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Stanford University is founded

Liberal Giolitti promotes universal suffrage in Italy

William Wrigley Jr. moved to Chicago to sell soap; he later switched to baking powder, and to encourage merchants to buy his baking powder, he gave them two packets of chewing gum for every packet of baking powder. Chewing gum soon became his main business,

Carl Auer combined thorium and cerium oxides in a ratio of 99 to 1 to produce a satisfactory white light (his previous gas light patent from 1885 produced a horrible greenish light). Thorium is radioactive, but this was not known at the time. Auer’s new

United States. Philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce publishes an article in the journal The Monist, titled “A Conjecture for the Enigma,” in which he sets forth his metaphysics and philosophy of mind, placing them against the backdrop of an evolutionary cosmology.

William Ramsay, professor of chemistry at University College London, discovers five new elements. These are the noble or inert gases. They will prove essential for lighting: when exposed to an electric current, they begin to glow while remaining chemically unchanged.

Flu epidemic kills one million in Asia

United States. Banker Edward Dean Adams (formerly head of the Cataract Construction Company in Niagara), after hearing opinions on electrical power transmission from the British, Germans, and Swiss, formed the International Niagara Commission, which held a contest to determine the best method for extracting and

The U.S. Census Bureau faces its first crisis in processing census data. Herman Hollerith’s punched-card processing machine cuts processing times from eight to two years;

Henrik Lorentz, after whom these transformations are now named, anticipated length contraction and time dilation. But it would take Poincaré and Einstein to discover that both actually occur at great speeds, and that at the speed of light, space vanishes and time stands still.

Paris, foundation of the Second Socialist International

Friedrich Nietzsche was interned in a mental asylum in Jena, due to mental instability probably of syphilitic origin.

Friedrich Nietzsche publishes Ecce Homo, in which one can already see signs of the mental instability (probably of syphilitic origin) that will lead to his confinement in a mental asylum in Jena.

Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy writes Kreutzer Sonata.

Vincent Van Gogh decides to enter a hospice; he continues to paint assiduously

Brazil’s last emperor is deposed. After a 49-year reign, Pedro II, Brazil’s second and last emperor, is deposed in a military coup. The Brazilian monarchy was born in 1822 when the Portuguese reigning prince Dom Pedro defied his parliament and proclaimed Brazil’s independence under his

Thomas Alva Edison is drawn into the most unpleasant controversy of his career: the Medico-Legal Society notifies the New York State Legislature that the quickest and least painful way to execute criminals condemned to death is with a 3,000-volt discharge of direct or alternating current.

The Italian physicist Augusto Righi coined the term photoelectric effect for the phenomenon just observed by Heinrich Hertz. It was theoretically explained by Albert Einstein in 1905, and would lead to the creation of solar panels (photoelectric cells).

Tesla’s business partners, Peck and Brown, agreed to sell the AC motor patents to Westinghouse for $75,000 and royalties of $2.50 per horsepower for each motor. Westinghouse, in turn, guaranteed that the royalties would be at least $5,000 the first year, $10,000 the second, and

Westinghouse noticed a scientific article by Galileo Ferraris in the Proceedings of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Turin. Ferraris, a professor of Applied Physics, had conducted experiments with polyphase systems in 1885, publishing his work in 1888. He also discussed how to use polyphase

Nikola Tesla delivers a lecture at the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE) entitled “A New System of Alternating Current Motors and Transformers.” This is the culmination of a planned marketing campaign, which also includes the renowned Professor William Anthony presenting Tesla’s AC motor at

Photographer Eadweard Muybridge visits Thomas Alva Edison after demonstrating zoopraxiscopic images, images that follow one another rapidly and leave the impression of movement on the retina. Edison is deeply interested. Within a few weeks, Edison will invent the Kinetograph and the Kinetoscope: “an instrument that

National Geographic is founded in Washington DC

United States. A terrible blizzard on January 12, 1888, a relatively warm day on the Great Plains of America, suddenly dropped temperatures by 30 or 40 degrees Celsius, bringing an unexpected snowstorm. The population and the government thus realized the usefulness of weather forecasts, especially

Hatfield-McCoy feud, Kentucky. New Year’s Night Massacre. Several armed men from the Hatfield family surround the McCoy home and open fire on the sleeping family. They then set the house ablaze. Randolph McCoy, the target of the raid, manages to escape, but his wife and

Isaac Newton’s private papers, inherited first by his niece Catherine Barton, then passed to the Earl of Portsmouth, then examined in 1777 by Bishop Samuel Horsley, and finally donated to Cambridge University, have now been catalogued. It turns out that a large body of work,

Chromosomes, so called because of their strong tendency to absorb light, which makes them easily observable, are observed under the microscope for the first time.

Heinrich Kreutz observed a comet skimming the Sun and surviving to reappear on the other side. Today, these comets are called Kreutz sungrazers. An example is C/2011 W3 Lovejoy (I’ve seen it!), which will pass just 140,000 km from the Sun (half the distance between

In Gerlinger, near Stuttgart, Robert Bosch founds Bosch

Friedrich Nietzsche published “Beyond Good and Evil,” in which he contrasted aristocratic morality, which values courage and greed, with slave morality, which values humility, compassion, and benevolence.

Ohio, United States. Charles Hall, while studying at Oberlin College, passes a current through a solution containing aluminum, releasing the precious metal, which precipitates to the bottom in the form of flakes. Hall is only 23 years old and has found a sort of philosopher’s

Carl Auer patented a gas light with a jacket made of magnesium, lanthanum, and yttrium oxides. Its greenish light, however, did not make it popular.

The discovery of Neodymium by Carl Auer, a century later, paved the way for applications in high-performance brushless motors, as a component (NdFeB) of permanent magnets on the rotor.

Modena. The exit to the Public Gardens from Via Vittorio Emanuele is opened.

Professor Galileo Ferraris of the University of Turin describes a method for producing a rotating magnetic field. Nikola Tesla had, unknowingly, already described it in 1882 and produced the various apparatus needed to test its operation.

Alexandria. German bacteriologist Robert Koch discovers Vibrio cholerae. The previous year, Vibrio cholerae had killed his French rival, physician Louis Thuillier.

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra, written in oracular language. The work contains some fundamental ideas: the concept of supermen who will replace men, the transvaluation of values, and finally the eternal return of the same (everything that has happened once is destined to happen

Grocer-pharmacist John Pomberton invents Coca-Cola in Atlanta. On May 8, 1886, he sells the first glass of Coca-Cola at Jacobs’ Pharmacy in downtown Atlanta. He serves nine drinks a day for the first year.

The British invade and occupy Egypt, losing only 57 soldiers in the decisive Battle of Tell al-Kebir. This soon prompts other European powers to embark on colonial adventures in Africa.

The first blow of the pickaxe to demolish the city walls of Modena; the demolition work will be completed before the 1920s.

The surface of the sea off the East Coast of the United States, stretching for approximately 480 kilometers, is covered with the bodies of approximately 1.4 billion fish. The die-off is believed to have been caused by an incursion of cold water during a storm.

Amalia Emmy Noether, author of the famous Noether Theorem, was born in Erlangen: CNS for the existence of a continuous symmetry is the existence of a conserved quantity (i.e., an invariant).

Ferdinand Von Lindemann publishes the first proof of the irrationality ofp

Budapest. Nikola, while working and visiting Ganz & Co., notices a non-functioning ring transformer on the ground in the warehouse. It’s broken because it’s caused by incorrectly wound copper wire. Tesla turns it on and places an iron ball on the wooden disk that covers

Charles Dow and Edward Jones found Dow Jones & Co.

In Modena the illiteracy rate is around 70%, and the number of high school students is no more than a thousand.

Industrial Revolution: The Singer factory releases the first electric automatic sewing machine model: the 99K (the fifth Singer model overall). By 1900, 40 models were in production, and by 1929, there were as many as 3,000!

London. The British government decides, for the first time, to align all timetables in the kingdom with Greenwich Mean Time.

Menlo Park, New Jersey. The first power line for Thomas Alva Edison’s streetlights is buried and connected in time for November 2nd, Election Day. Edison, a staunch Republican, issues instructions: “If Garfield is elected, turn everything on; if not, don’t turn it on.” The numbers

Thomas Alva Edison files for patent US369280, “System of Electrical Distribution.” He will soon apply for this patent and US223898, “Electric Lamp,” to install 800 light bulbs in the Lower Manhattan district.

Thomas Alva Edison receives confirmation of patent US223898 “Electric Lamp”.

The steamship Strathleven, equipped by James Harrison, left Melbourne and arrived in London two months later, carrying 40 tons of frozen beef and lamb. It was made using the process Harrison himself had invented for Australian beer 28 years earlier. He had made another shipment

South Africa: Zulu King Cetshwayo is captured by the British

The British arrive again in Afghanistan, and make a second (not triumphant) entry into Kabul. At first, the story seems to follow the same pattern as in 1841-42, but this time when the first insurgents appear, they are mowed down by Gatling guns. The Afghans

Albert Einstein, the greatest scientist of the 20th century, was born in Ulm.

English physicist Samuel Tolver Preston first hypothesized random fluctuations from thermodynamic equilibrium that could host the Milky Way. This topic would later be explored independently by Ludwig Boltzmann and Ernst Zermelo.

Samarium is discovered by Paul Emile Lecoq de Boisbaudran. The discovery occurs when the scientist observes impure samples of didymium (which later turns out to be composed of neodymium and praseodymium). A century later, samarium will be a component of some rare-earth magnets (although the

Maribor, Styria, Austro-Hungarian Empire. Young Nikola Tesla is arrested by the police as a vagrant. He has been in Maribor for a year after moving from Graz, where he never enrolled in his third year of university (despite successfully completing the first two). His father,

War between the English and the Zulus in South Africa

Vincent Van Gogh, after having attempted the profession of lay evangelist, began to draw

United States. Philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, after teaching courses on the history and logic of science at Harvard, becomes a professor of logic at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Invention of the pedal-and-chain bicycle (John Lawson)

The discovery of samarium in Sweden paved the way for its application, a century later, in permanent magnets in brushless motors.

Sweden. Scandium (Sc) is discovered. Swedish science contributes 19 elements to the periodic table, more than a fifth of the total, including manganese, molybdenum, and a large portion of the rare earth elements (yttrium, erbium, terbium, ytterbium, scandium, thulium, etc.).

First telephone exchange in New Haven, Connecticut

Second Anglo-Afghan War: The British invade Afghanistan to counter Russian expansion

Japan. The main architect of the Meiji Reforms, which led to the new Western-style rule, Toshimichi Okubo, is violently attacked and brutally murdered by seven samurai. The fatal blow is delivered with such force that the sword pierces his throat from side to side and

Ludwig Boltzmann enunciates a third form of the Second Law of Thermodynamics: the entropy of an isolated system always increases

Albany, New York, United States. Lyman Potter, on a bet, sets out to cross the United States, pushing a wheelbarrow on foot. He sets out with only $3 and 55 cents in his pocket. He reaches San Francisco on October 27th, having completed the journey

O.C. Marsh, in a hasty note typical of the rush these days that pits him against Edwin D. Cope, describes Apatosaurus ajax; the haste is also dictated by the enormous amount of finds unearthed in North America in just a few years.

Albert A. Michelson of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, measures the speed of light to an accuracy of 0.02%.

United States. Philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce publishes an article in the magazine Popular Science Monthly titled “Illustrations of the Logic of Science,” which argues that there is no such thing as objective truth. Science strives for absolute truth, but can only ever approximate it. This

Japan. The University of Tokyo is Japan’s first national university.

The court battle over the Celluloid patent between Englishman Daniel Spill and American John Wesley Hyatt ended with a ruling that neither man could claim the patent. This opened the commercial doors to the entire plastics industry, sparking intense competition and a wave of innovation.

Alexander Graham Bell inaugurates his first telephone line. Bell’s main challenge, however, will be creating a market for this invention: despite a well-orchestrated marketing campaign, it will take decades to convince American businesses and citizens to use this new technological marvel.

The fourth dimension entered the imagination of Victorian England with the American psychologist Henry Slade. In London, he claimed to be able to operate in the fourth dimension. He was arrested for fraud, but some physicists (such as Johann Zollner of the University of Leipzig)

Thomas Edison invents the phonograph

Thomas Edison founds his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, the first center of methodical scientific research and technological development in the world.

The “Corriere della Sera” is founded in Italy

At the Centennial in Philadelphia, Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated his telephone to a small audience. As the son of the creator of a teaching method for the deaf and himself a teacher of the deaf, Bell possessed a far more refined and sophisticated understanding of