1881 1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889 1890
The appointment of General Georges Boulanger as minister of war January 4 stimulates French revanchist sentiment. A 38-year-old veteran of the 1870 siege of Metz in the Franco-Prussian War, Boulanger has been pushed into prominence by Georges Clemenceau, 44, a member of the Chamber of Deputies who served as a war correspondent with Grant's army in the U.S. Civil War (see 1888). The Bourbon family that was once France's royal house is banished by law and will not be allowed to return even to visit until 1950.
Britain's first Salisbury ministry ends January 27 after 7 months. Spencer C. Cavendish, marquess of Hartington, assumes leadership of the Liberal Unionist Party but declines the prime ministership for a second time (he declined in 1880), and a third Gladstone ministry begins February 12.
An Irish home rule bill introduced in Parliament April 8 by Prime Minister Gladstone provides for a separate Irish legislature but retains control of matters relating to the army and navy, trade and navigation, and the crown in the British Parliament where the Irish will no longer be represented (see Parnell, 1885). The Manchester Guardian supports the bill despite strong opposition from the marquess of Hartington and others. Conservatives attack the measure; Joseph Chamberlain, 50, marquess of Huntington, resigns from the Gladstone cabinet and leads a secession from the Liberal Party; the bill is defeated in July, and the third Gladstone ministry ends July 26 when a general election gives victory to the Conservatives. A second Salisbury ministry takes power (it will continue until 1892), and Lord Salisbury's nephew Arthur J. Balfour, now 38, is made chief secretary for Ireland (see 1887).
The Congress of Berlin imposes a settlement on Serbia and Bulgaria March 3, ending their nearly 4-month-old conflict (see 1885). Bulgaria's Prince Aleksandr I is forced to abdicate and is abducted in August, Stefan N. Stambolov forms a counterrevolutionary regime at Turnovo that is loyal to the prince and undermines the pro-Russian provisional government at Sofia. Aleksandr formally abdicates in September, and Stambolov sets up a regency council to choose a new prince (see 1887).
Spain's queen Maria Christina of Austria gives birth May 17 to a boy who is immediately proclaimed king; posthumous son of the late Alfonso XII, he will reign until 1931 as Alfonso XIII, with his mother serving as regent until 1902.
Bavaria's eccentric king Ludwig II drowns in the Starnberger See June 13 at age 40 after a 12-year reign in which he has brought his realm into the German Empire but taken only occasional interest in affairs of state while he indulged his romantic passion for architecture (his Neuschwanstein reconstruction of a medieval castle near Füssen is left incomplete). A panel of physicians has declared Ludwig insane June 10, his uncle Prince Luitgard has become regent, and the king has been removed by the psychiatrist Bernard von Gudden to Schloss Berg near the lake, but whether he has drowned himself, fallen into the water by accident, or been murdered will remain a matter of controversy.
Britain annexes Upper (northern) Burma January 1 following a third Anglo-Burmese war, but desultory guerrilla warfare will continue for years. Viceroy to India Frederick Temple, earl of Dufferin, consolidates British territories by the annexation, and Burma will remain part of the British Empire until 1948; China recognizes the British protectorate in Burma July 24 in return for continuation of a decennial tribute.
The Royal Niger Company is chartered to establish British rule on Africa's Niger River. Britain was successful at last year's Berlin West Africa Conference in claiming that her dominant commercial position on the lower Niger justified the region being placed under British (rather than international) control, and former Royal Engineers officer George (Dashwood Taubman) Goldie, 40, has founded a company that will develop northern Nigeria into an orderly and prosperous protectorate, although most of the vast region has never been explored by Europeans and remains unoccupied (see Lugard, 1894).
A new Anglo-German agreement divides East Africa into two spheres of influence divided by a line that runs from a point south of Mombasa to the eastern shore of Lake Victoria (see 1890; Peters, 1885).
Former Union Army general and presidential candidate Winfield Scott Hancock dies at his Governors Island, New York, headquarters February 9 at age 61; former Confederate naval commander James I. Waddell at Annapolis, Maryland, March 15 at age 61; former presidential candidate Samuel J. Tilden at Yonkers, New York, August 4 at age 72; former president Chester A. Arthur of Bright's disease at New York November 18 at age 57; former diplomat Charles Francis Adams at Boston November 21 at age 79; former Union general and Grand Army of the Republic president Sen. John A. Logan (R. Ill.) at Washington, D.C., December 26 at age 60.
Colombia adopts a new constitution that replaces the Liberal Constitution of 1853 with one that consolidates the regime of President Rafael Nuñez and will impose reactionary dominance over the country for the next 50 years. Nuñez restores the power of the Roman Catholic Church and imposes a centralized government with supremacy over the various state governments.
Slavery is finally abolished in Cuba after centuries of oppression in which blacks have died by thousands harvesting the island's sugar cane (see revolutions, 1868; 1879). Spain has given the Cubans representation in the Cortes (parliament) but has not made good on other promises of reform (see politics, 1895).
U.S. congressional investigations into the Ku Klux Klan produce testimony to the effect that Klansmen have raped black women as a means of intimidation (see 1865). The Klan disbanded in 1869 (but see 1915).
Parliament enacts a Guardianship of Infants bill, recognizing a mother's role in child care.
Parliament repeals Britain's Contagious Diseases Act in April following a campaign by Josephine Butler.
The U.S. Supreme Court rules May 10 in Yick Wo v. Hopkins that a San Francisco law aimed at Chinese laundries violates the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection by discriminating against members of a racial minority (see Chinese Exclusion Act, 1882; Wong King Ark decision, 1898).
Seattle rioters drive 400 Chinese from their homes. Some are sent to San Francisco before federal troops are called in (see 1888).
The last major Indian war in the United States ends September 4 with the capture by U.S. troops of the Chiricahua Apache chief Geronimo after 4 years of warfare on the Mexican border (see 1876). Captured earlier by General George Crook, Geronimo has escaped, but General Henry Ware Lawton, 57, pursues him, recaptures Goyathlay, and turns him over to Nelson A. Miles, who has relieved Crook.
The U.S. settlement house movement has its beginnings in two small rooms at 146 Forsythe Street, New York, rented by humanitarian Stanton Coit, 29, who has returned from a visit to London's 2-year-old Toynbee Hall. An assistant to Felix Adler in the 10-year-old Society for Ethical Culture, Coit begins forming neighborhood clubs to help organize the poor to work for social improvement, and he will establish the Neighborhood Guild next year (see University Settlement, 1891; Hull House, 1889).
Indian-born British explorer Francis Edward Younghusband, 23, explores Manchuria; while en route home, he discovers a route from Kasgar into India via the Mustagh Pass through the Himalayas, a route that has not been used for years, perhaps even for centuries (see 1902; politics, 1904).
Johannesburg in the Transvaal is laid out in September as the world's largest gold mines begin operations. The Boer republic's vice president Christian Johannes Joubert has gone out with Deputy Surveyor General Johann Rissik to inspect the goldfields and identify an appropriate site for the new city, which is named in their honor and within 10 years will have a population of 10,000 as it becomes a boom town whose native men and women take jobs as domestic workers, rickshaw pullers, and washerwomen or work as prostitutes while experienced Cornish and Welsh miners work the new mines.
A gold rush to South Africa's Transvaal follows discovery by Australian prospector George Harrison of the yellow metal on the Witwatersrand (see 1853). Harrison has chanced upon an outcropping of the Witwatersrand Main Reef on a farm called Langlaagte but does not appreciate the significance of his find, sells his claim for £10, and leaves for the goldfields of the eastern Transvaal. By mid-year the line of men digging with picks and shovels stretches for 40 miles east and west of Harrison's strike; diamond king Cecil Rhodes founds Consolidated Gold Fields, Ltd. (see De Beers, 1880; British South Africa Co., 1889).
A gold strike on Alaska's Fortymile Creek brings another rush of prospectors to the area (see 1880; Klondike, 1897; Nome, 1898).
The Haymarket Massacre at Chicago gives the U.S. labor movement its first martyrs and marks the beginnings of May Day as a worldwide revolutionary memorial day. Chicago police fire into a crowd of strikers May 1, killing four and wounding many others. Anarchist Johann Most has been sent to Blackwell's Island at New York for a year in April on charges of inciting to violence and showing people how to use bombs and other means of destruction (see 1882). The 17-year-old Knights of Labor organization holds a peaceful rally May 4 in Haymarket Square to protest the May 1 shooting, someone throws a small dynamite bomb that knocks down 60 policemen, killing one and mortally wounding six others (it is the first use of dynamite in peacetime bombing anywhere in the world). The police fire into the crowd, and the workers sustain three times as many casualties as the police (see Altgeld, 1893).
Labor agitation for an 8-hour day and better working conditions makes this the peak year for strikes in 19th-century America (see 1825). Some 610,000 U.S. workers go out on strike, and monetary losses exceed $33.5 million.
The Noble Order of the Knights of Labor establishes a Woman's Department to "investigate the abuses to which our sex is subjected by unscrupulous employers and agitate the principle to which our order teaches of equal pay for equal work." Irish-born hosiery-mill worker Leonora Marie Barry (née Kearney), 36, of Amsterdam, New York, heads the new department; a widow with three children, she began working at 65¢ per week and her only experience has been running a machine, but in the next 2 years she will travel from Rhode Island to Colorado and from Toronto to Alabama, compiling statistics on women's work (see 1888).
Japan's Association of Silk Mills establishes a 15-hour day (from 4:30 in the morning until 7:30 at night) for workers, most of them young women, and cuts wages by 10 sen per day (see 1872). (Silk thread is Japan's biggest export.) Companies pay parents a given amount when they hire their daughters (who are sometimes only 7 or 8 years of age), and deduct more than half the girl's wages to pay for her food. An additional amount is deducted for the parents, and the girls are left with almost nothing.
More than 100 women workers at the Amamiya Silk-Reeling Works in Kofu, Yamanashi Prefecture, go on strike in June after the owner announces that working hours will be increased from 14 hours to 14½, daily wages for the best workers reduced from 32.3 sen to 22.3, and wage deductions made when a girl leaves her machine to get a drink of water or go to the toilet. It is the first organized strike by female workers in Japan, newspapers publicize it, and it ends June 16 when the owner agrees to reduce working hours and discuss better working conditions. Workers at three other factories follow the lead of the girls at the Amamiya Works (Kofu has 73 factories employing a total of 4,400 girls).
A corporation is a person within the intent of the clause in the Fourteenth Amendment forbidding a state to deny "to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws," the U.S. Supreme Court rules May 10 in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, but the court's empowerment of corporations as "persons" is based on narrow legalisms and will encounter challenges in years to come.
Swedish industrialist Andre Oscar Wallenberg dies at age 70, leaving his sons Knut, 33, and Marcus, 22, to carry on the family banking and industrial empire; Massachusetts textile manufacturer-philanthropist Amos A. Lawrence dies at Nahant August 22 at age 72.
A new American Federation of Labor (AFL) is founded at Columbus, Ohio, December 28 under the leadership of Samuel Gompers (see 1884). Founders include also George E. McNeill, now 49, who resigned in July from the Knights of Labor, partly because he favors the idea of trade autonomy for each individual trade, partly because the K of L takes sides politically (although McNeill has run in Boston's mayoralty race as the Union Labor Party candidate). The AFL comprises 25 labor groups representing 150,000 members and promises to remain aloof from politics; Gompers will be president for 37 of the next 38 years (see 1902).
Sears, Roebuck has its beginnings at North Redwood, Minnesota, where Minneapolis & St. Louis Railroad agent Richard Warren Sears, 23, buys a consignment of $25 gold-filled "yellow watches" that a local jeweler has refused. Station agent Sears has been selling wood, coal, and lumber to local farmers and Indians, bringing in the commodities at special freight rates and shipping out the farmers' meat and berries at a profit. He uses the telegraph to offer the watches to other station agents at $14 each C.O.D. subject to examination. The other agents are able to undersell local jewelers, Sears makes $5,000 in 6 months, and he quits his railroad company job to go into business at Minneapolis (see 1887).
A model Bloomingdale's department store opens October 5 on New York's Third Avenue at 59th Street near a station of the Third Avenue El that opened 8 years ago (see 1872). Bloomingdale brothers Lyman, Joseph, and Gustave have built up a thriving enterprise, specializing in whalebone for corsets, yard goods, ladies' notions, and hoopskirts with help from the El, whose convenient transportation has contributed to an uptown movement of the city's middle class. By the turn of the century Bloomingdale's will cover 80 percent of the block from 59th to 60th Street between Third and Lexington avenues and by 1927 it will occupy the entire block (see Federated, 1929).
Sun Oil Company has its beginnings March 27 at Pittsburgh, where People's Natural Gas Company partners Joseph N. (Newton) Pew, 37, and his partner Edward O. Emerson pay $4,500 for two oil leases at Lima, Ohio. Married since 1874 to a Titusville, Pennsylvania, woman whose family helped develop the Pennsylvania oil fields, Pew has pioneered in pumping gas by mechanical pressure and patented a pump of his own invention to supply cities with heat and light (see 1890).
Philadelphia coal operator Edward J. Berwind dissolves the 9-year-old Berwind, White & Company. Now 38, he organizes a new company under the name Berwind-White Coal Mining, operating bituminous coal mines in partnership with his brothers Charles, John E., and Henry. Edward will serve as president until 1930, becoming president of five additional coal companies and a director of four others, integrating his operations from mine to market, involving himself in railroads, docks, steamships, lumber, banks, and New York's rapid-transit system, which will be a major consumer of Berwind-White coal (see transportation, 1904).
National Carbon Company is founded to produce carbons for electric arc streetlights and similar carbon products (see 1879; Ever Ready battery, 1890).
The first U.S. alternating-current electric generating plant begins commercial production March 20 in Massachusetts.
Thomas A. Edison decides to move his electric-manufacturing facilities to Schenectady, New York, and entrusts the transfer to his personal secretary Samuel Insull, 28. A London-born lay minister's son, Insull left school at age 14, worked as an office boy for an auctioneering firm at $1.25 per week, studied shorthand and bookkeeping at night, became personal secretary and bookkeeper at age 19 to Edison's London agent Colonel George E. Gourard, sailed for New York in January 1881 to work as Edison's secretary, and will run the Schenectady operation from 1888 to 1892, developing innovative organizational and distribution methods as the payroll grows from 200 men to 6,000 (see General Electric, Commonwealth Edison, 1892).
More than half of Britain's 7.36 million tons of merchant shipping is in steam, up from less than 9 percent in 1856.
Newport News shipyard is founded by railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington, who has purchased the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad and acquired 17,000 acres of Virginia waterfront property. He builds drydocks and other facilities that will be used for construction of U.S. warships and merchant vessels.
Southern U.S. railroads adopt the standard-gauge width of four feet 8½ inches in May.
The first train of the Canadian Pacific Railway reaches Winnipeg July 1 (see 1885); by September the company has opened 366 telegraph offices between Quebec and Western Canada.
The U.S. Supreme Court forbids individual states to fix rates on shipments passing beyond their borders, thereby reversing its decisions in the 1877 Peik and Munn cases. Chief Justice Waite dissents, as do two others, but the 6-to-3 ruling handed down October 25 in Wabash, St. Louis & Pacific Railway v. Illinois strikes down an Illinois law prohibiting long- and short-haul clauses in transportation contracts, saying that only the federal government may regulate interstate railway rates; the decision affects 75 percent of the volume on U.S. railroads (see Interstate Commerce Act, 1887).
The first trainload of California oranges leaves Los Angeles for the East (see Columbia Exposition, 1893).
A streetcar strike ties up New York City public transit completely until motormen accept $2 for a 12-hour day with a half hour off for lunch (see transportation, 1895).
Virginia-born financier Thomas Fortune Ryan, 35, organizes New York's Metropolitan Traction Company, the nation's first holding company. Ryan started a brokerage house at age 21, had his own seat on the New York Stock Exchange 2 years later, has been buying up street railway franchises, and calls his company "the great tin box." By 1900 he will have beaten his rival William C. Whitney for control of the Broadway surface line and will control nearly every other line in the city (see Southern Railway, 1894; Royal Typewriter, 1905).
Financier Charles T. Yerkes joins with fellow Philadelphians Peter A. B. Widener and William L. (Lukens) Elkins, 53, in buying up shares in the North Chicago City Railway, acquiring 2,505 shares at $600 each (total: $1,503,000) to gain a bare majority control of the streetcar line (see Yerkes, 1871). They organize North Chicago Street Railroad as a holding company March 18, it issues $1.5 million in bonds, the North Chicago City Railway then leases all its property to the holding company for a period of 999 years, and the Yerkes syndicate thereby obtains for virtually nothing a street railway with annual revenues of about $1.2 million that pays dividends of about $250,000 per year. Now 49, Yerkes has been in Chicago since 1880, building up a complex corporate empire through financial maneuvers in which he aligns himself with corrupt politicians. He will obtain control of Chicago's West Side streetcar line next year, using the same tactic, but the Metropolitan West Side Elevated and Lake Street Elevated railroads will soon present a formidable threat to his monopoly in that part of town (see 1894).
Karl Benz files for a series of patents January 29 on a motorcar powered by an internal-combustion engine and begins to publicize his self-propelled machine (see 1885), but his partners become impatient (see 1887).
Gottlieb Daimler perfects his internal combustion engine of 1882 and obtains a second patent. He mounts the "high-speed" (800 rpm) engine on a bicycle, which is ridden for the first time in November (see motorcar, 1887).
German sewing-machine maker Adam Opel, 48, converts his 24-year-old factory at Rüsselsheim near Frankfurt to the manufacture of bicycles in June at the insistence of his sons Karl, Wilhelm, Heinrich, and Friedrich (Fritz), who are all successful competition cyclists. Opel has been exporting his machines to Russia, India, and the United States (see motorcar, 1899).
Flint, Michigan, entrepreneur William C. (Crapo) Durant, 24, starts a buggy manufacturing company that will soon be the largest in the world. His partner is hardware merchant J. Dallas Dort, who has acquired patent rights to a two-wheeled road cart (see Buick, 1905).
Ohio-born Oberlin College graduate chemistry student Charles M. (Martin) Hall, 22, pioneers commercial aluminum production, using a variation of methods developed without success by Humphry Davy in 1807 to liberate aluminum electrolytically from aluminum oxide (bauxite) (see Sainte-Claire Deville, 1855). Hall manages in February to separate the oxide from the bauxite, adds cryolite (a fluoride of aluminum), and applies electric current whose passage is resisted by the oxide, turning the electrical energy into heat and ultimately breaking down the oxide into its aluminum and oxygen components; he forms Pittsburgh Reduction Company to exploit his discovery (see 1888). French metallurgist Paul (Louis Toussaint) Heroult, 23, discovers a process almost identical to Hall's at almost exactly the same time, but litigation over patent priority will be resolved in Hall's favor in 1893. The two will eventually become close friends and develop the Hall-Heroult process used in the aluminum industry, whose largest single cost will always be electricity (see Bayer process, 1888).
Boston-born chemical engineer Arthur D. (Dehon) Little, 22, pioneers the industrial research firm, going into partnership October 1 with Roger B. Griffin (who will die in 1893 after a laboratory accident) and about $2,500 in capital. Forced by family financial limitations to drop out of MIT 2 years ago, Little went to work as an apprentice at a Rumford, Rhode Island, paper mill, became superintendent 6 weeks later when the mill's Swedish and German scientists quit after a dispute at the first U.S. mill to use the sulfite process, invented a wood-pulp digester that speeded up the mill's work substantially, and will patent the digester and become an authority on paper making (see 1894; energy, 1895).
The first electrolytic magnesium plant opens at Hamelingen, Germany, near Bremen. The plant uses carnalite (a double salt of magnesium chloride and potassium chloride) as a raw material to make magnesium, used initially in flares.
Bethlehem Steel's John Fritz switches from commercial work to ordnance at the suggestion of Navy Secretary William C. Whitney, who has made a fortune in New York City transit lines (see 1863; U.S. Shipbuilding, 1902).
Physicist Clemens A. (Alexander) Winkler, 47, at Freiburg, Saxony, studies a silver thiogermanate and discovers an element that will be called germanium. It was unknown to Dmitri Mendeléev in 1870 when he published the periodic table of elements, but he suspected its existence and assigned it an atomic weight of 72.6. A metallurgist's son, Winkler has been a professor at the Freiburg School of Mines since 1873 and has invented the three-way stopcock that will become a standard piece of laboratory equipment; he has worked night and day for months to analyze a sample of the newly found mineral, and he finally detects the presence of the element February 6.
A British government commission studies last year's treatment of rabies by Louis Pasteur and corroborates its results. Physiologist Victor Horsley has served as the commission's secretary and leads a campaign to eradicate rabies from the British Isles.
Paris neurologist Pierre Marie, 32, publishes the first description of agromegaly, a condition characterized by the overgrowth of bone tissue, notably in the fingers, toes, nose, and jaws. He traces the disease to a tumor in the pituitary gland located the base of the brain.
Latvian-born German surgeon Ernst (Gustav Benjamin) von Bergmann, 49, introduces steam sterilization of surgical instruments and dressings (see Lister, Semmelweiss, 1865). Bergmann's Surgical Treatment of Brain Disorders (Die Chirurgisch Behandlung der Hirnkrankneiten) will be published in 1888, and he will introduce aseptic methods to surgical practice 3 years later.
Johnson & Johnson introduces the first ready-to-use surgical dressings (see 1885). Having heard an address in 1876 by Joseph Lister, Robert Wood Johnson has developed sterile dressings wrapped in individual packages and suitable for immediate use without risk of contamination. His company has begun operations with 14 employees on the fourth floor of a former wallpaper factory (see 1899).
Bellevue Hospital physiology professor Austin Flint dies at New York March 13 at age 73, having written, "What has been accomplished within the past ten years as regards knowledge of the causes, prevention, and treatment of disease transcends what would have been regarded a quarter of a century ago as the wildest and most impossible speculation"; kaolin-process false teeth inventor (and wireless pioneer) Mahlon Loomis dies at Terra Alta, West Virginia, October 13 at age 60.
Buganda's kabaka (ruler) Mwanga continues his persecution of Christians (see 1885).
Bohemian-born poet Naphtali Herz Imber, 30, writes lyrics to "Hatikva" (or "Ha-Tiqva") and a Jewish farmer sets them to the melody of a Moldavian-Romanian folk song that Bedrich Smetana adapted in 1879 for his orchestral suite "The Moldau." Imber has come to Palestine as private secretary to the British journalist, poet and Christian Zionist Laurence Oliphant. He will move to England after Oliphant's death in 1888 and relocate to New York 4 years later. His words will become the Zionist anthem, and Jews throughout the world will sing it (see Herzl, 1894).
Former University of Massachusetts (still Massachusetts State Agricultural College) president William Smith Clark dies at Amherst, Massachusetts, March 9 at age 59, having helped to establish what will become Hokkaido University at Sapporo.
Massachusetts-born inventor Charles S. (Sumner) Tainter, 32, and Chichester A. Bell patent improvements to the phonograph that Thomas Edison invented in 1877; working with C. A. Bell's cousin Alexander Graham Bell at the Volta Laboratory in Washington, D.C., they have devised a wax-coated cardboard cylinder and a flexible recording stylus that work far better than the tinfoil surface and rigid stylus used by Edison (see 1887).
Postal Telegraph & Cable Corp. breaks Western Union's telegraph monopoly (see 1881; 1883). Commercial Cable's J. W. Mackay starts the company that will be headed by his son Clarence Hungerford Mackay beginning in 1902 (see 1928).
The 22-year-old Chicago printing firm R. R. Donnelley & Sons publishes its first telephone directory May 15 for the Chicago Directory Company, which has teamed up with the Chicago Telephone Company. Donnelley began publishing classified business directories in 1873. Tt has signed a contract to publish a directory three times per year for the company; 21-year-old founder's son Reuben H. Donnelley heads the directory operation, and it marks the start of classified telephone directory advertising as a medium that will become known as the Yellow Pages.
Rotary press inventor Richard M. Hoe dies while vacationing at Florence, Italy, June 7 at age 73.
The New York Tribune installs linotype machines, becoming the first newspaper to do so (see Merganthaler, 1884; Fotosetter, 1949).
Nonfiction: Capital (Das Kapital) by Karl Marx is published in English (see 1867); Renaissance in Italy (seventh of seven volumes) by English cultural historian John Addington Symonds, 45, who developed tuberculosis symptoms while a fellow at Oxford, went abroad for his health, settled at Davos Platz, Switzerland, and published the first volume of his work in 1875.
The Berne Convention (International Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works) is adopted by an international conference convened at the Swiss city to stop pirating of works, especially by American publishers and theatrical producers who have been profiting from (mostly) British and other European books, plays, and musical works without remuneration to their creators. The agreement will be modified at Berlin in 1908, at Rome in 1928, at Brussels in 1948, at Stockholm in 1967, and at Paris in 1971 (see U.S. law, 1909; Universal Copyright Convention, 1952).
Historian Leopold von Ranke dies at Berlin May 23 at age 90, having written widely about Florence, Rome, Serbia, and Venice, as well as on French and German history; his leading disciple, Georg Waitz, dies at Berlin May 24 at age 72; bibliographer John Russell Bartlett dies at his native Providence, Rhode Island, May 28 at age 80.
Fiction: The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy begins with a shocking episode wherein a man attends a country fair with his wife and daughter, orders frumenty (a "mixture of corn in the grain, flour, milk, raisins, currants and what-not" composing an "antiquated slop") for his family, arranges to have his own portion heavily laced with rum, and, having over-imbibed, auctions off his wife; The Princess Casamassima and The Bostonians by Henry James; Indian Summer by William Dean Howells, whose new novel makes him the acknowledged leader of the U.S. "realist" school; The Deluge (Potop) by Henryk Sienkiewicz; An Iceland Fisherman (Pécheur d'Islande) by French naval officer-novelist Pierre Loti (Louis Marie Julien Viaud), 36; A Drama in Muslin by George Moore; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, who has written the pioneer science-fiction novel in 3 days and 3 nights and rewritten it in another 3; Kidnapped by Stevenson, who is ill with tuberculosis; A White Heron and Other Stories by Sarah Orne Jewett; The Romance of Two Worlds by English novelist Marie Corelli (Mary Mackay), 31, whose sentimental, self-righteous works will be the favorite reading of Queen Victoria and Italy's Queen Margherita; "The Old Detective's Pupil" by New York writer John Russell Coryell, 38, whose Nick Carter story in Street & Smith's New York Weekly begins a series that will be revived in 1891 when S&S assigns Frederick Van Rensselaer Day to write a weekly Nick Carter Detective Library story (see 1858).
Author-adventurer-playwright Edward Z. C. "Ned Buntline" Judson dies at Stamford, New York, July 16 at age 63.
Poetry: Les Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud; Locksley Hall Sixty Years After by Alfred Lord Tennyson, now 57.
Poet Emily (Elizabeth) Dickinson dies at her native Amherst, Massachusetts, May 15 at age 55, having published little of her work (see 1890).
Juvenile: Little Lord Fauntleroy by Frances Hodgson Burnett, now 37, whose story of an American boy who inherits a vast estate in England is based on an actual event; Jo's Boys by Louisa May Alcott; Pepper and Salt; or, Seasoning for Young Folk by Howard Pyle.
Painting: the eighth and final show of French Impressionism opens at the Maison Dorée restaurant near the Paris Opéra and includes the canvases Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, The Asylum and the Lighthouse, Honfleur, and The Bridge at Courbevoie by "neoimpressionist" Georges Seurat, whose work is ridiculed by the critics. Seurat has developed a "pointillism" technique of applying paint in thousands of tiny spots rather than by brush strokes.
Other paintings: Bubbles by Sir John Everett Millais, who was made a baronet last year; Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose by John Singer Sargent; Girl Arranging Her Hair and Child in a Straw Hat by Mary Cassatt; Carnaval du Soir by French "primitive" painter Henri Rousseau, 42; Undertow and Eight Bells by Winslow Homer; Boston Common at Twilight by Childe Hassam; A Showery Day and Autumn on Lake George by Jasper Francis Cropsey; Moonlight by New York-born abstractionist R. A. (Ralph Albert) Blakelock, 38. Illustrator Randolph Caldecott dies at St. Augustine, Florida, February 12 at age 39 (see Juvenile literature [Caldecott Medal], 1938); painter Asher Durand dies at his native Jefferson Village, New Jersey, September 17 at age 90.
Yorkshire-born art dealer Joseph Duveen, 17, joins his father's 9-year-old London art business; he will soon be buying and selling art on a massive scale, make his headquarters at New York, find innovative ways to sell old masters to U.S. millionaires, and by 1914 have a virtual monopoly on sales of such works in both Britain and America.
Sculpture: The Kiss (Le Baiser) by French sculptor Auguste Rodin, 45, whose sensuous white marble work represents the 13th century Italian lovers Paolo Malatesta and Francesca da Rimini, whose story was told by Dante Alighieri (Francesca's husband Giovanni Malatesta murdered her because she was in love with his brother Paolo).
A process for halftone engraving developed by Litchfield, Connecticut-born inventor Frederick E. (Eugene) Ives, 30, uses small raised dots of varying sizes. Ives pioneered color photography 5 years ago by making the first trichromatic halftone process printing plates. He will also invent a process for gravure printing based on minute pits etched into a metal plate, and although rotogravure will replace his photogravure, the Ives halftone process will endure in photoengraving (see 1880; Tribune, 1897).
Theater: Beyond Human Power (Part I) by Bjornstjerne Bjornson 1/3 at Stockholm's New Theater (Nya Teatret).
Playwright Aleksandr Ostrovsky dies at Shchelykovo June 14 (June 1 Old Style) at age 63, having created a Russian national repertoire almost single-handedly.
Theater managers B. F. Keith and Edward F. Albee found the Keith-Albee Vaudeville Circuit (see 1885; Orpheum Circuit, 1897).
Composer Amilcare Ponchielli dies at Milan January 16 at age 51, having written 10 operas.
Stage musical: Dorothy 9/25 at London's Gaiety Theatre, with music by English organist and composer Alfred Cellier, 41. London-born soprano Marie Tempest (originally Marie Susan Etherington), 22, will take over the lead role next year and make the show a record-breaking success.
First performances: Manfred Symphony by Petr Ilich Tchaikovsky 2/23 at Moscow; Symphonic Variations for Piano and Orchestra by César Franck 5/1 at the Salle Playel, Paris; Symphony No. 3 in C minor by Camille Saint-Saëns 5/19 at London, with the composer conducting the London Philharmonic which has commissioned the work; "A Night on the Bald Mountain" by the late Modest Mussorgsky 10/27 at St. Petersburg; Ophelia by Edward MacDowell 11/4 at New York's Chickering Hall.
Composer Franz Liszt dies at Bayreuth July 31 at age 74.
William Renshaw wins in men's singles at Wimbledon, Blanche Bingley, 22, in women's singles; Richard Sears wins at Newport.
The U.S. yacht Mayflower retains the America's Cup by defeating the British challenger Galatea 2 to 0.
Gloucestershire-born jockey Frederick Archer rides the undefeated Ormonde to Britain's Triple Crown victory, winning the Two Thousand Guineas Stakes at Newmarket after taking the Derby and St. Leger Stakes, but he commits suicide at Newmarket November 8 at age 29. National champion every year since 1874, winning more than a third of all his races, he won a record 246 races last year, and some of the records he set in his 17-year career will stand for more than 50 years.
"Today is groundhog day," proclaims a Punxsutawney Pa., newspaper February 2, whose editor says that "up to the time of going to press the beast has not seen its shadow." European tradition has it that if the woodchuck sees his shadow on Candlemas Day it means there will be 6 more weeks of bad weather and the animal will return to its hole. Observations of groundhog day will continue into the 21st century, but the "forecast" will prove less than 40 percent correct.
The first world chess title goes to Prague-born New York chess master Wilhelm Steinitz, 49, who defeats German-born physician J. H. Zukertort in late March. Having lost hour of the first five games at New York in January, the arrogant Steinitz prevails at St. Louis and New Orleans, winds up winning 10 games to five, and will hold the title until 1894.
President Grover Cleveland is married in the Blue Room of the White House June 2 to his ward, Frances (originally Frank) Folsom, 21, a week after her return from a trip to Europe with her mother, Emma. Still a bachelor at age 49, Cleveland has for 25 years been a friend of the bride's mother, whose investments he has managed since she lost her husband, and gossip had it that he would marry her, not her daughter. On a presidential visit to New York to review the annual Decoration Day parade, every marching band has struck up the song, "He's Going to Marry Yum-Yum," from Gilbert and Sullivan's latest opera, The Mikado.
New Yorker Steve Brodie is found alive in the water beneath the 3-year-old Great East River (Brooklyn) Bridge July 23 and claims to have jumped. Nobody has witnessed it, and Brodie's claim is suspect since previous jumpers have fallen to their deaths, but any suicide leap—especially one from a bridge—will in many circles be called hereafter a "brodie."
The tuxedo dinner jacket worn by tobacco heir Griswold Lorillard October 10 at the Autumn Ball of the Tuxedo Park Country Club at Tuxedo, New York, is a short black coat with satin lapels modeled on the English smoking jacket. It will replace the tailcoat worn until now at evening social affairs.
English grocer's son William Hasketh Lever, 35, and his brother James introduce Sunlight Soap, manufactured from vegetable oils instead of tallow. They leased a financially failing soap factory 2 years ago to begin Lever Brothers, an enterprise that will grow to rival Procter & Gamble (see 1837) as a manufacturer and marketer not only of soap but also of food products. The Lever brothers have had the free-lathering yellow soap made for them but will soon produce it themselves, and it will quickly grow to dominate the British market (see Lifebuoy, 1897).
Avon Products has its beginnings in the California Perfume Company founded by Brooklyn, New York, door-to-door book salesman David H. McConnell, 28, whose firm will become the world's largest cosmetic company. McConnell has been gaining admission to his customers' parlors by offering free vials of perfume, formulated in five fragrances—Violet, White Rose, Heliotrope, Lily-of-the-Valley, and Hyacinth. He has found more response to the perfume than to Pilgrim's Progress or The American Book of Home Nursing, so he abandons book selling and concentrates on selling perfume, hiring Mrs. P. F. E. Albee of Winchester, New Hampshire, who has sold books for him, to develop a door-to-door selling strategy. Believing that women are more likely to trust other women, she creates an all-female sales force and by 1897 will have 12 women selling 18 fragrances (see 1898).
A dishwasher patented in December by Shelbyville, Illinois, politician's widow Josephine Cochrane (née Garis) is crude but effective (it can wash up to 20 dozen dishes in 2 minutes). Tired of having her servants break her good china after formal dinner parties, Cochrane has reputedly said, "If nobody else is going to invent a dishwashing machine, I'll do it myself"; she has crafted individual wire compartments for plates, saucers, and cups, fastened them around the circumference of a wheel resting in a large copper boiler, and used a motor to turn the wheel while hot. Turning a handle squirts soapy water that gushes up from the bottom of the boiler, bounces off the top, and rains down on the china, which is then rinsed with boiling water poured from a tea kettle and dried in the open air. Hotels and restaurants will be Cochrane's best customers, since relatively few private houses have the quantities of hot water her machine requires (see 1913).
The William J. Burns International Detective Agency has its beginnings at Columbus, Ohio, following revelations of fraud. A citizens "Committee of 100" that includes local tailor Michael Burns puts up money to hire a private investigator. The committee selects Michael's son William, 22, despite his father's disapproval. Young Burns finds the safecracker-forger (who has been spirited out of the local penitentiary to perpetrate the fraud), obtains confessions, and rounds up accomplices. Burns will work for the U.S. Secret Service for 14 years beginning at $3 per day in 1891, leave the Secret Service in 1905 to investigate fraud in San Francisco, start the Burns and Sheridan Detective Agency in 1909, and soon thereafter buy out his partner to operate under his own name (see commerce [Los Angeles Times bombing], 1910).
Chicago's Rookery building is completed in South LaSalle Street to plans by Burnham and Root. Architects Daniel Hudson Burnham, 39, and John Wellborn Root, 36, started their firm in 1873, their 11-story Rookery has a graceful semiprivate square surrounded by shops and offices, and their pioneering design employs cast-iron columns, wrought-iron spandrel beams, and steel beams to support party walls and interior floors (see 1891).
Architect Henry Hobson Richardson dies of Bright's disease at Boston April 27 at age 47 after years of weakening health. Men who have worked in his office include Charles F. McKim, John Wellborn Root, Louis H. Sullivan, and Stanford White.
Singapore's Raffles Hotel opens November 18 at the corner of Brasbasah Road and Beach Road (see politics [Raffles], 1826). The hotel began a few years ago as a "tiffen" house—a modest place made over from a residence that had belonged to a Captain Dare and his wife—for British colonials to have lunch and tea beneath ceiling fans, but an extension will be built in 1896 to meet the demands of the growing port city.
The Canadian government sets aside 10 square miles at the foot of Mount Stephen in southeastern British Columbia as a dominion park (see 1885; Banff Springs hotel, 1888). A much larger area of Rocky Mountain wilderness will be declared a national park in 1930, and Yoho National Park will embrace 507 square miles adjacent to Banff and Kootenay national parks.
Lumber baron and real estate magnate Martin A. Ryerson dies at Chicago September 6 at age 69, having amassed an enormous fortune.
A hot dry summer begins a decade of intermittent drought on the Great Plains after 8 years of extraordinary rainfall that has encouraged the growth of ranching. Snow begins falling November 13 and continues for a month; cattle grown scrawny for lack of grass on overgrazed lands cannot deal with the heavy snow, and close to 60 percent of range livestock die in the blizzards. Dakota Territory rancher Theodore Roosevelt sustains heavy losses, gives up, and returns to New York to reenter politics (see 1887; Sagamore Hill, 1885).
Illinois-born buffalo hunter Charles Jesse Jones, 42, crosses the plains from Kansas to Texas, sees thousands of head of cattle lying dead from the blizzard, but comes upon some of the few remaining buffalo in the area, finds "every animal . . . as well and wiry as a fox," and determines to capture bison calves and cross-breed them with cattle. By the end of the century he will have established a new breed, the cattalo.
U.S. Department of Agriculture scientists Theobald Smith and Daniel E. Salmon inject test pigeons with a hog cholera vaccine made from heated and killed whole cells (see consumer protection, 1885). Unlike the hog cholera of swine plague disease, caused by a virus, this hog cholera is caused by a bacterium, and the vaccine developed by Smith and Salmon immunizes the pigeons, as demonstrated when the birds are subsequently injected with live microbial culture (their study appears in the Proceedings of the Biological Society).
Manitoba farmer Angus MacKay, 45, demonstrates the Canadian prairie's ability to produce good wheat crops; he plants Red Fife wheat on a field that he left fallow last year and reaps 35 bushels of hard wheat per acre.
Plow and cultivator manufacturer John Deere dies at Moline, Illinois, May 17 at age 81 (see tractor, 1892).
Dutch researcher Christiaan Eijkmann, 28, is sent to Java to study beriberi, which has become a major problem in the East Indies (see 1896; Takaki, 1884).
French chemist Henri Moissan, 34, isolates fluorine, a naturally occurring nonmetallic element that will prove valuable in preventing tooth decay (see Motley, 1916).
Congress passes an Oleomargarine Act to tax and regulate the manufacture and sale of margarine (see 1881; 1890).
H. J. Heinz of Pittsburgh calls on London's 179-year-old Fortnum and Mason's while on holiday in England and receives orders for all the products he takes out of his Gladstone bag (see 1880; 1888).
New York grocery wholesaler Joseph Seeman, 26, and his brother Sigel pool their savings of $4,500, borrow another $4,000 from an older brother, buy out their uncle David and his partner, David Lewi, and adopt White Rose as their brand name (see White Rose Ceylon Tea, 1901).
Salada Tea has its beginnings in the Golden Tea-Pot Blend of the Salada Ceylon Tea Company introduced by Canadian wholesale grocery salesman Peter C. Larkin, who is convinced that Ceylon teas will supplant China teas in America as they have in England (China still supplies most of the world's market for tea, including blacks and oolongs as well as greens, and will continue to do so until the 1890s, when mechanized equipment for firing and packing, standardized grading, trade names, and worldwide advertising will give India and Ceylon teas dominance).
Coca-Cola goes on sale May 8 at Jacob's Pharmacy in Atlanta. Local pharmacist John S. (Stith) Pemberton, 54, has formulated a caramel-colored headache and hangover syrup in his backyard, using ingredients that include trace amounts of dried leaves from the South American coca shrub from which cocaine is made and an extract of kola nuts from Africa plus a mélange of fruit and spice flavorings that may include orange, lemon, cinnamon, and other flavors (the "7X" formula will remain a secret for well over a century). A new law has prohibited sale of beverage alcohol at pharmacies; a Confederate Army veteran who became addicted to cocaine and morphine after being wounded in the war, Pemberton has had to stop selling his profitable "Coca Wine" because of its alcohol content; his "Globe of Flower Cough Syrup," "Triplex Liver Pills," and other concoctions have had no success, but he has been advertising his bitter-tasting Coca-Cola "esteemed Brain Tonic and Intellectual Beverage" since March 29 and persuaded fountain man Willis E. Venable at Atlanta's largest drugstore to sell it on a trial basis. Venable adds carbonated water. Pemberton's partner Frank M. Robinson has named the product and written the name Coca-Cola in a flowing script, and the first advertisement appears May 29 in the Atlanta Journal: "Coca-Cola. Delicious! Refreshing! Exhilarating! Invigorating! The New and Regular Soda Fountain Drink, containing the properties of the wonderful Coca plant and the famous Cola nuts." Pemberton falls ill in June, sales plummet, and although Robinson keeps the business alive only 25 gallons of syrup have been sold at $1 per gallon by year's end, and $73.96 has been spent on advertising (see 1888).
Dr. Pepper is introduced as "The King of Beverages, Free from Caffeine" by Waco, Texas, chemist Robert S. Lazenby, who has experimented with a soft drink formula developed by Charles Alderton, a fountain man at the town's Old Corner Drug Store. The drink contains an artificial black-cherry flavor and the fountain man has called it Dr. Pepper's Phos-Ferrates. (By another account, the new soda pop is the creation of Wade Morrison, who owns the Waco pharmacy. Morrison will market the drink in partnership with Lazenby, having allegedly used a combination of 23 ingredients—including mountain herbs, roots, and seltzer—a recipe he learned as an assistant to former Confederate Army surgeon Charles T. Pepper at the Rural Retreat, Virginia, pharmacy opened by Pepper in 1872. He has come to Texas after being fired from his Virginia job for courting Pepper's daughter.) (see 1904).
Hires Rootbeer is introduced in bottles, but advertising emphasizes the advantages of brewing the drink at home from Hires extract (see 1876). The soft drink Moxie bottled since 1884 at Lowell, Massachusetts, far outsells its competitors in New England despite its bitter taste.
Bovril is introduced at London with invitations to free tastings at the Colonial and Continental Exhibition in South Kensington (see 1874). John Lawson Johnston sold out his Montreal business in 1884 following a disastrous fire and has resumed production at 10 Trinity Square, London (see 1887).
An automatic bottle filler and capper is patented for use with milk bottles (see bottled milk, 1885; 1897).
Fauchon opens on the Place de la Madeleine in Paris as an épicerie (grocery store) extraordinaire. Located on the northeast corner of the square, it will grow to occupy three adjoining houses and to have outlets in more than 500 cities, including Hong Kong, selling fruits, vegetables, canned goods, conserves, confections, wines and spirits, and more pâté de fois gras at retail than any competitor.
The Statue of Liberty dedicated October 28 on Bedloe's Island in New York Harbor has been designed by French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, 52, and presented by the people of France. Joseph Pulitzer's New York World has raised $100,000 for a pedestal that Congress refused to fund for the statue "Liberté Eclairant le Monde," which stands more than 151 feet tall and was originally intended for installation at Port Said, Egypt. No mention of immigration is made in the dedication speeches, but the pedestal will be inscribed in 1903 with words written in 1883 by local poet-philanthropist Emma Lazarus, now 37: "Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free,/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore./ Send these, the homeless, tempest tossed, to me:/ I lift my lamp beside the golden door."
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