Timeline 1860 to 1916

1860 Repeating Rifle
B. Tyler Henry, chief designer for Oliver Fisher Winchester's arms company, adapts a breech-loading rifle invented by Walter B. Hunt and creates a new lever action repeating rifle. First known as the Henry, the rifle will soon be famous as simply the Winchester.

January 24, 1860 -- New engine runs on fire, not water -- French inventor Etienne Lenoir was issued a patent for the first successful internal-combustion engine. Lenoir's engine was a converted steam engine that burned a mixture of coal gas and air. Its two-stroke action was simple but reliable--many of Lenoir's engines were still working after 20 years of use. His first engines powered simple machines like pumps and bellows. However, in 1862, Lenoir built his first automobile powered by an internal-combustion engine--a vehicle capable of making a six-mile trip in two to three hours. It wasn't a practical vehicle, but it was the beginning of the automobile industry.
1860 Gustav Kirchoff and Robert Bunsen discover that each element has its own distinct set of spectral lines
1861 - Both coasts are connected. There are now 2250 telegraph offices in operation nationwide.
1861, The Pony Express officially ceased operations
1862 Louis Pasteur conclusively disproves the spontaneous generation of living organisms
1862 Jean Lenoir makes a gasoline-engine automobile
1862 Battle of the Ironclads
For the first time, two armored ships battle each other at sea. The Union Monitor, designed from scratch by John Ericsson, features a two-cannon revolving turret and eight-inch plate armor. The Confederate Merrimac, a wooden hulled ship hastily outfitted with iron plates, holds it own against the Monitor. The two battle to a draw.

1863 Roller Skates
James Plimpton of Medford, Massachusetts, gives the world the first practical four-wheeled roller skate. This sets off a roller craze that quickly spreads across the U.S. and Europe.

1864 Oil Pipeline
Built in the oil fields at Pithole, Pennsylvania, Samuel van Syckel's five-mile, pump-operated pipeline made oil transport infinitely easier. No one appreciated this less than the Teamsters, who saw the pipeline as a threat to their business and destroyed it. The determined van Syckel hired a crew of "pipeline protectors" and rebuilt the pipeline.

October 17, 1864 -- Longstreet returns to command -- Confederate General James Longstreet assumes command of his corps in Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. Wounded at the Battle of the Wilderness in May, Longstreet missed the campaign for Richmond and spent five months recovering before retuning to his command. Longstreet was one of the most effective corps commanders in the war. He became a brigadier general before the First Battle of Bull Run in 1861, and he quickly rose through the ranks of the Army of Northern Virginia. He became a divisional commander, and his leadership during the Seven Days' Battles and the Second Battle of Bull Run earned him the respect of the army's commander, General Robert E. Lee, who gave him command of a corps just before the Battle of Antietam in September 1862. His leadership at Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Gettysburg sealed his reputation as a brilliant corps leader, but Longstreet was less successful when given an independent command. In spring 1863, he led a force in northern North Carolina and southern Virginia, and he made an expedition to relieve Confederate forces in Tennessee in fall 1863. He enjoyed little success in either situation. The Union Army of the Potomac crossed the Rapidan River in early May 1864 for another attempt at capturing the Confederate capital at Richmond. At the Battle of the Wilderness on May 6, Longstreet was shot by his own troops while scouting the lines during the battle. Ironically, it was just a few miles from the spot where Confederate General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson had been mortally wounded by his men just one year earlier. Longstreet was hit in the neck and shoulder, and he nearly died. He was incapacitated for the rest of the campaign and did not rejoin his corps until it was mired in the siege of Petersburg, Virginia, in October 1864. After the war, Longstreet worked at a variety of government posts, including U.S. minister to Turkey. He broke with his fellow Confederates by joining the Republican Party, and he dared to criticize some of Lee's tactical decisions. Though he was reviled by many of his fellow generals for this later behavior, he outlived most of his detractors. He died in Gainesville, Georgia, at the age of 82 in 1904.
1864 James Maxwell publishes his papers on a dynamical theory of the electromagnetic field
1864 John Herschel publishes the General Catalog
1864 Antoine Becquerel suggests an optical pyrometer
1865 August Kekul\'e realizes that benzene is composed of carbon and hydrogen atoms in a hexagonal ring
1865 Gregor Mendel presents his experiments on the crossbreeding of pea plants
1865: Claude Bernard publishes Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, calling for more use of the experimental method in medicine.
1865 Web Offset Printing
William Bullock introduced a printing press that could feed paper on a continuous roll and print both sides of the paper at once. Used first by the Philadelphia Ledger, the machine would become an American standard. It would also kill its maker, who died when he accidentally fell into one of his presses.

1865 - Maxwell mathematically predicts the propagation of electromagnetic waves through space. *[Note 3]
1866 - First transatlantic telegraph line successfully laid. Prior to the cable, sending messages between the United States and Europe took 11 days.
1866 - Uninterrupted transatlantic communications are established with the successful laying of the first telegraph cable on 27 July. *[Note 3]
October 18: General Interest -- 1867 : U.S. takes possession of Alaska -- On this day in 1867, the U.S. formally takes possession of Alaska after purchasing the territory from Russia for $7.2 million, or less than two cents an acre. The Alaska purchase comprised 586,412 square miles, about twice the size of Texas, and was championed by William Henry Seward, the enthusiasticly expansionist secretary of state under President Andrew Johnson. Russia wanted to sell its Alaska territory, which was remote, sparsely populated and difficult to defend, to the U.S. rather than risk losing it in battle with a rival such as Great Britain. Negotiations between Seward (1801-1872) and the Russian minister to the U.S., Eduard de Stoeckl, began in March 1867. However, the American public believed the land to be barren and worthless and dubbed the purchase "Seward's Folly" and "Andrew Johnson's Polar Bear Garden," among other derogatory names. Some animosity toward the project may have been a byproduct of President Johnson's own unpopularity. As the 17th U.S. president, Johnson battled with Radical Republicans in Congress over Reconstruction policies following the Civil War. He was impeached in 1868 and later acquitted by a single vote. Nevertheless, Congress eventually ratified the Alaska deal. Public opinion of the purchase turned more favorable when gold was discovered in a tributary of Alaska's Klondike River in 1896, sparking a gold rush. Alaska became the 49th state on January 3, 1959, and is now recognized for its vast natural resources. Today, 25 percent of America's oil and over 50 percent of its seafood come from Alaska. It is also the largest state in area, about one-fifth the size of the lower 48 states combined, though it remains sparsely populated. The name Alaska is derived from the Aleut word alyeska, which means "great land." Alaska has two official state holidays to commemorate its origins: Seward's Day, observed the last Monday in March, celebrates the March 30, 1867, signing of the land treaty between the U.S. and Russia, and Alaska Day, observed every October 18, marks the anniversary of the formal land transfer.
1867 - The first Atlantic cable, promoted by Cyrus Field, was layed on July 27th.
1867: Joseph Lister publishes On the Antiseptic Principle in the Practice of Surgery, showing that disinfection reduces post-operative infections.
1867 Barbed Wire
Lucien B. Smith of Kent, Ohio, invents the product that will close down the open cattle ranges by closing in cattle onto individual plots of privately owned land. I.L. Ellwood and Company's Glidden Steel Barb Wire will dominate the market; by 1890 the open range will be only a memory.

1867 Alfred Nobel patents dynamite
January 25, 1869 -- Pat Garrett leaves Louisiana -- Pat Garrett, both celebrated and despised as the man who killed Billy the Kid, abandons a life of luxury in Louisiana and heads west. Born into a wealthy southern farming family in 1850, Patrick Floyd Garrett grew up in a world of privilege on a large Louisiana plantation. When his parents died after the Civil War, a bitter estate feud erupted among the children, and Garrett received almost nothing. Like many other rootless post-war Southerners, Garrett decided to try his luck in the promised land of the West, and in 1869, he left Louisiana for Texas, where he worked for several years as a cowboy and buffalo hunter. After 10 years of drifting around Texas, in 1879 Garrett finally settled in Lincoln County, New Mexico, where he won election as sheriff the following year. A new sheriff could hardly have faced a more difficult time to try keeping the peace. Lincoln County was in the final days of a war between two powerful groups of ranchers and businessmen, both of which had hired former cowboys to become illegal soldiers and assassins. Although the war itself was winding down, some of these hired gunmen continued their crime sprees, including a young killer named Billy the Kid, who became Garrett's public enemy number one. Following a failed attempt to ambush the Kid near Fort Sumner in December 1880, Garrett tracked him to a stone cabin near Stinking Springs, New Mexico, where he finally arrested the young gunslinger. A Lincoln County jury quickly found the Kid guilty of murder and sentenced him to hang, but while Garrett was out of town on April 28, 1881, Billy the Kid managed to kill two of his guards and escape. Garrett renewed the manhunt, and learned that the Kid was still foolishly hanging around Fort Sumner in order to be near his girlfriend. On the night of July 14, Garrett unexpectedly encountered the Kid in a darkened room and shot him dead without warning. When news of Billy the Kid's death came out, some attacked Garrett for having violated the informal "code of the West," arguing the sheriff should have given the Kid a fair chance to defend himself. Garrett responded that he had merely done what was necessary to bring a vicious killer to justice, later writing, "I, at no time, contemplated taking any chances [with Billy the Kid] which I could avoid with caution or cunning." With Billy the Kid dead and the war all but over, Garrett turned to quieter pursuits. His 1882 ghost-written book, The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid, was not very authentic but it won Garrett enduring fame and cemented Billy the Kid's place in the pantheon of legendary western gunslingers. After several more stints as a sheriff and an unsuccessful attempt at horse ranching, Garret was shot to death by a disgruntled business associate in 1908.
1870 - Thomas Edison invents multiplex telegraphy.
January 20, 1870 -- First female brokerage firm opens -- In 1870, Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Claflin opened the doors of Woodhull, Claflin & Co., the nation's first brokerage firm run solely by women. The firm, which represented an early victory for equal rights in the often-chauvinistic world of Wall Street, was in part a product of the sisters' friendship with rail baron Cornelius Vanderbilt. All three were fiercely interested in spirituality--as children, Tennessee and Victoria performed psychic demonstrations in a traveling medicine show--and Vanderbilt willingly used his money and influence to help the sisters. The firm proved to be a success, but Victoria and Tennessee's achievements were hardly restricted to Wall Street. In 1870, the sisters established a publication, Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, which became a pulpit for their ardent beliefs in free love and women's suffrage and also served as the first venue for the English translation of the Communist Manifesto. Though her rejection of the tenets of conventional marriage raised the ire of some suffragettes, Victoria became a leading light in the women's rights movement. In 1872, the Equal Rights Party, a dissident branch of the National Woman Suffrage Association, even nominated Woodhull as their candidate for the president of the nation. Despite her stated aversion to the principles of marriage, Victoria wedded several times; later in life she headed to England and married an affluent British merchant, as did her sister. Tennessee died in 1923, while Victoria passed away a few years later, in 1927.
January 15, 1870 -- First appearance of the Democratic donkey -- On January 14, 1870, the first recorded use of a donkey to represent the Democratic Party appears in Harper's Weekly. Drawn by political illustrator Thomas Nast, the cartoon is entitled "A Live Jackass Kicking a Dead Lion." The jackass (donkey) is tagged "Copperhead Papers," referring to the Democrat-dominated newspapers of the South, and the dead lion represents the late Edwin McMasters Stanton, President Abraham Lincoln's secretary of war during the final three years of the Civil War. In the background is an eagle perched on a rock, representing the postwar federal domination in the South, and in the far background is the U.S. Capitol. Four years later, Nash originated the use of an elephant to symbolize the Republican Party in a Harper's Weekly cartoon entitled "The Third-Term Panic." The cartoon referred to the disparaging response by The New York Herald to the possibility that Republican President Ulysses S. Grant might seek a third-term. The New York Herald is depicted as a donkey wearing lion's skin labeled "Caesarism." This bogus lion is frightening several timid animals identified with the names of opposing newspapers, such as The New York Times and The New York Tribune, while a berserk elephant, labeled "Republican vote," is tottering above a chasm labeled "Chaos" as it tosses to the right and the left the few remaining platform planks holding its weight. The caption of the cartoon reads: "An Ass having put on the Lion's skin, roamed about the Forest, and amused himself by frightening all the foolish Animals he met with in his wanderings."
January 23, 1870 -- Soldiers massacre the wrong camp of Indians -- Declaring he did not care whether or not it was the rebellious band of Indians he had been searching for, Colonel Eugene Baker orders his men to attack a sleeping camp of peaceful Blackfeet along the Marias River in northern Montana. The previous fall, Malcolm Clarke, an influential Montana rancher, had accused a Blackfeet warrior named Owl Child of stealing some of his horses; he punished the proud brave with a brutal whipping. In retribution, Owl Child and several allies murdered Clarke and his son at their home near Helena, and then fled north to join a band of rebellious Blackfeet under the leadership of Mountain Chief. Outraged and frightened, Montanans demanded that Owl Child and his followers be punished, and the government responded by ordering the forces garrisoned under Major Eugene Baker at Fort Ellis (near modern-day Bozeman, Montana) to strike back. Strengthening his cavalry units with two infantry groups from Fort Shaw near Great Falls, Baker led his troops out into sub-zero winter weather and headed north in search of Mountain Chief's band. Soldiers later reported that Baker drank a great deal throughout the march. On January 22, Baker discovered an Indian village along the Marias River, and, postponing his attack until the following morning, spent the evening drinking heavily. At daybreak on the morning of January 23, 1870, Baker ordered his men to surround the camp in preparation for attack. As the darkness faded, Baker's scout, Joe Kipp, recognized that the painted designs on the buffalo-skin lodges were those of a peaceful band of Blackfeet led by Heavy Runner. Mountain Chief and Owl Child, Kipp quickly realized, must have gotten wind of the approaching soldiers and moved their winter camp elsewhere. Kipp rushed to tell Baker that they had the wrong Indians, but Baker reportedly replied, "That makes no difference, one band or another of them; they are all Piegans [Blackfeet] and we will attack them." Baker then ordered a sergeant to shoot Kipp if he tried to warn the sleeping camp of Blackfeet and gave the command to attack. Baker's soldiers began blindly firing into the village, catching the peaceful Indians utterly unaware and defenseless. By the time the brutal attack was over, Baker and his men had, by the best estimate, murdered 37 men, 90 women, and 50 children. Knocking down lodges with frightened survivors inside, the soldiers set them on fire, burnt some of the Blackfeet alive, and then burned the band's meager supplies of food for the winter. Baker initially captured about 140 women and children as prisoners to take back to Fort Ellis, but when he discovered many were ill with smallpox, he abandoned them to face the deadly winter without food or shelter. When word of the Baker Massacre (now known as the Marias Massacre) reached the east, many Americans were outraged. One angry congressman denounced Baker, saying "civilization shudders at horrors like this." Baker's superiors, however, supported his actions, as did the people of Montana, with one journalist calling Baker's critics "namby-pamby, sniffling old maid sentimentalists." Neither Baker nor his men faced a court martial or any other disciplinary actions. However, the public outrage over the massacre did derail the growing movement to transfer control of Indian affairs from the Department of Interior to the War Department--President Ulysses S. Grant decreed that henceforth all Indian agents would be civilians rather than soldiers.
1870 Pneumatic Subway
Working in secret to hide his operation from Boss Tweed, who opposes it, Scientific American publisher Alfred Ely Beach builds a pneumatic subway under Broadway in New York. Beach's single subway car, which features upholstered chairs and chandeliers is driven along the 300 foot tunnel by a 100 horsepower blower.

1870 Rudolph Clausius proves the scalar virial theorem
1870 Felix Klein constructs an analytic geometry for Lobachevski's geometry thereby establishing its self-consistency and the logical independence of Euclid's fifth postulate
1870 Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch establish the germ theory of disease
1871 John Rayleigh discusses the blue sky law and sunsets
1871 Dmitri Mendel\'eyev systematically examines the periodic table and predicts the existence of gallium, scandium, and germanium
1871 (April 1) - Bell arrived in Boston to start his work in the teaching of the deaf.
1872: Regulation of advertising and drugs -- U.S. Postmaster General is given authority to forbid use of mail to "persons operating fraudulent schemes," which constitutes first federal power to regulate misleading advertising.
1872 - Western Union buys the telegraph equipment manufacturing firm, Gray & Barton, and renamed it Western Electric.
1872 Ludwig Boltzman states the Boltzman equation
1873 James Maxwell states that light is an electromagnetic phenomenon
1873 Johannes van der Waals introduces the idea of weak attractive forces between molecules
1873 Charles Hermite proves that e is transcendental
October 27, 1873 -- Joseph Glidden applies for a patent on his barbed wire design -- On this day in 1873, a De Kalb, Illinois, farmer named Joseph Glidden submits an application to the U.S. Patent Office for his clever new design for a fencing wire with sharp barbs, an invention that will forever change the face of the American West. Glidden's was by no means the first barbed wire; he only came up with his design after seeing an exhibit of Henry Rose's single-stranded barbed wire at the De Kalb county fair. But Glidden's design significantly improved on Rose's by using two strands of wire twisted together to hold the barbed spur wires firmly in place. Glidden's wire also soon proved to be well suited to mass production techniques, and by 1880 more than 80 million pounds of inexpensive Glidden-style barbed wire was sold, making it the most popular wire in the nation. Prairie and plains farmers quickly discovered that Glidden's wire was the cheapest, strongest, and most durable way to fence their property. As one fan wrote, "it takes no room, exhausts no soil, shades no vegetation, is proof against high winds, makes no snowdrifts, and is both durable and cheap." The effect of this simple invention on the life in the Great Plains was huge. Since the plains were largely treeless, a farmer who wanted to construct a fence had little choice but to buy expensive and bulky wooden rails shipped by train and wagon from distant forests. Without the alternative offered by cheap and portable barbed wire, few farmers would have attempted to homestead on the Great Plains, since they could not have afforded to protect their farms from grazing herds of cattle and sheep. Barbed wire also brought a speedy end to the era of the open-range cattle industry. Within the course of just a few years, many ranchers discovered that thousands of small homesteaders were fencing over the open range where their cattle had once freely roamed, and that the old technique of driving cattle over miles of unfenced land to railheads in Dodge City or Abilene was no longer possible.
1873 Typewriter
Inspired by a Scientific American article featuring a British attempt at a typing machine, Christopher Latham Sholes invents his own. In 1873 he sells an improved prototype to Remington and Sons, gunsmiths, of Ilion, New York, who begin to mass produce the machines. Among the first works to be produced on a typewriter is Mark Twain's "Adventures of Tom Sawyer."

1874 Structural Steel Bridge
Captain James Buchanan Eads finishes the bridge across the Mississippi at St. Louis. Using steel supplied by Andrew Carnegie, Eads incorporates a triple arch design, with spans measuring 502, 520, and 502 feet. The construction amazes the engineering world; Eads will be the first American engineer to be awarded the Albert Medal of the Royal Society of Arts in London.

1874 Lord Kelvin formally states the second law of thermodynamics
1875 John Kerr discovers the electrically induced birefringence of some liquids
1875 Electric Dental Drill
George F. Green of Kalamazoo, Michigan, replaces the agony of tooth decay with the anxiety of the dental drill when he invents an electric powered device to drill teeth.

1875 Mimeograph
While using paraffin in an attempt to invent and improve telegraphy tape, Thomas Alva Edison discovers a way to make duplicate copies of documents instead.

1875 (June 2) - Bell's theory of the telephone confirmed by experiment.
1875 - First words transmitted by telephone.
January 26, 1875 -- Pinkertons maim Frank and Jesse James' mother -- Mistakenly believing Frank and Jesse James are hiding out at their family home, a gang of men--likely led by Pinkerton detectives--mount a raid that leaves the outlaws' mother permanently maimed and their nine-year-old half-brother dead. The Chicago-based Pinkerton Detective Agency had been pursuing the James brothers and their gang since 1874, when several big railroad companies first hired the Pinkertons to stop the outlaws. Responsible for a string of bank and train robberies, the James brothers were already famous for their daring style, and some even viewed the men as modern-day Robin Hoods. The Pinkertons, though, had no such romantic illusions about the outlaws. One of their best operatives working on the case, John W. Witcher, had been found dead from a bullet wound to the stomach, with his head, shoulder, and face eaten away by wild hogs. The Pinkertons were convinced Jesse James and another gang member had murdered Witcher, and they were determined to stop the outlaws. In late 1874, the Pinkertons learned that Jesse and Frank James periodically returned to their old family farm in Clay County, Missouri, to visit with their mother and other family. On the night of January 26, 1875, a gang of men surrounded the James farm in the mistaken belief that the James brothers were inside. In an attempt to flush the outlaws out of the house, the gang threw several flares through the windows. Unexpectedly, one of the flares exploded instantly, killing Frank and Jesse's young half-brother and blowing away their mother's arm. Though the identity of the gang members has never been determined with absolute certainty, contemporary admirers of the James Brothers and modern-day historians agree that the Pinkertons were probably responsible. Regardless, the incident gave credence to the popular view that the men were innocent victims of the powerful railroads that had hired the Pinkertons to wipe them out. After the attack on the James farm, the Pinkertons appear to have backed off from their more aggressive tactics. One of his own gang members, not a Pinkerton operative, killed Jesse James for a bounty in 1882. Frank James surrendered shortly thereafter, but no jury would convict him, and he remained a free and law-abiding citizen until his death in 1915. The grave of Jesse, who was buried in the front yard of his mother's farm, became a popular tourist attraction. For many years, tourists could pay Mrs. James 25ÝF to visit the grave and listen to her tearful and melodramatic account of how venal Pinkertons and evil railroad barons had so unjustly persecuted her good and utterly innocent sons.1876 - Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone. Elisha Gray files a patent application 3 hours after Bell. Over 600 patent suits filed during the next 11 years. Settled in Bell's favor. Bell offers his patent to Western Union for $100,000. I obtained the following item years ago from Warren Bender, of A.D. Little, Inc. Warren published it in an early issue of the Transactions of the IEEE Systems, Man & Cybernetics Society. I would like to share it with you. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell and his financial backer, Gardiner G. Hubbard, offered Bell's brand new patent (No. 174,465) to the Telegraph Company - the ancestor of Western Union. The President of the Telegraph Company, Chauncey M. DePew, appointed a committee to investigate the offer. The committee report has often been quoted. It reads in part: "The Telephone purports to transmit the speaking voice over telegraph wires. We found that the voice is very weak and indistinct, and grows even weaker when long wires are used between the transmitter and receiver. Technically, we do not see that this device will be ever capable of sending recognizable speech over a distance of several miles. "Messer Hubbard and Bell want to install one of their "telephone devices" in every city. The idea is idiotic on the face of it. Furthermore, why would any person want to use this ungainly and impractical device when he can send a messenger to the telegraph office and have a clear written message sent to any large city in the United States? "The electricians of our company have developed all the significant improvements in the telegraph art to date, and we see no reason why a group of outsiders, with extravagant and impractical ideas, should be entertained, when they have not the slightest idea of the true problems involved. Mr. G.G. Hubbard's fanciful predictions, while they sound rosy, are based on wild-eyed imagination and lack of understanding of the technical and economic facts of the situation, and a posture of ignoring the obvious limitations of his device, which is hardly more than a toy... ."In view of these facts, we feel that Mr. G.G. Hubbard's request for $100,000 of the sale of this patent is utterly unreasonable, since this device is inherently of no use to us. We do not recommend its purchase." The amusing thing about this letter, in retrospect, is that Bell obtained controlling interest in Western Union by 1882!
1876 (March 7) -The first telephone patent, No. 174,465 was issued to Alexander Graham Bell.
1876 (March 10) - First complete sentence of speech transmitted by telephone in Boston.
1876 (June 25) - Bell exhibited the telephone to the judges at the Centennial Exposi-tion, Philadelphia.
1876 (October 9) - Bell conducted the first successful experimental two-way talk over the telephone between Boston and Com-bridgeport, Mass., distance of 2 miles.
1876 - First complete sentence transmitted by telephone. First conversation by overhead line, 2 miles-Boston to Cambridgeport.
1876 - Edison invents the electric motor and the phonograph.
February 2, 1876 - National League of baseball is founded -- On February 2, 1876, the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs, which comes to be more commonly known as the National League (NL), is formed. The American League (AL) was established in 1901 and in 1903, the first World Series was held. The first official game of baseball in the United States took place in June 1846 in Hoboken, New Jersey. In 1869, the Cincinnati Red Stockings became America’s first professional baseball club. In 1871, the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players was established as the sport’s first “major league.” Five years later, in 1876, Chicago businessman William Hulbert formed the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs to replace the National Association, which he believed was mismanaged and corrupt. The National League had eight original members: the Boston Red Stockings (now the Atlanta Braves), Chicago White Stockings (now the Chicago Cubs), Cincinnati Red Stockings, Hartford Dark Blues, Louisville Grays, Mutual of New York, Philadelphia Athletics and the St. Louis Brown Stockings. In 1901, the National League’s rival, the American League of Professional Baseball Clubs, was founded. Starting in 1903, the best team from each league began competing against each other in the World Series.
1876 Telephone
Alexander Graham Bell patents his telephone, built with the assistance of young self-trained engineer Thomas A. Watson. Elisha Gray, who developed a similar device at about the same time, will unsuccessfully challenge Bell's patent.

1876 Nikolaus Otto designs a four-cycle engine
1876 Alexander Bell and Thomas Watson exhibit an electric telephone
1877 Thomas Edison patents the phonograph
1877 Phonograph
Working with a team of engineers at his Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratories, Thomas Alva Edison perfects a system of sound recording and transmission. The first recording replayed is a voice saying "Mary had a little lamb its fleece was white as snow."

1877 - Western Union has first telephone line in operation between Somerville, MA and Boston.
1877 - Bell Telephone Company formed, with Alexander Graham Bell as "electrician" and Thomas Watson as "superintendent."
1878 - First telephone directory, New Haven, CT, and had 21 listings.
1878 (January 28) - First commercial telephone exchange in the world opened at New Haven, Conn.
1878 Josiah Gibbs further develops thermodynamics
1878 Charles Hermite solves the general quintic equation by means of elliptic and modular functions
October 15, 1878 A little help from his friends -- Long before the days of Bill Gates, Thomas Edison offered a good lesson in the economics of technical innovation. On October 15, 1878, Edison opened the doors to the Edison Electric Company, but the prolific inventor didn't get the company off the ground by himself. Edison Electric was, in part, funded by wealthy investors like J.P. Morgan, who thought Edison, the inventor of the telegraph, was a wise investment. Though electric light had eluded inventors for over fifty years, Edison had vowed that he would create the first incandescent lamp. He quickly made good on his promise. His company was soon flush with profits, and competitors hoping to cash in on the burgeoning market were springing up everywhere. Under the tutelage of Morgan, Edison adopted the aggressive tactics of vertical integration, buying his rivals and transforming his company into a model modern enterprise. Without anti-trust laws to put the breaks on the feeding frenzy, Edison's shop, re-christened the General Electric Company, dominated the field with just one major competitor, the Westinghouse Company.
1879 Thomas Edison patents the carbon-thread incandescent lamp
1879 Josef Stefan observes that the total radiant flux from a black-body is proportional to the fourth power of its temperature
February 22, 1879 -- Woolworth opens five-cent store -- On this day in 1879, Frank Winfield Woolworth kicked off a retail revolution by opening the Great 5 Cents Store in Utica, New York. Pledging to sell "nothing" that cost more than a nickel, Woolworth packed his store with a smorgasbord of goods, ranging from items for the kitchen to beauty products. Though the Utica store ultimately failed, Woolworth hit pay dirt that same year when he opened another discount variety store in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The shop, which was expanded to include items that cost up to a dime, proved to be a fast success with Pennsylvanians and emboldened Woolworth to establish an empire of discount stores. The dawn of 1890s saw Woolworth's "five and ten" stores dot America's East Coast; by 1904 he had opened some 120 stores in twenty-one states, including chunks of the West and the District of Columbia. In 1911, he cemented his dominance of the burgeoning variety store field by merging with four rival companies. The move armed Woolworth with a fleet of 596 stores and, in 1912, he christened the shops with the now familiar name, F.W. Woolworth. Though WoolworthÝs stores continued to flourish during the first half of the century, the years following World War II were not so kind to the company. The sprawl of suburbs, and the attendant spread of malls, coupled with the recent rise of super-sized discount rivals like Target and Wal-Mart, ultimately spelled the end for Woolworth's. In 1997, the granddaddy of five-and-tens threw in the towel and closed its last 400 shops.
1879: Louis Pasteur demonstrates value of vaccine to protect sheep against anthrax.
January 22, 1879 -- Chief Dull Knife makes last fight for freedom -- On this day, pursuing American soldiers badly beat Cheyenne Chief Dull Knife and his people as they make a desperate bid for freedom. In doing so, the soldiers effectively crushed the so-called Dull Knife Outbreak. A leading chief of the Northern Cheyenne, Dull Knife (sometimes called Morning Star) had long urged peace with the powerful Anglo-Americans invading his homeland in the Powder River country of modern-day Wyoming and Montana. However, the 1864 massacre of more than 200 peaceful Cheyenne Indians by Colorado militiamen at Sand Creek, Colorado, led Dull Knife to question whether the Anglo-Americans could ever be trusted. He reluctantly led his people into a war he suspected they could never win. In 1876, many of Dull Knife's people fought along side Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull at their victorious battle at Little Bighorn, though the chief himself apparently did not participate. During the winter after Little Bighorn, Dull Knife and his people camped along the headwaters of the Powder River in Wyoming, where they fell victim to the army's winter campaign for revenge. In November, General Ranald Mackenzie's expeditionary force discovered the village and attacked. Dull Knife lost many of his people, and along with several other Indian leaders, reluctantly surrendered the following spring. In 1877, the military relocated Dull Knife and his followers far away from their Wyoming homeland to the large Indian Territory on the southern plains (in present-day Kansas and Oklahoma). No longer able to practice their traditional hunts, the band was largely dependent on meager government provisions. Beset by hunger, homesickness, and disease, Dull Knife and his people rebelled after one year. In September 1878, they joined another band to make an epic march back to their Wyoming homeland. Although Dull Knife publicly announced his peaceful intentions, the government regarded the fleeing Indians as renegades, and soldiers from bases scattered throughout the Plains attacked the Indians in an unsuccessful effort to turn them back. Arriving at Fort Robinson, Nebraska, near their Wyoming homeland, Dull Knife and his people surrendered to the government in the hopes they would be allowed to stay in the territory. To their dismay, administrators instead threatened to hold the band captive at Fort Robinson until they would agree to return south to the Indian Territory. Unwilling to give up when his goal was so close, in early January, Dull Knife led about 100 of his people in one final desperate break for freedom. Soldiers from Fort Robinson chased after the already weak and starving band of men, women, and children, and on January 22, they attacked and killed at least 30 people, including several in the immediate family of Dull Knife. Badly bloodied, most of the survivors returned to Fort Robinson and accepted their fate. Dull Knife managed to escape, and he eventually found shelter with Chief Red Cloud on the Sioux reservation in Nebraska. Permitted to remain on the reservation, Dull Knife died four years later, deeply bitter towards the Anglo-Americans he had once hoped to live with peacefully. The same year, the government finally allowed the Northern Cheyenne to move to a permanent reservation on the Tongue River in Montana near their traditional homeland. At last, Dull Knife's people had come home, but their great chief had not lived to join them.
1879 Incandescent Light Bulb
Backed by $30,000 in research funds provided by investors including J.P. Morgan and the Vanderbilts, Thomas Edison perfects an incandescent light bulb. The first commercial incandescent system will be installed at the New York printing firm of Hinds and Ketcham in January, 1881.

1880 Hearing Aid
R.G. Rhodes improves on the ear trumpet with another primitive hearing aid. The device is a thin sheet of hard rubber or cardboard placed against teeth which conducts vibrations to the auditory nerve.

1880 - American Bell founded. 30,000 phones in use. Bell spoke over a 1300-ft beam of light using his patented Photophone equipment.
1880: Hobble or restrictive skirts first appeared in Western fashion in around 1880. Advantages: Some people enjoy the feeling of legs being "hugged" together by the skirt. Due to their tightness and close proximity to the body, hobble skirts can make the wearer feel very warm, without having to wear bifurcated legwear. Disadvantages: They shorten the wearer's stride. They render the wearer unable to run It is impossible to do things which require spreading legs or having an object between the legs.
1880 - 30,872 Bell telephone stations in the United States. Conversation by overhead line, 45 miles-Boston to Providence.
February 2, 1880 -- First electric streetlight installed -- The first electric streetlight was installed in Wabash, Indiana. The city paid the Brush Electric Light Company of Cleveland, Ohio, $100 to install a light on the top of the courthouse. A month later the city commissioned four more lights to be installed. Residents of Wabash became the first Americans to wear their sunglasses at night.
1880: The Farm Journal publishes first "guarantee of advertising," assuring readers that only reputable firms will be allowed to advertise in its pages; other farm periodicals follow suit in the 1880s and 1890s.
1880 John Milne invents the seismograph
1881 Louis Pasteur develops an anthrax vaccine
1881 - Mr. Eckert who ran a telephone company in Cincinnati said he preferred the use of females to males as operators. "Their service is much superior to that of men or boys. They are much steadier, do not drink beer nor use profanity, and are always on hand."
1881 - Bell Telephone company purchases Western Electric Company.
1881 - Conversation by underground cable, 3/4 mile.
October 26: General Interest -- 1881 : Shootout at the OK Corral -- On this day in 1881, the Earp brothers face off against the Clanton-McLaury gang in a legendary shootout at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. After silver was discovered nearby in 1877, Tombstone quickly grew into one of the richest mining towns in the Southwest. Wyatt Earp, a former Kansas police officer working as a bank security guard, and his brothers, Morgan and Virgil, the town marshal, represented "law and order" in Tombstone, though they also had reputations as being power-hungry and ruthless. The Clantons and McLaurys were cowboys who lived on a ranch outside of town and sidelined as cattle rustlers, thieves and murderers. In October 1881, the struggle between these two groups for control of Tombstone and Cochise County ended in a blaze of gunfire at the OK Corral. On the morning of October 25, Ike Clanton and Tom McLaury came into Tombstone for supplies. Over the next 24 hours, the two men had several violent run-ins with the Earps and their friend Doc Holliday. Around 1:30 p.m. on October 26, Ike's brother Billy rode into town to join them, along with Frank McLaury and Billy Claiborne. The first person they met in the local saloon was Holliday, who was delighted to inform them that their brothers had both been pistol-whipped by the Earps. Frank and Billy immediately left the saloon, vowing revenge. Around 3 p.m., the Earps and Holliday spotted the five members of the Clanton-McLaury gang in a vacant lot behind the OK Corral, at the end of Fremont Street. The famous gunfight that ensued lasted all of 30 seconds, and around 30 shots were fired. Though it's still debated who fired the first shot, most reports say that the shootout began when Virgil Earp pulled out his revolver and shot Billy Clanton point-blank in the chest, while Doc Holliday fired a shotgun blast at Tom McLaury's chest. Though Wyatt Earp wounded Frank McLaury with a shot in the stomach, Frank managed to get off a few shots before collapsing, as did Billy Clanton. When the dust cleared, Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers were dead, and Virgil and Morgan Earp and Doc Holliday were wounded. Ike Clanton and Claiborne had run for the hills. Sheriff John Behan of Cochise County, who witnessed the shootout, charged the Earps and Holliday with murder. A month later, however, a Tombstone judge found the men not guilty, ruling that they were "fully justified in committing these homicides." The famous shootout has been immortalized in many movies, including Frontier Marshal (1939), Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957), Tombstone (1993) and Wyatt Earp (1994).

January 19, 1881 -- Western Union snaps up Atlantic and Pacific Co. -- In 1881 Jay Gould, the ravenous financier and archetypal robber baron, used his wiles and ways to seize control of Western Union, William Vanderbilt's mighty telegraph company. Gould mounted an elaborate campaign to drive down the company's stock, using his newspaper, as well as his influence on Wall Street, to raise doubts about Western Union's leadership and hefty stock price. He also started a rival telegraph concern, the Atlantic and Pacific Company, in hopes of raising doubts about Western Union’s dominance over the industry. The gambits worked and Western Union's stock swooned. In a desperate attempt to staunch the bleeding, Western Union snapped up the Atlantic and Pacific Company on this day in 1881. Far from staving off the competition, the deal further fattened Gould's pocketbook and, more importantly, primed him for the final phase of his takeover scheme. Gould convinced his Wall Street associates to start another raid on Western Union. However, as the traders were busy driving down Western Union’s asking price, Gould, in the guise of an "anonymous" investor, started gobbling up the company’s suddenly cheap stock. When the dust settled, Gould’s cronies were left counting their losses; meanwhile, the devious financier had successfully wrested control of Western Union.
1882 - Bell has controlling interest in Western Union and Western Electric.
1882 Electric Fan
The world becomes a cooler place, thanks to the work of Dr. Schuyler Skaats Wheeler. His two-bladed desk fan is produced by the Crocker and Curtis electric motor company.

1882: Robert Koch isolates microorganism responsible for tuberculosis (TB), then leading cause of death.
1882, the Nickel Plate Railroad opened for business.
1882 Simon Newcomb observes a 43'' per century excess precession of Mercury's orbit
1882 Ferdinand Lindeman proves that $\pi$ is transcendental and that the circle cannot be squared with a straightedge and compass
In 1883, Thomas Edison’s light bulb was demonstrated in Louisville, KY
1883: Robert Koch isolates microorganism responsible for cholera, major epidemic disease in nineteenth century.
1883: Edwin Klebs discovers microorganism responsible for diphtheria, often fatal disease of children.
1884 Thrill Ride
L.N. Thompson, founder of Coney Island's Luna Park, invites the first passengers to board his new thrill ride, the roller coaster. Thompson calls his new attraction the Switchback.

1884 - Paul Nipkow obtains a patent in Germany for TV, using a selenium cell and a mechanical scanning disk. First long distance call: Boston to NYC.
1884 (September 4) - Opening of telephone service between Boston and New York, 235 miles.
1884 - Conversation by overhead line (hard-drawn copper), 235 miles - Boston to New York.
February 1: General Interest -- 1884 : Oxford Dictionary debuts -- On this day in 1884, the first portion, or fascicle, of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), considered the most comprehensive and accurate dictionary of the English language, is published. Today, the OED is the definitive authority on the meaning, pronunciation and history of over half a million words, past and present. Plans for the dictionary began in 1857 when members of London's Philological Society, who believed there were no up-to-date, error-free English dictionaries available, decided to produce one that would cover all vocabulary from the Anglo-Saxon period (1150 A.D.) to the present. Conceived of as a four-volume, 6,400-page work, it was estimated the project would take 10 years to finish. In fact, it took over 40 years until the 125th and final fascicle was published in April 1928 and the full dictionary was complete--at over 400,000 words and phrases in 10 volumes--and published under the title A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles. Unlike most English dictionaries, which only list present-day common meanings, the OED provides a detailed chronological history for every word and phrase, citing quotations from a wide range of sources, including classic literature and cookbooks. The OED is famous for its lengthy cross-references and etymologies. The verb "set" merits the OED's longest entry, at approximately 60,000 words and detailing over 430 uses. No sooner was the OED finished than editors began updating it.
1885 - Theodore Vail becomes President of AT&T. Leaves in 1887 to go to South America to install electric traction systems.
1885: Louis Pasteur develops first rabies vaccine.
1885 The Bell Telephone Company formed a new subsidiary, American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T).
1885 (March 3) - Incorporation of American Telephone and Telegraph Company, New York City.
1885, Wilson Bentley took the first photograph of a snowflake.
January 14, 1875 -- Debate continues over greenbacks -- By 1875, the United States was involved in a roiling debate over greenbacks, the paper currency issued during the Civil War. So-called "soft money" supporters had taken up the cause of the greenback and successfully pushed for the paper notes to stay in circulation following the close of the war. However, "hard money" forces in the House fired back, and on January 14, they engineered the passage of the Specie Resumption Act, a legislative salvo against paper currency. The bill directed the Treasury to begin exchanging legal tender for gold on January 1, 1879; it also mandated that the number of greenbacks in circulation be trimmed down to $300 million. Treasury Secretary John Sherman stocked up on gold and, by the dawn of 1879, the specie exchange program was up and running. But, at the same time, greenbacks had become just as valuable as gold on the exchange market; the public was reluctant to swap their paper currency for coinage and the exchange program turned out to be a flop.
February 1, 1885 -- Mormon president goes underground -- John Taylor, the president of the Mormon Church, goes "underground" to avoid arrest and continue resisting federal demands for reforms within the community of Latter-day Saints. A former Methodist minister, Taylor converted to Mormonism in 1836, not long after Joseph Smith founded the religion in New York. Taylor quickly became one of Smith's closest confidants and supporters, and he remained loyal to the controversial prophet and his church through years of persecution. When Smith was assassinated in Illinois in 1844 by an angry mob, Taylor was by his side and suffered several wounds during the attack. He escaped serious injury because a heavy pocket watch stopped a potentially fatal bullet. After Smith's death, Taylor became an equally loyal follower of the new church president, Brigham Young. Taylor led one group of Mormon emigrants westward to Salt Lake City where Young was building a thriving theocratic empire. In Utah, he continued to ascend in the church hierarchy, and when Young died in 1877, Taylor took over leadership of the church. Taylor's tenure as the leader of the Latter-day Saints was marked by growing tensions between the church and the federal government. The Mormon practice of polygamy became a lightning rod for federal criticism, yet this issue reflected a larger struggle regarding the church's power over its members and the future state of Utah. Although the Mormons treasured the freedom to develop their new society free from outside interference, they also sought the benefits of being a part of the United States. Inevitably, these two goals conflicted. In 1851, the Mormons won territorial status for Utah, but the government remained suspicious of Taylor's theocratic society. To the federal government, the Mormon political and economic domination of the region violated the separation of church and state. By attacking polygamy, federal authorities hoped they could also undermine the secular power of the church. Taylor strongly opposed the federal attempts to undermine the Mormon theocracy. He believed the practice of polygamy was divinely ordained and state or federal anti-polygamy laws should not be allowed to prevail. Determined to assert the primacy of national secular law over the Mormon theocracy, U.S. marshals began arresting Mormons for practicing polygamy. Vulnerable to arrest themselves, Taylor and his leading administrators went underground on February 1, 1885. For the next two-and-a-half years, Taylor conducted church business from a series of secret hideouts in Salt Lake City. Taylor's underground administration managed to avoid arrest, but the federal actions were steadily undermining church power and influence. Grudgingly, in 1887, Taylor assented to one concession: making polygamy illegal in a proposed Utah state constitution. Congress found Taylor's proposed compromise inadequate and rejected the petition for statehood. Taylor died that same year, still an exile in his own home. For several more years, the Mormon leadership continued the fight, but federal pressure eventually became so great that in 1890 Taylor's successor publicly rejected polygamy. The theocratic government of the Latter-day Saints had been tamed, and Utah achieved statehood in 1896.
1885 Skyscraper
After the Great Fire of 1871, Chicago has become a magnet for daring experiments in architecture. William Le Baron Jenney completes the 10-story Home Insurance Company Building, the first to use steel-girder construction; more than twenty skyscrapers will be built in Chicago over the next 9 years.

January 29, 1886 -- Benz gets patent -- Karl Benz received a patent for his "Motorwagen" on this day. The Motorwagen, a three-wheeled automobile powered by an internal-combustion engine, was the first practical internal-combustion vehicle ever constructed. It made its first test run in early 1885. Benz completed his first four-wheeled motorcar in 1893, and went on to build many successful racing cars. In 1926, his company, Benz and Co., merged with Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft to form Daimler-Benz, an industry giant that has remained a formidable auto maker to the present day.
1885 Louis Pasteur develops a rabies vaccine
1885 Henri Poincar\'e introduces catastrophe theory
1885 Johann Balmer finds a mathematical expression for observed hydrogen line wavelengths
1885 William Stanley invents the alternating current transformer
1887 - Heinrich Hertz shows that electromagnetic waves exist. *[Note 3]
1887 - Idea of automatic exchange (Russia). *[Note 4]
1887 : First Groundhog Day February 2: General Interest -- On this day in 1887, Groundhog Day, featuring a rodent meteorologist, is celebrated for the first time at Gobbler's Knob in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. According to tradition, if a groundhog comes out of its hole on this day and sees its shadow, there will be six more weeks of winter weather; no shadow means an early spring. Groundhog Day has its roots in the ancient Christian tradition of Candlemas Day, when clergy would bless and distribute candles needed for winter. The candles represented how long and cold the winter would be. Germans expanded on this concept by selecting an animal—the hedgehog--as a means of predicting weather. Once they came to America, German settlers in Pennsylvania continued the tradition, although they switched from hedgehogs to groundhogs, which were plentiful in the Keystone State. Groundhogs, also called woodchucks and whose scientific name is Marmota monax, typically weigh 12 to 15 pounds and live six to eight years. They eat vegetables and fruits, whistle when they're frightened or looking for a mate and can climb trees and swim. They go into hibernation in the late fall; during this time, their body temperatures drop significantly, their heartbeats slow from 80 to five beats per minute and they can lose 30 percent of their body fat. In February, male groundhogs emerge from their burrows to look for a mate (not to predict the weather) before going underground again. They come out of hibernation for good in March. In 1887, a newspaper editor belonging to a group of groundhog hunters from Punxsutawney called the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club declared that Phil, the Punxsutawney groundhog, was America's only true weather-forecasting groundhog. The line of groundhogs that have since been known as Phil might be America's most famous groundhogs, but other towns across North America now have their own weather-predicting rodents, from Birmingham Bill to Staten Island Chuck to Shubenacadie Sam in Canada.
1887 "Platter" Record
Edison's tube recording system produces distorted sound because of gravity's pressure on the playing stylus. Emile Berliner, a German immigrant living in Washington, DC, invents a process for recording sound on a horizontal disc. The "platter" record is born.

1887 Albert Michelson and Edward Morley do not detect the ether drift
1887 Heinrich Hertz discovers the photoelectric effect
1888 Heinrich Hertz discovers radio waves
1888 John Dreyer publishes the New General Catalog
1888 Nikola Tesla patents the induction motor
1888 Henry Le Ch\^atelier states Le Ch\^atelier's Principle
1888 Kodak Camera
In Rochester, New York, George Eastman introduces a hand-held box camera for portable use. The camera is pre-loaded with 100 exposure film; after shooting the photographer returns the whole camera to the manufacturer for development and a reload.

1888 : National Geographic Society founded -- January 27: General Interest -- On January 27, 1888, the National Geographic Society is founded in Washington, D.C., for "the increase and diffusion of geographical knowledge." The 33 men who originally met and formed the National Geographic Society were a diverse group of geographers, explorers, teachers, lawyers, cartographers, military officers and financiers. All shared an interest in scientific and geographical knowledge, as well as an opinion that in a time of discovery, invention, change and mass communication, Americans were becoming more curious about the world around them. With this in mind, the men drafted a constitution and elected as the Society's president a lawyer and philanthropist named Gardiner Greene Hubbard. Neither a scientist nor a geographer, Hubbard represented the Society's desire to reach out to the layman. Nine months after its inception, the Society published its first issue of National Geographic magazine. Readership did not grow, however, until Gilbert H. Grosvenor took over as editor in 1899. In only a few years, Grosvenor boosted circulation from 1,000 to 2 million by discarding the magazine's format of short, overly technical articles for articles of general interest accompanied by photographs. National Geographic quickly became known for its stunning and pioneering photography, being the first to print natural-color photos of sky, sea and the North and South Poles.
1888 - Heinrich Hertz produces radio waves. *[Note 2]
1889 - Almon B. Strowger invents switch having line contacts in circular rows inside a cylinder. Controlled by push-buttons on telephone.
February 3, 1889 -- Belle Starr murdered in Oklahoma -- The outlaw Belle Starr is killed when an unknown assailant fatally wounds the famous "Bandit Queen" with two shotgun blasts from behind. As with the lives of other famous outlaws like Billy the Kid and Jesse James, fanciful accounts printed in newspapers and dime novels made Belle Starr's harsh and violent life appear far more romantic than it actually was. Born Myra Belle Shirley on a small farm near Carthage, Missouri, in 1848, she received an education in the classics and became a competent pianist. Seemingly headed for an unexciting but respectable middle-class life, her fate was changed by the outbreak of the Civil War, which ruined her father's business as a Carthage innkeeper and claimed the life of her brother Edwin. Devastated, the Shirley family abandoned Missouri to try to make a fresh start in Texas. In Texas, Belle began her life-long pattern of associating with men of questionable character. In 1866, she met Cole Younger, a member of the James-Younger gang that was gaining notoriety for a series of daring bank and train robberies. Rumor had it that Younger fathered Belle's first child, Pearl, though the father might have actually been another outlaw, Jim Reed. Regardless, Belle's relationship with Younger was short-lived, and in 1866 she became Reed's wife. Belle was apparently untroubled by her new husband's reputation and she had become his partner in crime by 1869. She joined him in stealing cattle, horses, and money in the Dallas area. Riding her mare, Venus, and sporting velvet skirts and plumed hats, Belle played the role of a "bandit queen" for several years. In 1874, a member of his own gang killed Reed, and Belle was suddenly on her own. Pursued by the law, she drifted into Oklahoma Indian Territory, where she led a band of cattle and horse thieves. There she met a handsome young Cherokee named Sam Starr, who eventually became her common-law husband and new criminal partner. The Starrs managed to elude capture for nearly a decade, but in 1883 they were arrested for horse theft and both served five months in the Detroit federal prison. Freed from prison, the couple immediately resumed their criminal careers. In 1886, Belle again lost a husband to violent death when Sam Starr was killed in a gunfight with an old enemy. Belle wasted no time in finding a third companion, a Creek Indian named Jim July, an outlaw who was 15 years her junior. In 1889, July was arrested for robbery and summoned to Fort Smith, Arkansas, to face charges. Belle accompanied her young lover for part of the journey but turned back before reaching Fort Smith. On her way home, someone ambushed and fatally wounded her with two shotgun blasts to her back. Jim July believed the murderer was a neighbor with whom the couple had been feuding, but no one was ever convicted of the crime.
1889 Dishwasher
After ten years work and numerous prototypes, Mrs. WA Cockran of Shelbyville, Indiana, eases kitchen labor everywhere by producing a practicable dishwashing machine.

1889 Roland von E\"otv\"os shows that gravitational mass and inertial mass are the same to within one part in one billion
1890 Emil von Behring discovers antitoxins and uses them to develop tetanus and diptheria vaccines
1890 Albert Michelson proposes the stellar interferometer
1890 - Herman Hollerith gets a contract for processing the 1900 census data using punched cards. His firm was eventually named IBM in 1924.
1890: Emil von Behring and Shibasaburo Kitasato develop effective diphtheria antitoxin.
1890 - 211,503 Bell telephone stations.
January 25, 1890 -- United Mine Workers of America founded -- On this day, a fleet of workers whose jobs were spread throughout the massive coal industry banded together to form the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). The UMWA rapidly became one of America's most potent, and at times most troubled, labor organizations. In its earliest incarnation, the coal union was a close affiliate of Samuel GompersÝs America Federation of Labor (A.F. of L.). The partnership not only helped legitimize the UMWA, but also shaped its politics, as GompersÝs A.F. of L. placed its conservative stamp on the new coal union. However, by 1935, UMWA chief John L. Lewis had grown disenchanted with the A.F. of L. and in the same year, Lewis and the UMWA joined forces with seven other unions to form the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The partnership didnÝt last long, at least for the coal workers: in 1942, the UMWA pulled up its stakes and withdrew from the CIO. On its own, the UMWA often fell prey to the anti-union tendencies of the federal government: in 1946 and 1948, Lewis and his union were found guilty of criminal contempt for failing to avert coal strikes. The UMWA persevered through the 1950s, but Lewis's retirement in 1960 badly rattled the union. By the late 1960s, the UMWA was riddled with corruption and internal struggles. The UMWA seemingly hit bottom in 1970, when reform minded president Joseph A. Yablonski, as well as his wife and daughter, were found murdered. However, a few years later, the situation turned even uglier when W.A. (Tony) Boyle, who had preceded Yablonski as the union's chief, was convicted of ordering the murders. The chaos continued until Richard Trumka's rise to the presidency in 1982: he cleansed some of the corruption and brought a modicum of stability back to the organization. In 1989, the UMWA ended its long stint as a lone wolf and joined forces with the AFL-CIO.
1891 - Invention of 1,000 line switch with disc bank having ten concentric rows of line contacts. Not used commercially. Formation of Strowger Automatic Telephone Exchange.
1891 Peep Show
Thomas A. Edison and William Dickson perfect their kinetoscope, a forerunner of the movie projector. Viewers watch through a small peephole as images pass between a lens and an electric light bulb at a rate of 46 frames per second. While the kinetoscope would lead directly to the development of moving pictures and the kingdom of Hollywood, Edison considered the kinetoscope as no more than a toy.

1891 Escalator
Jesse W. Reno, introduces a new novelty ride at Coney Island. His moving stairway elevates passengers on a conveyor belt at an angle of 25 degrees. The device will be shown at the Paris Exposition of 1900, where it is called the escalator.

1891 Thomas Edison patents the ``kinetescopic camera''
1892 Henry Le Ch\^atelier builds the first optical pyrometer
1892 Gasoline-powered Car
In a loft in Springfield, Massachusetts, brothers Frank and Charles Duryea fabricate the first gasoline-powered automobile built in the United States. It will make its first successful run on the streets of Springfield in September, 1893.

1892 - Almon Strowger, the St. Louis undertaker, became upset on finding that the wife of a competitor was a telephone operator who made his line busy and transferred calls meant for him to her husband. "Necessity is the mother of invention" so Strowger developed the dial telephone system to get the operator out of the system. He forms a Chicago firm, Automatic Electric, to manufacture step-by-step central office equipment (which is now owned by GTE). The first automatic C.O. was installed in LaPorte, Indiana. I discovered in Ralph Meyer's book, Old Time Telephones, that actually, in 1879, Connelly, Connelly and McTighe patented an automatic dial system, although they did not commercialize it.
1892 (October 18) - Opening of long distance telephone service, New York to Chicago, 950 miles.
February 1, 1893 -- First movie studio built -- On this day in 1893, Thomas Alva Edison finishes the first movie studio on his property in West Orange, N.J. The studio, a frame cabin covered with black roofing paper, was built on a pivot so it could be turned to face the sunlight throughout the day. Edison spent $638 building the studio, which he called a "revolving photographic building."
1893 Zipper
At the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Whitcomb L. Judson introduces his clasp locker, a hook-and-eye device opened and closed by a sliding clasp. Improvements in the device by other inventors will continue; workers at B.F. Goodrich will coin the name "zipper" in 1923.

1893: The Johns Hopkins University Medical School, first modern American medical school, opens in Baltimore.
1893 Ernst Mach states Mach's principle---first constructive attack on the idea of Newtonian absolute space
1893 Wilhelm Wien discovers the displacement law for a black-body's maximum specific intensity
1893 Edward Maunder discovers long-term variations in solar activity
1895: Parke-Davis Company founds first pharmaceutical research laboratory.
1895 Wilhelm R\"ontgen discovers X-rays
1895 Pierre Curie discovers that magnetization is proportional to magnetic field strength
1896 Antoine Becquerel discovers the radioactivity of uranium
1896 Arnold Sommerfield solves the half-plane diffraction problem
1896 Pieter Zeeman studies the splitting of spectral lines in magnetic fields
1896 Automatic Hat
James Boyle, of Washington, DC, makes public courtesy much more convenient for the modern gentleman. His new hat tips automatically.

1897 Player Piano
Edwin S. Votey, patents his self-playing piano, which he calls the pianola. The instrument uses instructions recorded on perforated paper to drive a set of artificial wooden fingers poised above a piano keyboard. Later versions placed the entire mechanism inside the body of the piano, eliminating the fingers.

1897: George Nuttall demonstrates that flies can spread plague bacilli.
1897: Aspirin, a highly effective pain reliever and fever reducer, is invented in Germany.
1897 Joseph Thomson discovers the electron
1897 Alvan Clark builds the Yerkes 40-inch optical refracting telescope
1897 Martinus Beijerinck discovers viruses
1898 Marie Curie and Pierre Curie isolate and study radium and polonium
1898 Submarine
The J.P. Holland torpedo boat company launches the first practical submarine, commissioned by the U.S. Navy. The test is successful. Holland gets orders for six more.

February 1, 1898 -- First auto insurance policy is issued -- The Travelers Insurance Company of Hartford, Connecticut, extended coverage to an automobile owner, making them the first company to issue an automobile insurance policy to an individual. Dr. Truman J. Martin of Buffalo, New York, paid a premium of $11.25 for the policy that covered $5,000 to $10,000 of liability. In 1925, Massachusetts became the first state to mandate automobile insurance, "requiring owners of certain motor vehicles and trailers to furnish security for their civil liabilities." Today, auto insurance is a fact of life for American drivers as nearly every state requires some insurance for the operator of a motor vehicle. In a country where the driver's license serves as the primary form of identification, the challenge of selecting a coverage policy and paying the car insurance premium has become a rite of passage for many young Americans.
1899 Ernest Rutheford discovers that uranium radiation is composed of positively charged alpha particles and negatively charged beta particles
October 29, 1901 -- A mass-murdering nurse is arrested -- Nurse Jane Toppan is arrested in Amherst, Massachusetts, for single-handedly killing the Davis family of Boston with an overdose of morphine during a period of six weeks in July and August. Toppan's childhood, as with virtually all serial killers, was very troubled. Her mother died when she was very young, and her father had severe mental problems. A tailor by trade, he was sent to an asylum after he stitched together his own eyelids. Although her sister was soon sent off to a mental hospital as well, Jane bounced around between several orphanages for years until she was finally adopted. To all around her, Toppan seemed to be doing fine until a broken engagement led her to attempt suicide. After recovering from her suicide attempt, she went on to study nursing and developed a fascination with the morgue, corpses, and autopsies. For years, she worked as a private nurse, taking care of elderly patients throughout the New England area, but no one took note of her patients' survival rate until she came to care for Mattie Davis. Davis, who was an old friend of Toppan's, died on July 4, 1901, in Toppan's care. Volunteering to assist the Davis family as they worked through their grief, Toppan soon began to care for Mattie's sister, Annie, and her father, Alden. On July 29, Annie died, and, only days later, Alden died as well. Because she had also allowed Toppan to treat her, the only surviving family member, Mary, was not suspicious of her relatives' deaths. However, a few weeks later, she too was dead. Mary's husband, who knew that the deaths had gone beyond coincidence, demanded autopsies of all of the family members. After the coroner determined that they had each been killed by morphine injections, Toppan fled Boston. During her time as a fugitive, Toppan killed her sister, Edna Bannister. By the time she was arrested, authorities produced solid evidence of 11 murders, and she confessed to 20 more. Some believe that she may have been responsible for as many as 100 deaths. At her trial, Toppan told the court, "That is my ambition, to have killed more people-more helpless people-than any man or woman who has ever lived." Unsurprisingly, she was sent to a Massachusetts mental asylum. There, she allegedly implored the workers to get some morphine so that they could have fun by killing the other patients. Toppan died in 1938.
1901 Shaving
King Camp Gillette, former traveling hardware salesman of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, takes the risk out of shaving with his new double-edged safety razor. By the end of 1904, he will have sold 90,000 razors and 12,400,000 blades, but he will die in 1932 with his dream of a utopian society organized by engineers unrealized.

1902 Air Conditioning
Working as an engineer at the Buffalo Forge Company, Willis H. Carrier designs the first system to control temperature and humidity. He will go on to found his own company, the Carrier Corporation, to produce air-conditioning equipment.
1916 - On November 7, 1916, Montana suffragist Jeannette Rankin was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, becoming the first woman to win a seat in the federal Congress. A dedicated pacifist, Rankin’s first vote as a U.S. congresswoman was against U.S. entry into World War I.