1884
Greenwich Mean Time is established by representatives of 25 world nations; the Meridian Conference establishes worldwide time zones, with the new year to begin when it is midnight at Greenwich, but local time at Paris remains 9 minutes, 21 seconds ahead of GMT and at St. Petersburg 2 hours, 1 minute, 18.7 seconds ahead.
February 18 - Mark Twain publishes The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
March 13 - Reaper magnate Cyrus McCormick dies at Chicago March 13 at age 75, leaving a fortune of $200 million to his widow, four sons, and three daughters. Nancy "Nettie" Fowler McCormick, 50, has served as his private secretary and business counsel; she takes over management of her late husband's McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, and although his son Cyrus Jr., 25, assumes the presidency it is Mrs. McCormick who will run the enterprise for the next 18 years.
April - Durham, North Carolina, tobacco-grower's son James Buchanan Duke, 27, arrives at New York in April with good financial resources and determines to become a dominant force in the growing tobacco business, by whatever means are necessary. He begins opening tobacco shops, some of them alongside existent shops whose prices he then undercuts, forcing the proprietors to sell him their businesses and hiring them as managers. Duke will distribute his cigarettes free to immigrants arriving from Europe and turn them into loyal customers.
May 4 - Woodstock, Tennessee, schoolteacher Ida Bell Wells, 22, boards a Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad train May 4, taking a seat in the first-class "Ladies' Car" for the short trip between Woodstock and Memphis (see Supreme Court decision, 1883). The C&O conductor orders Wells to vacate the Ladies' Car and take a seat in the second-class smokers' section. She refuses, bracing her feet against the seat in front of her, and when the conductor reaches for her she bites him. He gets help from two train workers, and they manage to push her off the train to a standing ovation from the white passengers. Born into slavery at Holly Springs, Mississippi, Wells was left an orphan after a yellow fever epidemic in 1878 and has had to raise her seven younger siblings. Humiliated, her dress torn in the struggle, she vows to take the railroad (and segregation) to court. The C&O tries to bribe her to drop the case but she refuses. The judge turns out to be an ex-Union soldier from Minnesota and rules in her favor, awarding her $500 in damages; the Memphis Daily Appeal reports the story under the headline, "A Darky Damsel Obtains a Verdict for Damages," but the railroad files an appeal.
May 6 - Former Confederate secretary of state Judah P. Benjamin dies at Paris May 6 at age 72. He has enjoyed such outstanding success in his legal career that he has been able to afford a mansion in the French capital.
May 8 – Birth of Harry S. Truman, 33rd President of the United States (d. 1972)
August 5 – The cornerstone for the Statue of Liberty is laid on Bedloe's Island in New York Harbor.
October 11 - Birth of Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady of the United States (d. 1962)
December 6 – The Washington Monument is completed
John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Trust markets more than 80 percent of the petroleum from U.S. oil wells.
National Cash Register Company is founded at Dayton, Ohio, by local coal merchant John H. (Henry) Patterson, 40, who has bought a controlling interest in a company that has bought the Ritty cash register of 1879 and improved it by adding a cash drawer and a bell that rings every time the drawer is opened. Ridiculed for having invested $6,500 in a company that makes anything so useless, Patterson offers the seller $2,000 to let him out of the deal, is refused, changes the firm name, and goes to work improving the cash register. He will innovate the idea of exclusive sales territories, pay large commissions to salesmen, organize a force of well-trained service men to maintain the machines he sells, and make NCR prosper .
Danish bacteriologist Hans Christian (Joachim) Gram, 30, at Berlin develops a dye system for distinguishing between the two major classes of bacteria (the Gram stain). Those bacteria that retain the violet dye will be classified as gram-positive, and the distinctions revealed by Gram's staining will later be correlated with other biochemical and morphological differences.
New York surgeon William S. (Stewart) Halsted, 31, injects a patient with cocaine, pioneering the practice of local anesthesia. A stickler for hygiene who sends his shirts to Paris to be laundered, Halsted becomes addicted in the course of his experiments to the drug derived from leaves of the South American Andes shrub Erythroxylon coca (or E. truxillense), and although he will recover in 2 years he will require morphine in order to function.
Chinese farm workers account for half of California's agricultural labor force, up from 10 percent in 1870. The Chinese have raised dikes at the mouths of the San Joaquin and Sacramento Rivers and are reclaiming millions of acres of rich farm lands. A second Chinese Exclusion Act passed by Congress July 5 tightens the provisions of the 1880 act.
Quaker Oats becomes one of the first food commodities to be sold in packages. Put up in cardboard canisters, the cereal will be widely and aggressively advertised throughout the United States and Britain .
1884
Greenwich Mean Time is established by representatives of 25 world nations; the Meridian Conference establishes worldwide time zones, with the new year to begin when it is midnight at Greenwich, but local time at Paris remains 9 minutes, 21 seconds ahead of GMT and at St. Petersburg 2 hours, 1 minute, 18.7 seconds ahead.
February 18 - Mark Twain publishes The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
March 13 - Reaper magnate Cyrus McCormick dies at Chicago March 13 at age 75, leaving a fortune of $200 million to his widow, four sons, and three daughters. Nancy "Nettie" Fowler McCormick, 50, has served as his private secretary and business counsel; she takes over management of her late husband's McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, and although his son Cyrus Jr., 25, assumes the presidency it is Mrs. McCormick who will run the enterprise for the next 18 years.
April - Durham, North Carolina, tobacco-grower's son James Buchanan Duke, 27, arrives at New York in April with good financial resources and determines to become a dominant force in the growing tobacco business, by whatever means are necessary. He begins opening tobacco shops, some of them alongside existent shops whose prices he then undercuts, forcing the proprietors to sell him their businesses and hiring them as managers. Duke will distribute his cigarettes free to immigrants arriving from Europe and turn them into loyal customers.
May 4 - Woodstock, Tennessee, schoolteacher Ida Bell Wells, 22, boards a Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad train May 4, taking a seat in the first-class "Ladies' Car" for the short trip between Woodstock and Memphis (see Supreme Court decision, 1883). The C&O conductor orders Wells to vacate the Ladies' Car and take a seat in the second-class smokers' section. She refuses, bracing her feet against the seat in front of her, and when the conductor reaches for her she bites him. He gets help from two train workers, and they manage to push her off the train to a standing ovation from the white passengers. Born into slavery at Holly Springs, Mississippi, Wells was left an orphan after a yellow fever epidemic in 1878 and has had to raise her seven younger siblings. Humiliated, her dress torn in the struggle, she vows to take the railroad (and segregation) to court. The C&O tries to bribe her to drop the case but she refuses. The judge turns out to be an ex-Union soldier from Minnesota and rules in her favor, awarding her $500 in damages; the Memphis Daily Appeal reports the story under the headline, "A Darky Damsel Obtains a Verdict for Damages," but the railroad files an appeal.
May 6 - Former Confederate secretary of state Judah P. Benjamin dies at Paris May 6 at age 72. He has enjoyed such outstanding success in his legal career that he has been able to afford a mansion in the French capital.
May 8 – Birth of Harry S. Truman, 33rd President of the United States (d. 1972)
August 5 – The cornerstone for the Statue of Liberty is laid on Bedloe's Island in New York Harbor.
October 11 - Birth of Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady of the United States (d. 1962)
December 6 – The Washington Monument is completed
John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Trust markets more than 80 percent of the petroleum from U.S. oil wells.
National Cash Register Company is founded at Dayton, Ohio, by local coal merchant John H. (Henry) Patterson, 40, who has bought a controlling interest in a company that has bought the Ritty cash register of 1879 and improved it by adding a cash drawer and a bell that rings every time the drawer is opened. Ridiculed for having invested $6,500 in a company that makes anything so useless, Patterson offers the seller $2,000 to let him out of the deal, is refused, changes the firm name, and goes to work improving the cash register. He will innovate the idea of exclusive sales territories, pay large commissions to salesmen, organize a force of well-trained service men to maintain the machines he sells, and make NCR prosper .
Danish bacteriologist Hans Christian (Joachim) Gram, 30, at Berlin develops a dye system for distinguishing between the two major classes of bacteria (the Gram stain). Those bacteria that retain the violet dye will be classified as gram-positive, and the distinctions revealed by Gram's staining will later be correlated with other biochemical and morphological differences.
New York surgeon William S. (Stewart) Halsted, 31, injects a patient with cocaine, pioneering the practice of local anesthesia. A stickler for hygiene who sends his shirts to Paris to be laundered, Halsted becomes addicted in the course of his experiments to the drug derived from leaves of the South American Andes shrub Erythroxylon coca (or E. truxillense), and although he will recover in 2 years he will require morphine in order to function.
Chinese farm workers account for half of California's agricultural labor force, up from 10 percent in 1870. The Chinese have raised dikes at the mouths of the San Joaquin and Sacramento Rivers and are reclaiming millions of acres of rich farm lands. A second Chinese Exclusion Act passed by Congress July 5 tightens the provisions of the 1880 act.
Quaker Oats becomes one of the first food commodities to be sold in packages. Put up in cardboard canisters, the cereal will be widely and aggressively advertised throughout the United States and Britain .