernando Wood dies at Hot Springs, Arkansas, February 14 on his 69th birthday. House of Representatives majority leader at his death, he is remembered by his detractors as the mayor who defended slavery during the Civil War, but admirers remember him as an opponent of harsh Reconstruction measures; German revolutionary politician Friedrich Hecker dies at St. Louis March 24 at age 79, having served as a colonel in the Union Army during America's Civil War. He has admired the German empire established 10 years ago but could never reconcile himself to Prussian leadership.
Sen. Roscoe Conkling (R. N.Y.) and Sen. Thomas C. Platt (R. N.Y) resign their Senate seats in May when President Garfield refuses to follow Conkling's advice with regard to the appointment of a new collector of the port of New York and sends federal appointees instead. Conkling, now 51, fought Garfield's nomination and refused to support the party ticket last year; he retires from politics. President Garfield is shot July 2 by a disappointed office seeker while waiting for a train at the Washington, D.C., depot of the Baltimore & Potomac Railroad ("My God! What is this?" he exclaims). Physicians are unable to find the bullet in his body, and Alexander Graham Bell is brought in to probe for it with an electrical metal-detector that he and another man have invented, but although the device has worked successfully on other Civil War veterans it fails at the White House because nobody mentions that the president's bed has a mattress with metal coil springs. The bullet is later found lodged in Garfield's back muscles a few inches from its entry point, encased in a protective cyst that has formed around it; the wound becomes infected because the doctors have used unsterile instruments, Garfield is taken in September to a seaside cottage at Elberon, New Jersey (a special railroad track is laid to bring his train to the cottage door), and he dies there September 19 at age 49. Vice President Chester A. Arthur, now 51, is sworn in as president at his 123 Lexington Avenue, New York, town house; the first president since George Washington to take the oath of office at New York, Arthur abandons his support of the spoils system, from which he has personally benefited as collector of the port of New York, and follows Garfield's policy of avoiding party favoritism in his appointments. Garfield's assassin, Charles J. Guiteau, is a Republican "Stalwart" who had sought to gain office by making Arthur chief executive, and although he has a history of mental illness he will be hanged in June of next year.
Baltimore-born Maryland Civil Service Reform League chairman Charles Joseph Bonaparte, 30, joins in organizing a National Civil Service Reform League (see Pendleton Act, 1883).
Former Confederate Army general John C. Pemberton dies at Penilyn, Pennsylvania, July 13 at age 66; former Union Army general Ambrose E. Burnside at Bristol, Rhode Island, September 13 at age 57. He served as governor of Rhode Island from 1866 to 1869 and has been U.S. senator from that state since 1875.
Japan's first political parties are formed.
Boers in the Transvaal repulse British forces January 28 at Laing's Neck and defeat them February 27 at Majuba Hill, where the governor and commander-in-chief of the Natal colony, Sir George Pomeroy Colley, is killed at age 45 (see 1880). Pieter A. Cronjé forces the surrender of the British garrison at Potchefstroom in March as leaders of the two sides meet to arrange a general armistice, and the Treaty of Pretoria concluded April 5 gives independence to the South African Republic of the Boers, albeit under British suzerainty (see 1899).
Egyptian nationalist Colonel Ahmad Arabi al-Misri, 42, leads a revolt against the Turkish and Circassian officers who have dominated the country's army (see 1880). Resentful of European influence in his country, Arabi and two of his colleagues draw up a petition in January against the Circassian war minister. The three are arrested and court martialed, but mutineers release them, and the khedive Tewfik replaces the war minister with one of Arabi's friends. Unrest continues, Tewfik appoints a new ministry following a military demonstration at Cairo in September, and he convenes the Assembly (see 1882).
France acquires Tunisia May 12 under terms of the Treaty of Kasser Said (Treaty of Bardo, or of Al-qasr As-sa'id) as Premier Jules Ferry, now 49, works to expand the French colonial empire (see 1878). A 36,000-man French expeditionary force has been sent at Ferry's urging with the ostensible purpose of subduing Tunisian Kroumer attacks on the Algerian border. The treaty provides for indefinite French occupation, a curb on the bey's authority, a reorganization of Tunisian finances, and a French resident minister to act as a liaison between Paris and the Tunisian authorities (see Cambon, 1882).
The Householders in Scotland Act gives Scottish women the right to vote in local elections.
Lakota Sioux chief Sitting Bull (Tatanka-Iyotanka) finds it impossible to feed his people absent the buffalo, which has become virtually extinct along the Canadian border. Now 50, he travels to Montana, has his young son hand over his rifle July 19 to the commanding officer at Fort Buford, says, "I wish it to be remembered that I was the last man of my tribe to surrender his rifle," and asks for the right to cross back and forth into Canada whenever he wishes, but instead of giving him a reservation of his own on the Little Missouri River near the Black Hills, federal authorities send him to the Standing Rock Reservation and then further down the Missouri River to Fort Randall, where he and his followers will be held as prisoners of war until 1883.
A Century of Dishonor by Amherst, Massachusetts-born Colorado Springs author Helen (Maria) Hunt Jackson (née Fiske), 51, records government wrongs in dealing with Indian tribes. Jackson will be appointed a special commissioner next year to investigate conditions among California's Mission Indians.
The Tennessee legislature enacts a second "Jim Crow" law (see 1880); it segregates black passengers on railroads, thereby establishing a precedent that will be followed by similar laws throughout the South (see 1887).
"Exoduster" Benjamin "Pap" Singleton organizes the United Colored Links in a black section of Topeka, Kansas, known as "Tennessee Town" (see 1874). Called to testify last year before a congressional hearing on the alarming migration of blacks from the South, Singleton allies his new party with the Greenback Party with a view to helping blacks acquire their own factories and start their own industries, but he soon finds that the black community lacks enough capital to achieve such goals (see Chief League, 1883).
Maryland farmer John Merryman dies at Baltimore November 15 at age 67, having been denied a writ of habeas corpus in 1861.
The American Association of the Red Cross is founded by nurse Clara Barton of Civil War fame, who from 1865 to 1868 headed the Missing Soldiers Office at Washington, D.C., using a $15,000 grant from Congress to track down information regarding some 22,000 Union men and mark the graves of those buried near the Andersonville, Georgia, prison camp. Barton did relief work in Europe during the Franco-Prussian War and has campaigned to have the United States sign a Geneva Convention (see 1861). Now 59, she will serve as president of the American National Red Cross until 1904, when lack of public support will require congressional action to keep the Red Cross from folding.
The New York Tribune takes over the Fresh Air Fund for city slum children that was started 4 years ago. The newspaper appeals to the public for funds to continue the program.
The officers and crew of the De Long expedition that went to the Arctic 2 years ago escapes with most of their provisions June 12 when the ice northeast of the New Siberian Islands crushes their ship Jeanette June 12. A search expedition under the command of Lieut. Robert Mallary Berry surveys Wrangel Island but finds no trace of De Long. Lieut. Adolphus W. (Washington) Greely, 37, U.S. Army, volunteers to lead a scientific expedition to the Arctic and sails in July aboard the Proteus for Newfoundland with 24 other volunteers. They land in August at Lady Franklin Bay on the eastern shore of Ellesmere Island. George W. De Long reaches the eastern shore of Siberia's Lena River delta in August, having traveled some 600 miles but lost one of his three small boats and the men aboard her. His engineer George W. Melville reaches the western shore and is rescued, many of De Long's men die of exposure and starvation, and he himself succumbs October 30 at age 37, having kept a journal until the end (see Greely, 1882).
Frontiersman-fur trader-scout Jim Bridger dies at his farm near Kansas City July 17 at age 77.
The U.S. Supreme Court rules January 24 in Springer v. United States that the federal income tax law of 1861 was constitutional (see 1872; 1894).
Congress authorizes the registration of trademarks March 3.
The Anaconda silver mine opens in Montana Territory. Irish-born miner Marcus Daly, 39, has persuaded George Hearst, Lloyd Tevis, and James Ben Ali Haggin to buy Michael Hickey's 1875 claim for $30,000. The silver will give out quickly, but the mining operation will turn up a rich vein of copper. Daly will buy up neighboring companies, the Anaconda will reopen as a copper mine, Daly will build a smelter in 1884, demand for copper will increase, and he will reorganize his expanded holdings under the name Anaconda Mining Company in 1891 with a capitalization of $25 million (see Amalgamated Copper, 1899).
Meyer Guggenheim embarks on a mining and smelting career that will establish great fortunes. A 51-year-old Swiss-born Philadelphia lace and embroidery importer, Guggenheim buys sight-unseen a one-third interest in two lead and silver mines on the outskirts of Leadville, Colorado; when he travels out to inspect his holdings, he finds that the A. Y. mine and the Minnie (both nearly two miles above sea-level) are flooded. He invests half his $50,000 capital to "unwater" them, and within a few months the A. Y. mine is producing 15 ounces of silver per ton of ore (see 1888).
Diamond Match Company is created by a merger of the two largest U.S. match manufacturers with Ohio-born Columbus Harber, 40, as president. Chicago lawyer William H. Moore, 35, has effected the merger.
Former Wells, Fargo and American Express president William G. Fargo dies at Buffalo, New York, August 3 at age 63.
Marshall Field & Company, is created by a reorganization of Chicago's Field, Leiter & Company (see 1867). Field buys out Levi Z. Leiter for $2.5 million and in the next 25 years will make his store the world's largest wholesale and retail dry goods emporium (see 1893; education, 1891).
Detroit's J. L. Hudson department store has its beginnings in a menswear shop opened by English-born merchant Joseph Lothian Hudson, 34, who will specialize in fire sales, acquire a site at Gratiot and Farmer Streets in 1891, and by 1911 have a store with 50 passenger elevators that covers an entire city block (see Northland, 1954).
Boston's William Filene, Sons & Company opens at 10 Winter Street. Prussian-born tailor-merchant William Filene (originally Filehne), now 51, came to America in 1848 and has opened (and closed) a series of stores in Massachusetts and New York; he and his Salem, Massachusetts-born sons Edward Albert, 21, and (Abraham) Lincoln Filene, 16, will take over a five-story building at 445-447 Washington Street for their womenswear and accessories "specialty" store (see 1901).
Inventors Lewis H. Latimer and Joseph V. Nichols receive a patent on the first incandescent light bulb with a filament made entirely of carbon (see 1880). Now 32, Latimer last year left the Boston patent-law firm that employed him and has been working at Bridgeport, Connecticut, for the United States Electric Lighting Company, headed by Hiram Maxim.
Thomas Edison's Edison Electric Light Company creates a subsidiary (The Edison Co. for Isolated Lighting) to furnish factories and large department stores with individual power plants (see 1880; Edison Illuminating, 1882).
London's Savoy Theatre opens with Swan Glo-Lights, the first electric illumination in any British public building.
A two-stroke internal-combustion engine patented by Glasgow-born inventor Dugald Clerk, 27, will be widely used for light motorcycles and other small machines. It generates an explosion once every two strokes of the piston, whereas the Otto engine of 1866 generated an explosion once in every four.
A decade of unprecedented railroad construction begins in North America.
The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe links up with the Southern Pacific March 8 at Deming in New Mexico Territory to create the second transcontinental railroad; the first Santa Fe through train to California leaves Kansas City March 17, but the road still has only 868 miles of its own track and despite its name is balked by terrain from reaching Santa Fe (it will never get closer than Lamy) (see 1880). The 868 miles will increase to 3,600 in the next 6 years under the leadership of the Santa Fe's new president William Barstow Strong (see 1887). The Southern Pacific joins up with the Texas and Pacific near Sierra Blanca, Texas, in December as the last spike is driven home near El Paso, Texas; having followed the route used by the Mormon Battalion in 1847, the SP will take over the Galveston, Harrisburg, and San Antonio, and begin service in 1883 on the Sunset route along the 32nd parallel between El Paso, Texas, and Shreveport, Louisiana (see 1885).
Henry Villard gains control of the Northern Pacific Railroad now under construction (see 1870). Now 46, Villard came to New York from his native Bavaria at age 18, changed his name from Ferdinand Heinrich Gustav Hilgard to avoid being returned and drafted into the army, and worked for years as a journalist for the New York Staats-Zeitung, James Gordon Bennett's Herald, and Horace Greeley's Tribune. He has formed a pool of investors to monopolize Pacific Northwest transportation (see 1883; 1901).
James J. Hill of the St. Paul and Pacific joins with Montreal financier George Stephen to organize a new Canadian Pacific Railway Company after the collapse of an earlier effort. Given a $25 million pledge of government aid, a 10-year deadline, and assurance that no other railroad will be permitted in the area for 20 years, Hill and Stephen hire Illinois-born Chicago Milwaukee & St. Paul general manager William Cornelius Van Horne, 38, to carry out the trans-Canada project, long overdue in light of the Dominion government's pledge to British Columbia in 1871. Former Nova Scotia prime minister Sir Charles Tupper, 60, is now Canada's minister of railways and canals and has introduced the bill giving the new railway its charter. Van Horne moves to Winnipeg, he works his crews night and day, and by September they have built nearly 500 miles of track through forest and swamp (see 1885).
The Norfolk and Western Railroad created by a reorganization of roads that began with a 10-mile line in 1837 will grow within 50 years to operate 4,477 miles of track in six states with 30,000 employees (see Mahone, 1865). The Philadelphia private banking house E. W. Clark & Company has purchased the Atlantic, Mississippi & Ohio Railroad; it will augment that line's 479 miles of track in this decade by acquiring other roads in Maryland and Ohio and building new lines into the coal fields of Virginia and West Virginia.
Former Pennsylvania Railroad president Thomas A. Scott dies at Derby, Pennsylvania, May 21 at age 57. He suffered a paralytic stroke in 1878, was able to return to work, but resigned his presidency last year.
The S.S. Servia goes into service for Britain's Cunard Line. It is the world's first steel ocean liner and is soon equipped with electric lights (Swan Glo-Lights) at a time when relatively few passengers have seen anything more modern than gas lights and must be given instructions on how to turn the lights on and off.
The Canadian ferry Princess Victoria sinks in the Thames River near London, Ontario, May 24 with a loss of 180 lives.
The motor-driven water bus (vaporetto) introduced at Venice will make the traditional gondola a conveyance used chiefly by tourists (see 1292). By 1971 Venice will have fewer than 500 gondolas.
French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette dies at Cairo January 19 at age 59 and is succeeded as director general of excavations and antiquities for the Egyptian government by Gaston (-Camille-Charles) Maspero, 35; suspecting that a royal grave has been discovered by robbers, Maspero notifies authorities, they arrest a thief, and the thief shows them a tomb secreted in a cliff near Dayr al-Bahri containing 40 mummies, including those of the ancient pharaohs Seti I, Amenhotep I, Thutmose II, and Ramses II plus inscribed sarcophogi and large numbers of decorative and funerary artifacts.
German-born U.S. physicist Albert A. (Abraham) Michelson, 29, constructs an interferometer that will be used in modified form to test lenses and prisms, measuring index of refraction, and examining microtopographies (minute details of optical surfaces). Michelson will also construct a stellar interferometer that can measure the diameters of stars (see 1887).
A Treatise on Comparative Embryology by Edinburgh-born Cambridge University zoologist Francis Maitland Balfour, 29, establishes the foundation of modern embryology. A younger brother of statesman Arthur J. Balfour, Francis Balfour has made discoveries bearing on the evolution of invertebrates to vertebrates.
Chemist and toxicologist Francesco Selmi dies at Bologna August 13 at age 64.
Methods for the Study of Pathogenic Organisms by Robert Koch at Berlin describes his success with soldified culture media, notably an aseptically-cut slice of potato he has used to overcome the difficulties posed by liquid media. Future microbiologists will rank his breakthrough second only to the perfection of sterilization techniques in the development of their field of study (see science [agar-agar], 1882). British physicist John Tyndall, now 60, proves that food left in a sterile, bacteria-free environment does not decay, destroying once and for all the idea that decay organisms emerge through "spontaneous generation" (see Huxley, 1870).
Viennese surgeon Theodor Billroth successfully excises a cancerous pylorus (the lower end of the stomach), an abdominal procedure that has heretofore defied the best efforts of surgery.
Spanish virologist Jaime Ferran discovers a serum effective against cholera (see Koch, 1883).
A paper by Cuban physician Carlos Juan Finlay, 47, suggests that mosquitoes may spread yellow fever from infected persons to uninfected persons, but although the paper will be published at London in 1886 it will be ignored (see 1878; Reed, 1900).
The pneumococcus bacillus that causes most cases of pneumonia is found by upstate New York-born U.S. Army bacteriologist-physician George M. (Miller) Sternberg, 43, who was captured at the Battle of Bull Run in 1861, escaped, survived an attack of typhoid fever a year later, survived an attack of yellow fever in 1875, and has earlier identified the malaria plasmodium and the bacilli of tuberculosis and typhoid fever (pneumonia can also occur in viral form).
Britain's Midwives' Institute has its beginnings in the Matron's Aid or Trained Midwives' Registration Society, founded to improve the quality of attendants at childbirth (see Midwives' Act, 1902).
Sales of Mrs. Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound reach nearly $200,000 (see 1879; 1883).
Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company is founded by promoters John Healy and Texas Charley Bigelow, who hire 300 Indians (none of them Kickapoo) from Indian agents, pay each one $30 per month plus expenses, and have them stage rodeos, rope tricks, and war dances to promote Kickapoo Indian Oil, Salve, Cough Cure, Pain Pills, Wart Killer, and the like. Healy and Bigelow will be joined in Pennsylvania by promoter Edward "Nevada Ned" Oliver, who has never been anywhere near Nevada but who will specialize in catarrh powders made of menthol, sugar, milk, and cocaine (see cocaine, 1884).
Russia's new czar Aleksandr III makes Jews the scapegoats for the assassination of his father. He also persecutes Roman Catholics but vows to kill one-third of the country's Jews, drive out another third, and convert the rest, beginning a series of pogroms (massacres) that will spur emigration of millions of Jews in the next 30 years.
Anti-Semitism appears in America after generations during which German Jews have mixed on equal terms with other German immigrants. Some 500,000 Romanian Jews will emigrate to America in the next few decades and be joined by other Eastern European Jews, plus 1.5 million Russian Jews, adding new diversity to the population.
The encyclical Diuturnum issued June 29 by Pope Leo XIII reaffirms the position against liberalism adopted by his predecessors, the late Gregory XVI and Pius IX.
The American Museum of Natural History's new (third) president engages a taxidermist to create dramatic new displays that will attract far more interest than the specimens displayed heretofore (see 1877). Railroad securities broker Morris Ketchum Jesup, 51, supports Albert Bickmore's idea of having lectures on nature for schoolteachers, will keep the museum open on Sundays, and will appoint zoologist Joel E. Allen as curator of mammalogy and ornithology (see Osborn, 1891).
Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute is founded at Tuskeegee, Alabama, where local blacks have invited Booker T. (Taliaferro) Washington, 25, to start the pioneer school for blacks. Born in Virginia, Washington has been instructor to 75 Indian youths at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia (see 1868). He receives help from Hampton graduate Olivia America Davidson, 27, who will become his second wife in August 1886 following the death of his first wife, Fannie, and will bear two sons before her death in May 1889 (see 1895; agriculture, 1896).
Spelman College has its beginnings in the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary. Operated by Harriet E. Giles and Sophia B. Packard with backing from oil baron John D. Rockefeller, the school will purchase nine acres next year with five buildings that housed Union occupation troops during Reconstruction days, will have 450 enrollees by 1883, rename itself in 1924 to honor Rockefeller's mother-in-law, Lucy Henry Spelman, and become the leading U.S. college for black women.
The Wharton School of Finance and Commerce is established at the University of Pennsylvania with a gift from nickel miner Joseph Wharton, 55, whose Pennsylvania nickel mine has for years been the only U.S. producer of refined nickel. Wharton developed a process in 1875 for making pure malleable nickel (see commerce [Ritchie], 1885).
Wellesley College founder Henry Fowle Durant dies at Boston October 3 at age 59.
Western Union Telegraph is created by a consolidation of Western Union Company with two smaller telegraph companies to form a giant monopoly (see 1866). Financier Jay Gould and railroad magnate William H. Vanderbilt have effected the consolidation (see Postal Telegraph, 1886).
The Cyclostyle introduced by Hungarian-born Chicago inventor David Gestetner, 27, is the first wax stencil duplicating machine to be marketed commercially. Gestetner arrived at New York 6 years ago, found it overcrowded, moved west, lost his money to a pickpocket, borrowed money to start a business peddling kites in Chicago streets, and spent his evenings making kites from wood and a thin Japanese-made waxed paper. When he tried to draw designs on the paper the ink leaked through (see Mimeograph, 1887; typewriter stencil, 1888).
"The Story of a Great Monopoly" by Chicago Tribune financial editor Henry Demarest Lloyd, 34, appears in the Atlantic Monthly. The attack on John D. Rockefeller's operations wins Lloyd a commission from Harper's Monthly to do a study of the Pullman Palace Car Company, but it will reject his work, calling it too uncritical, and publish instead an article by Johns Hopkins economist Richard T. Ely, 27, who will praise the physical facilities of Pullman, Illinois, and its absence of saloons but will call the town undemocratic, un-American, and feudalistic.
Scribner's Monthly editor Josiah G. Holland dies at New York October 12 at age 62 and the publication is renamed the Century Illustrated Magazine.
Il Progresso Italo-Americano begins publication at New York, whose Italian population remains small. Pisa-born padrone Carlo Barsotti has founded the paper, and it will grow to have the largest circulation of any foreign-language daily in the city (see Columbus Day, 1892).
The London Evening News begins publication July 26 (see 1894; 1896).
Tit-Bits magazine begins publication at London October 22 under the name Tit-Bits from all the Most Interesting Books, Periodicals and Contributors in the World. Its publisher is George Newnes, 30, who has turned his hobby of snipping out items that he found amusing or interesting into a penny magazine whose name is soon shortened and will be renamed Titbits in 1968.
The Los Angeles (Daily) Times begins publication December 4 under the direction of Thomas Gardiner and Nathan Cole (see Otis, 1882).
Andrew Carnegie donates funds for a Pittsburgh library, beginning a series of library gifts (see 1901).
Nonfiction: Primer of Logical Analysis for the Use of Composition Students by California-born philosopher and English instructor Josiah Royce, 25, who will join the Harvard faculty next year; Kantian Ethics and the Ethics of Evolution by Canadian philosopher Jacob Gould Schurman, 27; Virginibus Puerisque (essays) by Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson, 30.
Essayist-historian Thomas Carlyle dies at Edinburgh February 4 at age 85; anthropologist-author Lewis Henry Morgan at Rochester, New York, December 17 at age 63.
Fiction: The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James; Doctor Wortle's School by Anthony Trollope; Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonard by French novelist Anatole France (Jacques Anatole François Thibault), 37; The House by the Medlar Tree (I Malavoglia) by Giovanni Verga; Epitaph of a Small Winner (The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas; Memórias Postumas de Brás Cubas) by Brazilian novelist Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, 42.
Novelist Fedor Dostoievsky dies at St. Petersburg February 9 at age 59.
Poetry: Prometheus und Epimetheus by Swiss poet Carl Friedrich George Spitteler, 36.
Poet-songwriter William Ross Wallace dies at New York May 5 at age 62; poet-novelist-critic Sidney Lanier at Lynn, North Carolina, September 7 at age 39.
Juvenile: Pinocchio, la storia di un burratino (little wooden boy) by Florentine journalist-author C. Collodi (Carlo Lorenzini), 54, begins in the Giornale dei bambini (Children's Magazine) and creates a sensation. The marionette made by the fictional woodcarver Gepetto comes to life and will have a series of adventures and misadventures, including one in which his nose grows longer every time he tells a lie; Heidi (Heidis Lehr- und Wanderjahre, Heidi Kann Brauchen, Was es Gelernt Hat) by Swiss author Johanna Spyri (née Heusser), 51; Five Little Peppers and How They Grew by New Haven, Connecticut-born author Margaret Sidney (Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop) 37, who marries Boston publisher Daniel Lothrop (he serialized the story last year in his magazine Wide Awake).
Painting: Luncheon of the Boating Party and On the Terrace (Two Sisters) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir; Sunshine and Snow by Claude Monet; Bridge and the Barge at Pontoise by Paul Cézanne; Peasant Girl with a Stick and The Café au Lait by Camille Pissarro; An Asylum for Old Men and Cobbler's Shop by Max Liebermann; Dr. Pozzi at Home by John Singer Sargent; Femme a la Tapisserie (her sister Lydia working at a tapestry frame), Woman Seated before a French Screen, and Master Robert Kelso Cassatt by Mary Cassatt; Scotland for Ever! by Lady Elizabeth Butler; Ramapo Valley by Jasper Francis Cropsey; Shad Fishing at Gloucester on the Delaware River by Thomas Eakins; Watching from the Cliffs by Winslow Homer. Painter Samuel Palmer dies at Reigate, Surrey, May 24 at age 76.
Sculpture: Admiral Farragut by Irish-born sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 33, who opened studios at New York in 1873 but will move to Cornish, New Hampshire, in 1885. Saint-Gaudens shows a style of dramatic simplicity that has made him popular with architects such as Stanford White, who has designed a pedestal for the full-length statue of the late U.S. naval hero in New York's Madison Square.
Photographic roll film is patented October 11 by Wisconsin inventor David H. (Henderson) Houston (see Eastman, 1880). His "photographic apparatus" is a camera whose inner end has a receptacle containing a "roll of sensitized paper or any other suitable tissue, such as gelatine or any more durable material that may be discovered, and an empty reel, upon which the sensitized band is wound as rapidly as it has been acted upon by the light" (see Walker, Eastman, 1884).
Theater: The Professor by Hartford-born actor-playwright William H. (Hooker) Gillette, 27, 6/1 at Mew York's Madison Square Theater, with Gillette in the title role; La Mascotte 10/15 at London's newly-opened Comedy Theatre; Esmeralda by William H. Gillette and Frances Hodgson Burnett 10/29 at the Madison Square Theater, with Annie Russell in the title role; Talents and Admirers (Talanty i poklonniki) by Aleksandr Ostrovsky 12/20 at Moscow's Maly Theater.
A fire destroys Vienna's Ring Theater December 8, killing at least 640 and possibly as many as 850.
Barnum & Bailey's Circus is created by a merger that joins the 10-year-old P. T. Barnum circus with that of Detroit-born showman John Anthony Bailey (originally James McGinnis), 34, who has purchased the Great London Circus, gone on tour in competition with Barnum, and will gain control in 1888 (see Jumbo, 1882; Ringling brothers, 1907).
Opera: The Tales of Hoffmann (Les Contes d'Hoffman) 2/10 at the Opéra-Comique, Paris, with music by the late Jacques Offenbach (a friend has completed the score, and its Barbarelle aria makes the work a succes fou); The Maid of Orleans (Orleanskata dieve) 2/13 at St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Theater, with music by Petr Ilich Tchaikovsky, libretto from the Friedrich von Schiller play of 1801; Patience (or Bunthorne's Bride) 4/23 at London's new Savoy Theatre, with Gilbert and Sullivan songs that include "Prithee, Pretty Maiden." The theater has been built by Richard D'Oyly Carte, now 37, who has been producing Gilbert and Sullivan operas since Trial by Jury in 1875, 578 performances; Libusa 5/11 at Prague, with music by Bedrich Smetana to open the new National Theater; Vienna-born U.S. soprano Emma (Johanna) Juch, 17, makes her debut in June at Her Majesty's Theatre, London, singing the role of Philine in the 1866 Ambroise Thomas opera Mignon and sings the same role in her New York debut at the Academy of Music 10/21; Australia-born soprano May Witty, 16, makes her operatic debut in the chorus at the Liverpool Court Theatre.
Composer Modest Moussorgsky is taken to a St. Petersburg hospital February 24 following a possible stroke, bribes an orderly to fetch him a bottle of wine or cognac, and dies March 28 at age 42 of causes exacerbated by his chronic alcoholism.
A gas lamp starts a fire in the French opera house at Nice March 23, killing 70.
Lillian Russell achieves stardom at age 19 playing D'Jemma in the comic opera The Great Mogul (or The Snake Charmer) with music by French composer Edmond Audran, 39. Born Helen Louise Leonard at Clinton, Iowa, Russell adopted her stage name last year while appearing at Tony Pastor's Opera House in New York and has toured California in the new comic opera. She will play roles in Patience and other Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, remaining popular for more than 20 years for her clear soprano voice and well-upholstered beauty.
First performances: Concerto No. 3 in B major for Violin and Orchestra by Camille Saint-Saëns 1/2 at Paris; Academic Festival Overture (Academische Festouverture) by Johannes Brahms 1/4 at the University of Breslau; Symphony No. 2 in C minor (Little Russia) by Petr Ilich Tchaikovsky 2/2 at St. Petersburg; Symphony No. 3 in D major by the late Franz Schubert 2/19 at London's Crystal Palace; Symphony No. 4 in E flat major (Romantic) by Anton Bruckner 2/20 at Vienna; Concerto No. 2 in B flat major for Pianoforte and Orchestra by Johannes Brahms 11/9 at Budapest's Redountensaal; Concerto No. 2 in G major for Pianoforte and Orchestra by Tchaikovsky 11/12 at New York's Academy of Music; Concerto in D major for Violin and Orchestra by Tchaikovsky 12/4 at Vienna.
The Boston Symphony Orchestra is founded by local stockbroker Henry Lee Higginson, 47 (see 1875). Having studied music at Vienna in his 20s, he pays all salaries out of his own pocket and makes up all deficits (see Boston Pops, 1885; Symphony Hall, 1900).
Hymn: "I Am Coming" by Ira D. Sankey, lyrics by Helen R. Young; "Tell It Out Among the Nations" by Ira D. Sankey, lyrics by Francis R. Havergal.
March: "Semper Fidelis" by Washington, D.C.-born U.S. Marine Corps bandmaster John Philip Sousa, 27, who took the post last year and will keep it until 1892 (see 1889).
The Autoharp patented in the United States by German immigrant C. F. Zimmermann has been invented by C. A. Gütter of Markneukirchen, whose Akkordzither is a string instrument much like a zither that will be widely used in America to accompany folk music as well as country and western music (see accordion, concertina, 1829). New York piano-equipment maker Alfred Dolge, now 33, will acquire Zimmermann's interests and promote sales in the 1890s through mail-order advertising and with door-to-door salesmen.
William Renshaw, 20, wins in singles play at Wimbledon, Boston-born player Richard D. (Dudley) Sears, 19, in the first national U.S. singles tournament in August at Newport Casino, where the matches will be held until 1918 (the casino has been built at the Rhode Island resort town to designs by McKim, Mead & White). The United States Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA) founded May 21 by 33 U.S. clubs will control all U.S. national tournaments.
The second Canadian bid for the America's Cup in ocean yacht racing fails. The U.S. defender Mischief defeats Canada's Atalanta 2 to 0.
Billy the Kid escapes in May while under heavy guard after 5 months in confinement on a murder conviction. He kills two deputies who try to stop him, but Alabama-born Sheriff Patrick F. "Pat" Garrett, 31, tracks him down and discovers him July 17 at Fort Sumner in New Mexico Territory and shoots him dead. The New York-born western outlaw William H. Bonney, 21, has killed 21 men, including a previous sheriff and within 6 weeks of his death The True Life of Billy the Kid is being sold in the streets of New York.
A shootout at the O.K. Corral outside Tombstone in Arizona Territory on the afternoon of October 26 breaks up a gang headed by Ike Clanton, whose brother Billy is shot along with Frank and Tom McLaury. The Clantons and McLaurys have been affiliated with the "Cowboys," a gang of thieves who have been stealing cows in Mexico and committing murders, and some of Ike Clanton's friends have killed a stage driver during an attempted holdup. Town marshal Virgil Earp has deputized his brothers Wyatt, 31, and Morgan; they are joined by Georgia-born alcoholic dentist-gambler John Henry "Doc" Holliday, 29. Virgil Earp says, "Boys, throw up your hands—I want your guns." Two quick shots are heard, and within 30 seconds every man in the fight except Wyatt Earp is dead or wounded. Ike Clanton and Billy Claiborne escape out of town, the town suspects the Earps of murder, and Virgil Earp loses his job as marshal. His brother Wyatt has been seeking the lucrative office of county sheriff after a career as buffalo hunter, gambler, shotgun guard, saloon keeper, boxing referee, faro dealer, and peace officer with a reputation for keeping the peace without gunplay; he had made a deal with Ike Clanton, offering a reward in hopes of capturing the Clanton and McLaury gang, and he has probably never killed anyone before. Virgil Earp will be wounded and crippled by unseen assailants within a few months, his brother Morgan will be killed, Wyatt Earp will avenge their deaths as a deputy federal marshal, and will then become a peripatetic gambler and speculator.
A model factory town for Pullman Palace Car employees goes up on a 4,000-acre tract at Pullman, Illinois, beside Lake Calumet outside Chicago. Architect Solon Spenser Beman, 29, has designed the first all-brick U.S. city; it will have paved streets, good water supply and sewage disposal systems, a shopping center arcade and a hotel named after George M. Pullman's daughter. Rents will be fixed to give the Pullman company a 6 percent return on investment (see 1893) strike.
The Chicago firm Adler and Sullivan is founded by German-born architect Dankmar Adler and Boston-born architect Louis H. (Henri) Sullivan, 24, who worked as a draftsman in 1873 for the Philadelphia firm Furness and Hewitt and was strongly influenced by Frank H. Furness, now 42.
The Texas state capitol at Austin burns down, and legislators demand the biggest capitol building in the country, with a dome at least one foot higher than the one in Washington. They agree to build a railway to a quarry, whose owners donate pink granite in return (the quarry will still be selling stone in the 21st century), and arrange with a group of Chicago contractors and financiers to erect the new capitol, trading 3 million acres of Panhandle prairie to the Chicago syndicate.
Architect George Edmund Street is appointed professor of architecture at the Royal Academy of Arts but dies at London December 18 at age 57, having designed a number of churches in Gothic Revival style. The Law Courts that he designed will be completed in London next year.
U.S. Navy engineers rig up a crude air-conditioning device in the sickroom of President Garfield at Elberon, New Jersey, but although the fan blowing over cloths saturated with ice water lowers temperatures by as much as 20° F., the contraption uses more than 500,000 pounds of ice in 2 months (see Gorrie, 1842; Carrier, 1902).
Ring-necked pheasants from Shanghai are introduced into Oregon's Willamette Valley. The Chinese pheasant will be an important American upland game bird.
Drought strikes the eastern United States. New York City runs out of water and people in many cities die of heat exhaustion.
A hurricane that hits Florida and the Carolinas August 27 leaves about 700 dead.
William Underwood & Company of Boston puts up a sardine factory at West Jonesport, Maine. Underwood has been packing lobster, clams, mackerel, and chowders since 1846 at plants in West Jonesport and Southwest Harbor (see red devil, 1870). It will fry the sardines in oil and pack them under French names (see Wolff, 1876; Rogers, 1903).
Chicago dry goods merchant John Villiers Farwell, 56, and his brother Charles Benjamin, 58, (a U.S. congressman) form the Capitol Freehold Land and Investment Company, wind 800 miles of barbed wire around their holdings, and establish the XIT Ranch. The largest in the Panhandle, it will soon be driving 12,000 head per year from its 200-mile Texas range 1,200 miles up the Montana Trail to the leased XIT range in Montana Territory—the last great cattle drives from Texas.
The Beef Bonanza: or, How to Get Rich on the Plains; Being a Description of Cattle-growing, Sheep-farming, Horse-raising, and Dairying in the West by Pennsylvania-born Brig. Gen. James S. (Sanks) Brisbin, 44, extols the possibilities of buying calves for $5 and selling steers for $45 after fattening them for nothing on the "luxuriant growth of blue, buffalo, and gramma grasses" on 16 million acres of federal lands. "Here the buffalo were thickest, and only 10 years ago it was estimated that there were 1 million head grazing on the Republican [River] and its tributaries. They have all gone, and now 50,000 head of cattle or sheep have yet replaced them. What a field for the future stock kings of the West!" Easterners and Europeans read Brisbin's book; those who rush to buy herds include retail merchant Marshall Field, barbed-wire king Joseph Glidden, and railroad magnate William K. Vanderbilt.
Cattle ranges in the U.S. Southwest wither in a severe drought, but cattle-raising remains profitable.
The Prairie Cattle Company of Edinburgh, Scotland, declares a 28 percent dividend. The company buys out Texas Panhandle rancher George W. Littlefield, whose LIT squatter ranch claims no land rights but who receives more than $125,000 (see 1882).
Louis Pasteur develops a vaccine to prevent anthrax in sheep and hogs (see 1861; Koch, 1883).
California imposes quarantine regulations to keep out insect pests and plant diseases.
German physiologist Carl von Voit, 49, at Munich suggests that a man requires 118 grams of protein per day, 500 grams of carbohydrate, and 56 grams of fat for a total of what will later be reckoned as 3,055 kilocalories (see Moleschott, 1859). Having studied under Friedrich Wöhler and the late Justus von Liebig, Voit and chemist Max von Pettenkofer have built a "respiration chamber" large enough to hold human subjects and studied animal metabolism, measuring the ingestion and excretion of foodstuffs, oxygen consumption, and the production of heat and carbon dioxide during states of activity, rest, and fasting (see Atwater, 1889; 1902).
The first U.S. pure food laws are passed by New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and Illinois (see 1904).
The first U.S.-made margarine is produced in a West 48th Street, New York, factory by Community Manufacturing Company, a subsidiary of the U.S. Dairy Company (see 1874; 1886).
Jumbo Rolled Oats are introduced by Akron, Ohio, oatmeal king Ferdinand Schumacher (see 1875). They save him money, give him an advantage over competitors who have copied his steel-cut method, and permit a housewife using a double-boiler to prepare breakfast in 1 hour—less than half the time needed for steel-cut oats and at less expense.
J. H. Kellogg adopts Granola as a new brand name for his cold breakfast food (see religion, 1876). He has been sued for using the name Granula by the Dansville, New York, originators of that name (see Granose, 1895).
Chicago meat packer Gustavus F. Swift perfects a refrigerator car to take Chicago-dressed meat to eastern butchers (see 1877). Sides of meat hang from overhead rails inside the car, and when it reaches its destination the rails are hooked up with rails inside the customer's cold storage building, making it easy to slide the meat from railcar to cold store without loss of time or change of temperature. Beginning with a disassembly line from the moment of slaughter to the butchering of carcasses into primal sections, the efficiency of Swift's system will lower the price of meat in New York, New England, and down the Atlantic seaboard.
The first British cold store opens at London, which soon begins to receive shipments of chilled beef from America. When it is discovered that meat kept at 30° F. maintains its quality better than meat preserved with early freezing methods, U.S. meat will begin a domination of British markets that will continue for more than 25 years (see 1877).
A report shows that the average Briton's expenditure for meat is higher than for bread, with average per-capita meat consumption estimated at 1.75 pound per week, but Irish-born London music and drama critic George Bernard Shaw, 25, embraces vegetarianism. "A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses," he will later say, and he will claim to be "seldom less than ten times as well as an ordinary carcass eater."
Britons spend more on "luxuries" such as sugar, tea, and butter than on potatoes.
Hills Brothers Coffee has its beginnings at San Francisco, where Maine-born entrepreneurs A. H. (Austin Herbert) Hills, 30, and R. W. (Reuben Wilmarth) Hills, 25, buy the Arabian Coffee & Spice Mills, a retail store. The brothers came west with their mother in 1873 to join their father, Austin Sr., then 50, who worked as foreman for a local ship building firm. The two opened a stall at the Bay City Market in 1876, purveying butter, cheese, and eggs that A. H. continues to sell while R. W. roasts coffee in front of the store, attracting customers with the aroma of his wares. He will distribute handbills next year claiming to sell "The Finest Coffee in the World! Our Coffee Is Roasted on the Premises Every Day, in Full View of the Customer." The brothers will give up their retail business in 1884 and soon thereafter will adopt the cup-testing method of coffee evaluation that has been pioneered on the West Coast by San Francisco coffee blender Clarence Bickford (see 1900).
New York restaurateur Lorenzo Delmonico dies of a stroke at Sharon Springs, New York, September 3 at age 68.
Some 669,431 immigrants enter the United States, up from 91,918 in 1861, as a decade begins that will see 5.25 million immigrants arrive.
The U.S. population reaches 53 million; Britain has 29.7 million, Ireland 5.1, Germany 45.2, France 37.6, Italy 28.4.
1881 1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889 1890
