1891 1892 1893 1894 1895 1896 1897 1898 1899 1900
Britain's fourth Gladstone ministry ends March 5 after Prime Minister Gladstone has shattered the Liberal Party with his fight for Irish home rule. The Liberals retain power with Archibald Philip Primrose, 46, 5th earl of Roseberry, as prime minister. A celebrated orator and wit, he married Hannah Rothschild, the only daughter of banker Baron Amschel de Rothschild, in 1878, and thus allied himself with the richest heiress in Britain, but Roseberry's cabinet is divided. He meets with antagonism in the House of Lords, and his ministry will achieve little.
Former Hungarian president Lajos Kossuth dies at Turin March 20 at age 91; his son Ferenc, 53, returns from exile to lead the Independence Party in the Parliament at Budapest.
Bulgaria's Ferdinand I forces his prime minister Stefan N. Stambolov to resign May 31 after a despotic 6½-year regime in which Stambolov has used terrorist tactics to suppress opposition (see 1887).
French president Marie François Sadi Carnot dies at Lyons June 24 at age 57 after being stabbed by Italian anarchist assassin Santo Caserio. He is succeeded by Jean Casimir-Perier, who will serve only 6 months.
The pamphlet "Caligula" by pacifist German journalist-historian Ludwig Quidde, 36, satirizes Kaiser Wilhelm II. Quidde has been editor since 1889 of the Deutsche Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, his publication is tremendously popular, but a court convicts him of lèse-majesté and gives him a 3-month prison term.
Russia's Aleksandr III dies of nephritis at his Lavadia Palace in the Crimea November 1 at age 49 after a 13-year reign. His son, 24, will reign until 1917 as Nicholas II, the last Romanov monarch (he marries Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstad, 22, at St. Petersburg November 26).
The Treaty of Marrakech January 29 ends a 5½-month war between Morocco and Spain. Spanish minister of war Arsenio Martínez Campos has negotiated the peace settlement.
The Congo Treaty signed May 12 with the king of the Belgians Leopold II gives Britain a lease on a wide corridor between Lake Tanganyika and Lake Albert Edward in return for a lifetime lease to Leopold of vast territories west of the Upper Nile and north of the Congo-Nile watershed. German protests force the British to abandon their corridor and give up the possibility of a Cape Town-to-Cairo railroad, and French threats force Leopold to make an agreement August 14, giving up his claim to the northern part of his lease.
Dahomey becomes a French colony June 22 following a March 15 Franco-German agreement on the boundary between the French Congo and the Cameroons that have been a German protectorate since 1885 (see 1893). French imperialists have hopes of taking over the southern part of the former Egyptian Sudan and forcing the British to evacuate Egypt by threatening to divert the course of the Nile, but Irish-born Egyptian army sirdar (commander in chief) Horatio Herbert Kitchener, 44, works energetically to build an effective fighting force, and the Royal Niger Company engages British colonial administrator F. D. Lugard to race the French for treaty rights to explore the Middle Niger; Lugard will obtain the rights despite being wounded in the head by a poisoned arrow (see 1892; 1895; Kitchener, 1896).
The Republic of Hawaii is proclaimed July 4 with Judge Sanford Ballard Dole, 50, as president (see 1893). The republic gains U.S. recognition August 7, and the royalist revolt that begins December 8 is quickly suppressed (see 1898).
Adherents to a 34-year-old Korean religious-political movement occupy the southwestern city of Chonju in May, waving banners that decry corruption and foreign influence; China and Japan both send troops, the occupation of Chonju has ended by the time they arrive, but neither the Chinese nor Japanese withdraw. Japanese naval forces sink the British ship Kowshing carrying Chinese troops in Kanghwa Bay July 25 and defeat a Chinese fleet. The Korean regent declares war on China July 27, China and Japan declare war on each other August 1, and the Japanese win easy victories in the ensuing months under the direction of General Aritomo Yamagata, 56 (see 1876). Berlin and Washington reject a British invitation to Germany, France, Russia, and the United States to join in a united move to intervene (see 1895).
Former British secretary of state for war and the colonies Henry George Grey, 3rd earl Grey, dies at his native Howick, Northumberland, October 9 at age 91, having tried in the 1840s and early 1850s to give the colonies home rule to whatever extent possible.
The Dutch East Indies rebel against the government of Queen Wilhelmina, now 14, but the revolt is suppressed. Another uprising in 1896 will be put down only with great difficulty (see 1922).
Spanish minister for the colonies Antonio Maura, 41, resigns following rejection by the cortes of reforms that would have granted autonomy to Cuba (see 1879). Spain cancels a trade pact between Cuba and the United States (see 1895).
Colombia's dictatorial president Rafael Nuñez dies at his El Cabrero plantation outside Bogotá September 12 at age 68, having served as president three times and dominated the nation's government since 1880.
Britain's first governor general of the Dominion of Canada Sir Charles Stanley, 4th Viscount Monck (of Ballytrammon), dies at Enniskerry, County Wicklow, November 29 at age 75. Queen Victoria swears Canada's Prime Minister Sir John Thompson into the privy council at Windsor Castle December 12, whereupon he drops dead at age 50 after just 2 years in office. He is succeeded as prime minister by English-born fellow Conservative MacKenzie Bowell, 70, a newspaper publisher who has served as a cabinet minister in three governments and will hold office until 1896.
Former Confederate Army general Jubal A. Early dies at Lynchburg, Virginia, March 2 at age 77, still unreconciled to the defeat of the Confederacy; former Union general Nathaniel P. Banks dies at his native Waltham, Massachusetts, September 1 at age 78.
Supporters of South Carolina's Populist governor Benjamin R. Tillman prepare a banner at Abbeville hailing him as the "Champion of White Men's Rule and Woman's Virtue" (see Hamburg riot, 1876). Tillman has equalized tax rates, regulated railroads, supported upcountry farmers against bankers and lawyers, and increased educational funding, but he has also disenfranchised the state's blacks, favored repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment, and—most recently—issued a statement opposing lynching but declaring that he would "willingly lead a mob in lynching a Negro who had committed an assault against a white woman." Now 47, Tillman threatens to stick a pitchfork in "that bag of beef" Grover Cleveland, and "Pitchfork Ben" wins election to the U.S. Senate, where he will embarrass his fellow senators for 24 years with his outspokenly racist views.
The Local Government Act passed by Parliament March 1 increases the rights of British women to vote, but they still have no voice in national elections (see WSPU, 1903).
Reformer Amelia Jenks Bloomer dies at Council Bluffs, Iowa, December 30 at age 76.
The Provident Loan Society of New York is founded by the Charity Organization in response to a plea from local philanthropist Alfred Bishop Mason, who has written, "There is no merchant in this community who would not be driven into bankrupcy if his unsecured bills payable bore the rate of interest which the poor have to pay on the most undoubted security. Borrowing is often the greatest necessity; let the Anglo-Saxons learn from the Latins and build up in New York a Mont-de-Piété [municipal pawnshop] where it shall not be shame and ruin to borrow, and where self-respect need not make part of every pledge." Cornelius Vanderbilt III and 30 other philanthropists have responded to form the Loan Society "for the purpose of aiding such persons as said Society shall deem in need of pecuniary assistance, by loans of money at interest, upon the pledge or mortgage of personal property." Society employees will become expert gem appraisers.
African explorer Verney Lovett Cameron dies near Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, March 27 at age 49.
The U.S. Treasury sells $50 million in bonds January 17 to replenish its gold reserves (see 1893). It sells a second $50 million issue November 13.
The National Association of Manufacturers has its beginnings in a meeting convened at Cincinnati's Oddfellows Hall January 22 to 25. Governor William McKinley addresses the delegates, and they agree to extend foreign trade through reciprocal relations with other governments and to seek retention of home markets, rehabilitation of the U.S. merchant marine, construction of a canal across Central America, and improvement and extension of U.S. waterways (see 1916).
The Union for Industrial Progress is founded at Boston by Women's Education and Industrial Union director Mary Kimball Kehew, 34, and Mary Kenney, 30, who marries John O'Sullivan, labor editor of the Boston Globe. Women bustle makers at Boston work from 8:30 in the morning until 6 at night to earn 25¢ per dozen—a day's output. Men do much better.
Strikes cripple U.S. railroads as economic recession continues. President Cleveland takes the position that the government has authority only to keep order, thus effectively supporting the railroad operators and their strikebreakers (see Roosevelt, 1902). Guards kill 11 strikers in a riot at Connelsville, Pennsylvania, April 5.
Coxey's Army arrives at Washington, D.C., April 30 after a 36-day march of unemployed workers from Massillon, Ohio, led by sandstone quarry operator Jacob S. (Sechler) Coxey, 40 (see Kelly's Industrial Army, 1893). Joined by members of the Kelly group from San Francisco, the 400 marchers demand that public works be started to provide employment and that $50 million in paper money be issued, but Coxey is arrested for walking on the grass and forced to leave the Capitol grounds (see 1932).
Pullman Palace Car workers strike May 1 to protest wage cuts without corresponding reduction of rents, and a general strike of western railroads begins June 26 as Eugene V. Debs forbids his railway workers to operate trains containing Pullman cars (see 1893). Chicago strikers set fire July 5 to structures used for last year's Columbian Exposition in Jackson Park, reducing seven to ashes. The strike of some 50,000 workers stops trains and halts mail service, and troops enter Chicago in July to enforce federal laws. Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld protests that President Cleveland has violated states' rights in sending in the troops; he claims the press exaggerated the size of Chicago's disorders; and the strike ends 2 weeks later (July 10) after 14,000 federal and state troops have joined with police in its suppression. The troops are withdrawn, but they have killed 34 American Railway Union members in the Chicago area. A federal grand jury indicts Debs for violating injunctions that barred him from interfering with the mails and with interstate commerce, and his union will fall apart.
Congress votes June 28 to make Labor Day a legal holiday, setting aside the first Monday in every September to honor the contribution of labor (see 1882). Some 750,000 U.S. workers strike during the year for higher wages and shorter hours.
The Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act that becomes law August 27 without President Cleveland's signature reduces U.S. tariff duties by roughly 20 percent, but lobbyists keep most of the 1890 McKinley Act's protective features intact (see Dingley Act, 1897).
The Wilson-Gorman Act includes an income tax on incomes above $4,000 per year (see 1881). New York lawyer Joseph H. Choate, 62, calls the 2 percent tax "communistic, socialistic" (see 1895).
A September 4 strike against New York sweatshops brings out some 12,000 tailors.
Pioneer woman lawyer Myra Bradwell dies at Chicago February 14 at age 63; legal reformer David Dudley Field at New York April 13 at age 89. The New York State Constitution is amended to contain a civil-service reform clause that removes some of the patronage that has corrupted politics (see politics [Pendleton Act], 1883); silver king James G. "Bonanza Jim" Fair dies at San Francisco December 29 at age 63, having made a fortune of $40 million (see real estate [Fairmont Hotel], 1907).
Japanese factories (most of them textile mills) employ 308,000 workers, of whom 240,000 are women (see 1886; 1904).
Former Hudson Bay Company fur trader (and Yukon explorer) Robert Campbell dies at his Merchiston Ranch in Manitoba May 9 at age 86.
England's Marks & Spencer retail store chain has its beginnings in the Penny Bazaar ("Don't ask the price, it's a penny") opened at Cheetham Hill, Manchester, by Polish-born merchant Michael Marks, 31, in partnership with Thomas Spencer, 42, whose employer loaned Marks £5 in 1884 when the Pole arrived at Leeds penniless, illiterate, and unable to speak English. Marks started as an itinerant peddler; opened a stall in Kirkgate Market, Leeds; has since opened stalls in six other Lancashire street markets; and has innovated the practice of arranging wares according to price. By 1900 there will be a dozen Penny Bazaar stores (three of them in London), and by 1915 there will be 140 such establishments selling haberdashery, earthenware, hardware, household goods, stationery, and toys at the fixed price of a penny per item (see 1922).
Harrods at London inaugurates 7 o'clock closing hours (4 o'clock Thursdays) as its new manager Richard Burlidge, 47, ends the penny-halfpenny fines for late employees that was instituted in 1883, installs display windows, and arrives himself by 7 each morning to make "Harrods Serve the World" more than a slogan for the Knightsbridge store, whose cable address is "Everything." Harrods begins to acquire land for a large new store that will open in 1939.
Electrical engineer Pavel N. Yablochkov dies in poverty at Saratov, Russia, March 19 (March 31 Old Style) at age 46, having seen incandescent bulbs make his 1876 arc-lamps obsolete.
Corsicana, Texas, has a petroleum boom after a well being bored for water suddenly begins spouting oil. By 1898 nearly every Corsicanian will have an oil well in his backyard, and the field will be producing 500,000 barrels per year (see Spindletop, 1901).
The new Southern Railway System links the Richmond and Danville and the East Tennessee, Virginia, and Georgia systems into a company that will soon embrace the South Carolina and Georgia, Cincinnati Southern, Alabama Great Southern, New Orleans and Northeastern, Georgia Southern and Florida, and Northern Alabama. Organized by New York financier and traction magnate Thomas Fortune Ryan, the system will operate 8,000 miles of road extending from the Potomac and Ohio Rivers to the Gulf and from the Atlantic to the Mississippi (see 1886).
The Sunset Limited begins service on the Southern Pacific between New Orleans and San Francisco. The once-a-week express averages 33 miles per hour to make the run in 75 hours and will run daily beginning in 1913 (seeSunset magazine, 1898).
Union Station opens at St. Louis September 1. Architect Theodore C. Link has adapted a design from that of the medieval French walled city of Carcassonne; the $6.5 million structure is twice the size of any other railroad depot in the world.
Boston's North Station opens for the Boston & Maine Railroad (see South Station, 1899).
The first railroad opens across the South American Andes.
Cable cars in U.S. cities haul 400 million passengers (see Hallidie, 1873; Richmond, 1888). The complex cable car systems are vulnerable to breakdown, they require large inputs of energy simply to move their heavy cables, and trolley lines will rapidly supplant them, but the cars will continue to operate on the hills of San Francisco.
A steam-powered flying machine built and piloted by machine-gun inventor Hiram Maxim takes off July 31 from a rail track and covers a distance of 100 feet at a height of two feet before a structural failure forces it to land (see Lillienthal, 1889).
Progress of Flying Machines by Chicago engineer Octave Chanute of 1869 Hannibal Bridge fame is a study of aerodynamics based on some 2,000 glider flights that he has made since 1886 on the dunes along the Indiana shore of Lake Michigan, near Chicago. Now 62, Chanute will construct multiwinged gliders for further experiments (see 1896; Langley, 1896).
English-born Australian inventor-astronomer Lawrence Hargrave, 44, flies the world's first box kite November 12 at Bald Hill near Sydney's Stanwell Beach. Having tested ornithopters from the veranda of his house, he built a rotary engine driven by compressed air in 1889 and realized 3 years later that a curved wing surface provided better lift than a flat wing surface. His box kite comprises four kites linked together with a sling seat, its cellular wing has a curved surface and a thick leading edge, or aerofoil, and although it flies only 16 feet it proves that a flying machine can carry people; Hargrave's reports will appear in publications available to others intent on finding ways for man to fly.
England's 36-mile Manchester Ship Canal opens January 1 to link Manchester with the Mersey estuary at Eastham, above Birkenhead. Begun in 1887, the 35½-mile (57-kilometer) waterway has a minimum depth of 28 feet (8½ meters) and transforms Manchester from a river port to a seaport.
London's Tower Bridge opens to span the Thames. Designed by the late Sir Horace Jones and built by John Barry (later Wolfe-Barry), now 58, the £1.5 million bridge has a 200-foot center span that can be raised to permit passage of vessels; its chain suspension side spans are each 270 feet long.
The Blackwell Tunnel opens under the Thames at London, where it has been built by engineer Weetman Dickinson Pearson, 38, of the 50-year-old firm S. Pearson & Son Ltd. Pearson went to Mexico 5 years ago, helped develop that country's petroleum industry, has barely recovered from "the bends" suffered while working beside his men below the river (he was paralyzed for 2 weeks), will be elected as a Liberal to Parliament next year (he will hold the seat until 1910), and by 1900 will be employing 20,000 men in the construction of railways, docks, harbors, waterworks, and drainage systems in Britain, Ireland, China, and Mexico.
Suez Canal builder (and Panama Canal promoter) Ferdinand de Lesseps dies at La Chenaie, near Guilly (Indre), December 7 at age 89.
Boston industrial chemist Arthur D. Little patents processes for making artificial silk (rayon) but will encounter financial difficulties and sell the rights at auction for $2,500 (see 1902; Cross, Bevan, 1892).
Inventor Margaret E. Knight patents a machine to cut out leather for shoes and sew them (see paper bag, 1870). Now 56, she has invented a dress and skirt shield, a clasp for holding robes, a barbecue spit, and this year obtains patents also for a window frame and a numbering device.
Physicist Heinrich R. Hertz dies of blood poisoning at Bonn January 1 at age 36; physiologist-physicist Hermann L. F. Helmholtz at Berlin September 8 at age 73.
A chemically inert gas that he calls argon (from the Greek word for inactive) is discovered by Scottish chemist William Ramsay, 42, with help from physicist John W. (William) Strutt, 51; they remove from the air various known gases, including nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide and find that an inert gas remains. Ramsay and his colleague Morris W. Travers, now 22, will discover three other inert gases in the air and name them krypton (hidden), neon (new) (see Claude, 1910), and xenon (stranger) (see Langmuir, 1912).
Chemist Wilhelm Ostwald at Leipzig gives the first modern definition of a catalyst and begins research into catalytic reactions (see 1887; 1902).
German botanist Johannes Reinke, 45, finds that lichens consist of fungi and algae living in a symbiotic (mutually beneficial) relationship (see Schwendener, 1869).
Botanist Eduard Strasburger at the University of Bonn shows that spore-bearing generations in non-flowering plants (e.g. ferns, mosses) are diploid (have pairs of chromosomes) while the sexual generation has haploid egg and sperm cells (with only one chromosome of each type; see 1877).
Botanist-physiologist Nathaniel Pringsheim dies at Berlin October 6 at age 70; mathematician Pafnuty Chebyshev at St. Petersburg December 8 at age 73, having said, "To isolate mathematics from the practical demands of the sciences is to invite the sterility of a cow shut away from the bulls."
Shibasaburo Kitasato and A. E. J. Yersin at Berlin discover the bacillus pestis—etiological agent of the Black Death (bubonic plague) (see 1665; 19)OO.
New York physician Hermann M. (Michael) Biggs, 35, introduces Emil von Behring's diphtheria antitoxin into U.S. medical practice. Bacteriologist Anna W. Williams isolates an unusually powerful and prolific strain of the diphtheria bacillus (Corynebacterium diphtheriae) and produces an antitoxin that will bear her name and continue in production for at least a century (see 1891). It will make diphtheria a rare disease in most of the world.
Roxbury, Massachusetts-born New York surgeon Charles McBurney, 49, develops a muscle-splitting incision for appendectomies (see Grant, 1885); he has discovered a tender pressure point important in the diagnosis of appendicitis (it will be called McBurney's point).
Abdominal surgery pioneer Theodor Billroth dies at Abbazia, Austria-Hungary (later Patatija, Croatia) February 6 at age 64.
The first successful U.S. cesarean section delivery is performed at Boston on a woman with a tiny pelvis who has previously lost two infants (see 1882; 1980).
The Japanese Army employs its first female nurses to work in hospitals treating wounds sustained in the nation's successful war with China.
A French court martial convicts Army captain Alfred Dreyfus, 35, of having passed military information to German agents (see 1893). He is sent to Devil's Island off the coast of French Guiana, and although he will later be proved innocent, he is Jewish, and the Dreyfus case fuels the growth of anti-Semitism in France (see 1897).
Viennese journalist Theodore Herzl, 34, covers the Dreyfus trial and hears the Paris mob cry, "Death to the Jews!" He lays the foundations of political Zionism with his pamphlet, "The Jewish State (Der Judenstaat): An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question" (see Oliphant, 1878; first Zionist congress, 1897).
Radcliffe College for Women opens at Cambridge, Massachusetts, after 15 years of opposition by Harvard president Charles William Eliot to the classes given since 1879 by Elizabeth Cary Agassiz. The college is named for Anne Radcliffe, who in the 17th century became the first woman to make a gift to Harvard.
Educator Elizabeth Palmer Peabody dies at Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, January 3 at age 89; scholar-educator Victor Duruy at his native Paris November 25 at age 83; former College of New Jersey president James McCosh at Princeton November 16 at age 83.
English physicist Oliver J. (Joseph) Lodge, 43, pioneers radio telegraphy with a demonstration before the Royal Institute of a coherer that improves on the crude device produced in 1890 by Edouard Branly. Lodge has added a "trembler" that shakes the metallic filings between waves; when connected to a receiving circuit, it detects Morse-code signals transmitted by radio wave, and the signals can be transcribed on paper by an inker (see Marconi, 1895).
Engineer Jean-Emile Baudot in France invents a distributor system for simultaneous (multiplex) transmission of several telegraphic messages on the same circuit or channel (see Baudot, 1874).
Austro-Hungarian-born U.S. physicist Michael (Idversky) Pupin, 36, improves multiplex telegraphy. He arrived at New York as a penniless immigrant in 1874, graduated from Columbia University in 1883, and has studied in Germany under Hermann von Helmholtz.
A new model of the L. C. Smith Premier typewriter introduced in 1889 embodies certain minor improvements and dispenses with the ornate cattails and flowers that decorated the sides of the earlier model. Like the first one, it has 76 keys, but beginning in 1901 the machine will have a total of 84 and will come in different carriage widths. L. C. Smith will for years be the largest producer of typewriters (see 1908; Underwood, 1895).
A. C. W. Harmsworth acquires London's conservative Evening News and reorganizes the paper (seeAnswers, 1888); (seeDaily Mail, 1896).
The Daily Oklahoman begins publication May 5 at Oklahoma City. It will change its name simply to the Oklahoman and continue daily publication into the 21st century.
The Memphis Commercial Appeal publishes under that name for the first time July 1 (see 1878). The Daily Appeal acquired a competitor 4 years ago to become the Appeal-Avalanche and has made another merger (see Scripps, 1936).
New York World Sunday editor Morril Goddard asks Ohio-born cartoonist Richard F. (Felton) Outcault, 31, to submit some drawings. The World has acquired a process for printing colored pictures (see 1893). Outcault has attracted Goddard's attention with his work for the Electrical World and the Street Railway Journal. His drawing "The Origin of a New Species" is published in the World November 18, and it marks the beginning of what will become known as the "funny papers" or "funnies" (see "Yellow Kid," 1896).
Nonfiction: Wealth Against Commonwealth by Henry Demarest Lloyd is a florid and often inaccurate study of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company. Lloyd defends Eugene V. Debs in legal battles arising out of the Pullman strike; The Philosophy of Freedom (Die Philosophie der Freiheit) by Austrian-born German scientist-philosopher Rudolf Steiner, 33; Les Mortcoles by Léon Daudet is a savage indictment of the medical profession; Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan by Lafcadio Hearn gives Western readers their first sympathetic view of Japanese life. Now 44, (Patricio) Lafcadio (Tessima Carlos) Hearn was born of British-Greek parentage on the Ionian island of Leukas, moved to New Orleans in 1877, opened an eating place under the name "5-Cent Restaurant," moved to Japan after the venture failed, married a Japanese woman of a samurai family, and has lectured on western literature. Hearn will become a Japanese citizen next year, take the name Koizumi Yakumo, and teach at the Imperial University in Tokyo from 1896 to 1903; Safar Nameh: Persian Pictures, a Book of Travel by English traveler (Gertrude) Margaret Lowthian Bell, 26, who visited Persia 2 years ago with Sir Frank and Lady Lascelles, her stepmother's sister and brother-in-law. One of the first women to matriculate at Oxford, Bell has mastered several European languages and studied Farsi.
Critic-essayist Walter Pater dies at Oxford July 30 at age 54; historian-biographer James A. Froude at Kingsbridge, Devon, October 20 at age 76.
Fiction: Trilby by George du Maurier, who calls his malevolent hypnotist Svengali, a name that will become a generic term for anyone who tries with evil intentions to force or persuade someone else to do his bidding (the novel creates a fashion for the trilby hat); The God in the Car (based on the career of Cecil Rhodes), The Dolly Dialogues, and The Prisoner of Zenda by London lawyer-novelist Anthony Hope (Anthony Hope Hawkins), 31, whose latter work is such a success that he gives up the law and devotes himself full time to writing; The Great God Pan and the Inmost Light by Welsh teacher-translator-novelist Arthur Machen (Arthur Llewellyn Jones), 31; The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson and the Comedy of Those Extraordinary Twins by Mark Twain is published November 28; The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by A. Conan Doyle, who in December 1893 seemingly killed off his detective along with Professor Moriarty in an Alpine disaster chronicled in the Strand magazine (but see 1902).
Robert Louis Stevenson suffers a stroke of apoplexy on his veranda in Samoa December 3 and dies at age 44. Samoans have regarded him as a chief and bury his body on the summit of Mount Vaea.
Poetry: The Golden Boat (Sonar Tari) by Rabindranath Tagore (who also writes music for the work). Poet William Butler Yeats is instrumental in bringing Tagore's work to world attention; Homeward: Songs by the Way by Irish poet-mystic AE (George William Russell), 27, who has adopted his pen name after being questioned by a proofreader about an earlier pseudonym, "AEon." AE's ideas on the village Co-Operative Movement are similar to those of Rabindranath Tagore.
Poet Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle dies at Louveciennes outside Paris July 17 at age 75; poet-physician-essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes at Boston October 7 at age 85.
Juvenile: The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling; Seven Little Australians by English-born Australian author Ethel Sibyl Turner, 22, whose book will remain in print through most of the next century; The Story of Jack Ballister's Fortunes by Howard Pyle.
Author R. M. Ballantyne dies at Rome February 8 at age 68.
Painting: Anxiety by Edvard Munch; Femme à sa toilette by Edgar Degas; Spring Landscape (Giverny) by Claude Monet; Summertime by Mary Cassatt; The Room of Flowers and Winter: Midnight by Childe Hassam. Gustave Caillebotte dies at Gennevilliers February 21 at age 45; George Inness at Bridge of Allan, Scotland, August 3 at age 69.
The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance enhances the reputation of Lithuanian-born U.S. art critic-historian Bernard Berenson, 29, who graduated from Harvard 7 years ago, studied at Oxford and the University of Berlin, and has trained himself in the galleries of Italy to recognize the works of the Italian masters by their styles and techniques. Berenson will acquire the 18th-century Florentine mansion I Tatti and be the ranking authority on classical art until his death in 1959.
The Yellow Book begins publication with London artist Aubrey (Vincent) Beardsley, 22, as art editor. Beardsley's black-and-white "Art Nouveau" drawings will achieve a fame far more enduring than their tubercular creator.
German graphic artist Käthe Kollwitz (née Käthe Ida Schmidt), 27, completes the first in a series of prints, Der Weberaufstand, inspired by last year's Gerhart Hauptmann play The Weavers.
The American Academy in Rome has its beginnings in the American School of Architecture in Rome founded by Charles F. McKim of McKim, Mead & White. Its first students begin their studies. It will be expanded in 1897 to provide a training ground for students of painting and sculpture as well as architecture, will be incorporated in 1905 by act of Congress, have its charter amended in 1913 to include the American School of Classical Studies in Rome, and will continue into the 21st century granting annual awards to U.S. citizens who compete for fellowships in architecture, art history, landscape architecture, music, painting and sculpture, receiving residence in Rome, travel allowances, and yearly stipends (prominent artists will be awarded the same benefits in return for giving lectures).
Louis Comfort Tiffany trademarks Favrile glass (see 1878). He has invented a process for staining glass by adding pigments to molten glass while it is being made, instead of applying stain or burning pigments into hardened glass, and achieves incomparable iridescences that he employs in free form "Art Nouveau" shapes to create brilliant lamps, chandeliers, vases, jewelry, and other objects.
Theater: The Old Jew by Manchester-born English playwright Sydney Grundy, 45, 1/6 at London's Garrick Theatre, with W. J. Abingdon, 35; How to Get Rid of Your Mistress (Un fil à la patte) by Georges Feydeau 1/9 at the Théâtre du Palais Royal, Paris; The Butterflies by New Mexico Territory-born Henry Guy Carleton, 37, 2/5 at Palmer's Theater, New York, with Maude Adams, John Drew; The Land of Heart's Desire by William Butler Yeats 3/29 at London's Avenue Theatre in a production financed by tea heiress and patron Annie (Elizabeth Fredericka) Horniman, 34, who will serve as Yeats's unpaid secretary for the next 5 years and who also subsidizes (secretly) a production at the same theater of George Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man, which has its premiere 4/21 (and opens later at New York in a production mounted by actor Richard Mansfield, who gives Shaw his first New York exposure). Horniman will sponsor construction of Dublin's Abbey Theatre in 1904 and purchase Manchester's Gaiety Theatre in 1908, turning it into a repertory house. Shaw innovates the practice of having his plays published for general readership with elaborate prefaces that deal with political and social issues (his new play deflates romantic illusions of military "glory"); Hotel Paradise (L'hôtel du libre échange) by Georges Feydeau and a collaborator 12/5 at the Théâtre des Nouveautés Paris.
Actor-playwright-theater manager Steele Mackaye dies at Timpas, Colorado, February 25 at age 51 while en route to California. He initiated overhead lighting 20 years ago, invented the first moving "double stage" in 1879, invented folding theater seats, and has patented more than 100 theater-related inventions.
Wisconsin-born illusionist-escape artist Harry Houdini (originally Ehrich Weiss), 20, entertains New York audiences at Huber's Opera House, next door to Lüchow's Restaurant in 14th Street, with his wife, Bess, in an act billed as "The Metamorphosis Miracle." He has himself tied inside a sack with his hands bound behind his back and locked into a wooden trunk, Bess stands atop the trunk, hidden by a screen; on the count of three, the screen is removed, revealing Houdini himself standing atop the trunk, and when the trunk is opened Bess is found to be inside the tied sack with her hands bound behind her back (see 1900).
Billboard magazine has its beginnings in an eight-page monthly begun by Cincinnati publishers James Hennegan and W. H. Donaldson as Billboard Advertising. Theater notes will be introduced beginning in late 1901, a motion picture section will be added in 1907, and Billboard will become a U.S. show business weekly (seeVariety, 1905).
Boston's $1 million Keith Theater opens with vaudeville acts that include Weber and Fields, who make $400 per week (see 1883); they will be pulling down $4,000 per week by 1905.
Opera: Thaïs 3/16 at the Paris Grand Opéra, with music by Jules Massenet, libretto from a novel by Anatole France; Werther 4/19 at New York's Metropolitan Opera House, with music by Massenet, libretto from the Goethe work of 1774; La Navarraise 6/20 at London's Covent Garden, with music by Massenet.
Ballet: Afternoon of a Faun (L'Aprés-midi d'un Faune) 12/23 at Paris, with music by French composer Claude (Achille) Debussy, 32 (see Mallarmé poem, 1876).
First performances: Symphony No. 5 in B flat major by Anton Bruckner 4/9 at Graz; Concerto No. 2 in D minor for Piano and Orchestra by Edward MacDowell 12/14 at New York.
The Queen's Hall opens in London's Langham Place under the direction of impresario Robert Newman (see The Proms, 1895).
Conductor Hans von Bülow dies at Cairo February 12 at age 64; composer Emmanuel Chabrier at Paris September 13 at age 53; composer-pianist Anton Rubinstein at Peterhof November 20 at age 64.
Paris music halls attract audiences with semi-nude chorus girls; the 25-year-old Folies-Bergère outdoes its competitors with sensational displays of nudity that will henceforth be its hallmark, along with more conventional entertainers (see 1887).
Stage musicals: King Kodak 4/30 at Terry's Theatre, London, with music by Alfred Plumpton, John Crook, London-born composer (John) Lionel (Alexander) Monckton, 31, Walter Slaughter, and others; The Passing Show 5/12 at New York's Casino Theater, with music by Vienna-born composer Ludwig Englander, 35, book and lyrics by Sydney Rosenberg. The production introduces the revue to the musical theater; The Shop Girl 11/24 at London's Gaiety Theatre, with actor-singer Seymour Hicks, 23, who is soon joined by his Falkland Islands-born wife Ellaline (née Lewin), 24, the 20-year-old son and namesake of Savoyard George Grossmith, comedian Edmund Payne, book by James T. Tanner, music by Ivan Caryll and Lionel Monckton, songs that include "Her Golden Hair Was Hanging Down Her Back," 546 perfs.
Popular songs: "Humoresque" (piano composition) by Antonin Dvorák; "The Sidewalks of New York" by Irish-born composer Charles B. Lawlor, 42, lyrics by native New Yorker James W. Blake, 32 ("East side, West side, all around the town"); "I've Been Working on the Railroad" is published under the title "Levee Song" in Carmina Princetoniana. University of Texas undergraduate John Lang Sinclair will write lyrics beginning, "The eyes of Texas are upon you" for a student minstrel show that will be presented May 12, 1903.
Saxophone inventor Adolphe Sax dies in poverty at Paris February 4 at age 79, having created more than a dozen different sizes of his instrument from soprano to bass (five will survive). His son Adolphe Edouard, 44, continues the Sax factory, which will be acquired in 1928 by the Henri Selmer Company (see Selmer, 1921).
The Penn Relays are held for the first time in April at Philadelphia.
Joshua Pim wins in men's singles at Wimbledon, Blanche Bingley Hillyard in women's singles; Robert Wrenn wins in U.S. men's singles, Helen R. Helwig in women's singles.
English golfer John Henry Taylor, 23, wins the British Open, won by Scottish players every year since 1860.
The first U.S. Open is held at St. Andrew Golf Club in Yonkers, New York, at the initiative of Scottish-born golfer John Reid, who helps to organize the United States Golf Association (USGA) (see British Open, 1860; U.S. Amateur, 1895).
Yale end Frank Hinkey, 22, concludes a 4-year football career in which he has been named to the All-Star team four times although he weighs only 157 pounds and stands only five feet nine. Coach Glenn Scobey "Pop" Warner, now 23, will call Hinkey "the greatest football player of all time" (Warner will coach the Carlisle Indians and go on to coach teams at Georgia, Cornell, Pittsburgh, Stanford, and Temple).
World chess champion Wilhelm Steinitz loses to Prussian-born chess master Emanuel Lasker, 25, who gains the world title May 26 at New York and will hold it until 1921. Now 58, Steinitz defeated all comers since 1866, held the world title since 1886, and suffers a nervous breakdown.
Texas gunslinger John Wesley Hardin is killed at age 42 while playing poker August 19 at El Paso. He has insulted Marshal John Selman, who shoots him in the back of the head at the Acme Saloon.
Berlin's Reichstag building is completed after 10 years of construction; the German parliament moves into its new home (see 1933).
A London Building Act voted by Parliament limits the height of buildings to 150 feet. A development called Queen Anne's Mansions has disturbed Queen Victoria's view, and no skyscrapers will be erected in London for nearly 60 years.
Chicago's new Reliance building designed by Daniel H. Burnham is "a glass tower 15 stories high."
Pittsburgh's 13-story Carnegie Building is completed for the steel baron; it will remain the city's tallest building until 1902 and stand until the early 1950s.
Savoy Hotel owner Richard D'Oyly Carte buys Claridge's (see 1878; 1898).
The Royal Poinciana Hotel opens at Palm Beach, Florida, with 540 rooms that will be enlarged to give it 1,300. Standard Oil millionaire H. M. Flagler has extended his Florida East Coast Railway 200 miles south to Lake Worth and put up the $2 million wooden hotel to accommodate winter visitors (see 1888; The Breakers, 1895).
Newport's Belcourt Castle is completed on Bellevue Avenue in the Rhode Island summer resort for Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, 35. Richard Morris Hunt and John Russell Pope, 20, have designed the 52-room Louis XIII-style "cottage."
Some 6,576 New York slum dwellers are found to be living in windowless inside rooms. Landlords have installed air shafts to circumvent an 1879 law passed to ban such inside rooms, but the shafts are used in many cases as garbage chutes.
U.S. wheat sells at 49¢ per bushel, down from $1.05 in 1870. Prairie schooners headed back east have canvas covers painted with the words, "In God we trusted, in Kansas we busted."
The Carey Act passed by Congress August 18 grants 1 million acres of federally-owned desert lands to certain states on condition that they irrigate the land, reclaim it, and dispose of it in small tracts to settlers. Sen. Joseph M. Carey, 49, (R. Wyo) has sponsored the legislation.
California's Irvine Company ranch is incorporated by James Irvine Jr., 27, whose late father came from Ireland to seek his fortune in the gold fields, made money as a wholesale merchant in San Francisco, joined with three other men to buy up sheep rangeland from Spanish settlers who had fallen into debt to Anglo-American merchants in Los Angeles, and bought out his partners in 1876. The younger Irvine will develop a vast ranching and farming empire, including a 100,000-acre ranch in Montana.
Ralston Purina Company has its beginnings in the Robinson-Danforth Commission Company founded by St. Louis feed merchants George Robinson and William H. Danforth, 24. They have mixed corn and oats to produce a feed that will not give horses and mules colic as corn alone may do (see Purina, 1897).
Iceberg lettuce is introduced commercially by the 18-year-old W. Atlee Burpee Company, whose crisp, cool, crunchy, bland-tasting head lettuce will be scorned by gastronomes in favor of Bibb (or limestone), Boston (or butter), Cos (or Romaine), leaf, and other, more flavorful, lettuces but will be widely popular in France as well as in the United States.
U.S. ice-making plants produce 1.5 million tons of machine-made ice (see 1889; 1926).
Joseph Campbell Preserve Company gets a new president as Arthur Dorrance, 45, succeeds Campbell, with whom he formed a new partnership in 1876 (see 1869; "condensed" soup, 1897).
The New York Condensed Milk Company acquires Elgin Condensed Milk Company of West Elgin, Illinois, that the late Gail Borden helped found in the early 1850s (see 1892; 1899).
Minute Tapioca has its beginnings in Tapioca Superlative, introduced by Whitman Grocery Company of Boston, whose product is soon renamed in honor of the minutemen who fought the British at Lexington and Concord in 1775. Local housewife Susan Stavers has obtained South American manioc (cassava) roots, imported duty free since 1883 and used to produce starch; she has run them through her coffee grinder to produce translucent tapioca granules that make a smooth pudding. Local publisher John Whitman has bought rights to her process, organized a company, and sells boxes of the tapioca that Stavers has sold in paper bags (see General Foods, 1929).
Shredded Wheat maker H. D. Perky receives a visit at Denver from John Harvey Kellogg, who returns to Battle Creek determined to invent a better breakfast food (see 1881; Granose, 1895). Perky moves his Natural Food Company to Boston and opens a Roxbury plant with 11 machines to produce shredded wheat on a commercial basis (see 1893; 1895).
German-born café owner William Gebhardt at New Braunfels, Texas, runs pepper (capsicum) bits through a small home meat grinder three times and dries the ground pepper into the first commercial chili (or chile) powder (see 1835). Gebhardt will open the first chili-powder factory next year, making five cases per week and selling the product from the back of a wagon while he develops improved machinery to increase production.
Caramel maker Milton S. Hershey incorporates Hershey Chocolate Company and moves his Chicago production lines to Bloomington, Illinois, so as to be close to the dairy farms that provide fresh milk for his Crystal A caramels, opens factories at Mt. Joy and Reading, Pennsylvania, and spends the summer in Europe. The people at J. M. Lehmann help gain access to Swiss factories that make milk chocolate, and while he does not learn their recipes he does experiment on his own, using fresh milk, not powder. Fresh milk gives chocolate better flavor, but it has to be condensed to eliminate excess moisture and keep from spoiling, so Hershey learns how to condense it. Ordinary milk shortens the product's shelf life substantially, and shelf life will always be a paramount consideration in the formulation of any commercial food product. Hershey learns the correct proportions of milk, how to add the sugar, what kind of cacao beans to use, how to roast them, how long to conch in order to reduce the moisture content of a milk and chocolate paste and give it a smoother texture. Impressed with German technology, he sends J. M. Lehmann & Company an order for additional machinery, including conching equipment. Hershey uses his first chocolate as coating for his caramels (see 1900).
The 1-year-old Paris restaurant Maxim's escapes bankruptcy with help from vaudeville star Irma de Montigny, who has been refused a table at Weber's in the rue Royale, walks across the street to Maxim's, and helps Maxim Gaillard gain backing from her rich admirer, Bernard de Contades. Gaillard will die early next year, leaving the debt-ridden establishment to his maître d'hôtel Eugene Cornuché, who will attract the city's most elegant courtesans as Maxim's gains a reputation for elegance and fine cuisine, prepared by its talented chef, Chauveau.
Chef Auguste Escoffier creates pêche Melba at London's 5-year-old Savoy Hotel to honor the Australian grande cantrice Nellie Melba, now 33, who is singing in Richard Wagner's 1850 opera Lohengrin at Covent Garden. Escoffier has never heard Melba sing in Lohengrin or any other opera, but he knows she is partial to peaches and ice cream, so he places a scoop of vanilla ice cream on a peeled and poached peach half (using peaches obtained from the Paris suburb Montréal) and will later enhance the dish by covering it with sauce Cardinale—a purée of raspberries flavored with old Kirsch—and almond slivers. He gives the name Melba toast to the thin-sliced toast he has created (originally to satisfy the wife of hotelman César Ritz) by grilling a slice, splitting it down the middle, and grilling it a second time (Mme. Melba breakfasts on tea and dry toast and is always concerned about her weight).
London's first J. Lyons teashop opens in September at 213 Piccadilly, an outgrowth of a catering company started 7 years ago by Joseph Lyons, who operates the white-fronted shop with gold letters. Its bright decor, smartly dressed waitresses, and quality food at low prices make it an immediate success, and by year's end there are eight more such Lyons establishments, all in London, to launch an empire of Lyons teashops that will sell Welsh rabbit, meat pies, canned spaghetti on toast, fried potatoes, and assorted biscuits, buns, and cakes. There will be 96 Lyons tea shops by 1904, all with the same menu and charging the same prices.
Beijing (Peking) again consents to exclusion of Chinese laborers in a treaty signed with the United States March 17 (see 1884; 1943).
Congress creates a Bureau of Immigration (see 1891).
An Immigration Restriction League formed by a group of Bostonians campaigns for a literacy test that will screen out uneducated "undesirables". It will direct its efforts against Asiatics, Latins, and Slavs (see 1917).
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