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 distributing electrical energy from the falls. The contest was extended to 28 nations worldwide, including several American companies and participants. Edison (obviously) considered using direct current (DC), while Westinghouse (before consulting with Tesla) considered using compressed air pipes to transmit the power. Adams opted for electric current. The (newly formed) General Electric (with Edison) then proposed DC for Niagara and AC for Buffalo (more distant) in 1892. Finally, in January 1893, Westinghouse (finally) decided to enforce his (Tesla’s) patents for three-phase AC motors and generators.

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 rule. The Brazilian empire, however, did not get off to a good start, and in 1831, Emperor Pedro I abdicated in favor of his five-year-old son and returned to Portugal. Pedro II was crowned emperor in 1841 and proved a far more capable ruler than his father. During his fifty-year reign, Brazil enjoyed unprecedented stability, and its troubled economy began to balance out and grow. Later, however, the emperor lost the favor of certain sectors of society, including the military and the growing urban middle class. After his deposition, Pedro II went to Europe, where he died in exile two years later.

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. Edison is, in fact, convinced that the savage alternating motion of AC current, 60 times per second, would destroy every cell in the body. At this point in the “War of the Currents” between AC and DC, victory is already practically in the hands of AC current (Tesla and Westinghouse): in the last month, Westinghouse has received more orders for AC lights than Edison received for DC in a year. For electrocution in the electric chair, Edison, perhaps in good faith believing AC to be more lethal, nevertheless recommends AC. In December, the Medico-Legal Society recommends AC for the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison. At this point, Westinghouse, who had kept himself aloof until then, accused the commission of being the paid underling of the Edison Electric Light Company and a cynical psychological terrorist. Harold Brown, a member of the commission, challenged Westinghouse to an electric boxing match, with one pair of AC and one pair of DC gloves, and the voltage increased by 20 volts in each round. Westinghouse declined.

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 $15,000 from the third onwards. Over the life of the patents (17 years), Tesla, Peck, and Brown would earn $315,000.

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 systems to create rotational motion and is credited with introducing the concept of phase. Westinghouse then sent his associate, Pantaleoni, to Turin to purchase Ferraris’s patents for $1,000, thus ensuring broad coverage of polyphase systems.

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 the MIT Society of Arts in Boston that same month.

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 does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear.” Twenty-five exposures per second for twenty-eight minutes, for a total of 42,000 images.

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 for agricultural purposes. On January 12, 1888, the National Weather Service was transferred to the Department of Agriculture. President Ulysses Grant had signed a congressional resolution in 1870 authorizing the Secretary of War to establish the National Weather Service. Grant had assigned it to the War Department both because he believed that only military discipline was capable of gathering the necessary data and making predictions, and because he believed that such an effort was justified only during a war.

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 two of his children are killed. This finally attracts the attention of the law, and before the year is out, Wall Hatfield and eight other members of his family are arrested. Seven receive life sentences, while the eighth, Ellison Cottontop Mounts, is hanged. Johnse Hatfield is the last to be tried, in 1901.

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, approximately one million words, is devoted to alchemy and theology! Newton, in fact, devoted a good portion of his life to alchemy rather than physics and science. This portion of the material was deemed of little interest and returned to the Earls of Portsmouth.

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 the Earth and the Moon).

In Gerlinger, near Stuttgart, Robert Bosch founds Bosch