Ferdinand Von Helmholtz shows that different forms of Gauge Field can give rise to the same electromagnetic field

United States. President Ulysses Grant signs a congressional resolution authorizing the Secretary of War to establish the National Weather Service. Grant assigns it to the War Department both because he believes that only military discipline is capable of gathering the necessary data and making predictions, and because he believes such an effort is justified only during wartime. But it is with the terrible blizzard of January 12, 1888, a relatively warm day on the Great Plains of America, that the population and the government realize the usefulness of weather forecasting, especially for agricultural purposes. On January 12, 1888, temperatures suddenly drop by 30 or 40 degrees Celsius, bringing an unexpected snowstorm. The National Weather Service is transferred to the Department of Agriculture.

The average working week is 65 hours in Western Europe and 60 hours in the United States. This will drop to 45 and 40 hours, respectively, by 1950.

During the Union Pacific excavations, the almost complete skeleton of the first Brontosaurus (thunder lizard) was found, which caused great wonder and made the front pages of all the newspapers.

The Suez Canal is inaugurated.

Huxley coined the term agnosticism or unknowability, in opposition to Gnosticism which claims to know everything.

Japan annexed the island of Hokkaido, originally inhabited by the Ainu people, significantly different from the Japanese, but largely already controlled.

American George Herbert Taylor invented the vibrator. It was a medical bed with a sphere at its center that was made to vibrate the patient’s pelvic area by a mechanism powered by a steam engine in the next room. At the time, however, Dr. Joseph Mortimer Granville’s percuteur was already widespread. This portable device, although not specifically designed, was already being used by some doctors to “cure” so-called female hysteria.

The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution is approved. The amendment was passed with the aim of guaranteeing the rights of slaves. Today, it is the foundation of due process and the equal protection clause in the laws of each state. The amendment was proposed to the states on June 13, 1866, by a vote in the House, with all Republicans voting in favor and all Democrats against. It was ratified on July 9, 1868.

Henrietta Leavitt was born in Lancaster, Massachusetts. She discovered the law of Cepheid variables: their absolute magnitude is proportional to the period of their variability. This provided a method for estimating the distances of galaxies, which allowed her to discover, for example, that the small spiral nebulae seen in the sky were not within our galaxy (the Milky Way) but far outside it, and were therefore much larger than we thought: they were themselves galaxies like our own, or even larger. The volume of the known universe would suddenly become billions of times larger.

United States. President Andrew Johnson is impeached and acquitted by a single vote.

Japan. Conspirators capture the gates of the Imperial Palace in Kyoto, ending the shogunate and restoring power to the emperor. The Meiji Restoration has begun. The shogun accepts defeat, but many others do not, sparking a civil war. But realism quickly prevails. Westerners cannot all be expelled. New, more equitable treaties must be drafted. The navy and army must be modeled on the British navy and the German army. Western teachers and scientists are imported.

With Garibaldi’s inconclusive expedition to Rome, the democratic Risorgimento failed, while the year before the royal Risorgimento had failed at Custoza.

Lazio. Many Garibaldi followers end up in papal prisons, others manage to cross the border where Italian troops disarm and arrest them. Garibaldi is captured and taken to La Spezia, then sent back to Caprera. General Govone witnesses him protesting, declaring himself an American citizen and an Italian general.

Giuseppe Garibaldi, confined on the island of Caprera, a sixty-year-old man suffering from arthritis and with an ankle injured by the Bersaglieri in Aspromonte, manages to escape one evening on a small boat, in which he remains lying down to elude surveillance, paddling as he had learned to do in America.

Joseph Lister began using carbolic acid as an antiseptic agent in all his surgical procedures, not just as a post-operative dressing. He had previously used this method on a child with an open leg fracture—a highly feared case at the time. He carefully cleaned the bone and the patient’s area with gauze soaked in carbolic acid. He then prepared a dressing using carbolic acid-soaked cloths, covered with a metal sheet shaped to prevent evaporation of the acid. The dressing was bandaged. A scab formed, and the wound healed without infection. Coal tar, from which Lister obtained carbolic acid, was readily available as a waste product from gas-lamp lighting in urban streets. Lister later succeeded in obtaining the main component of carbolic acid, phenol, in its pure form of white crystals. By 1878, Lister’s antiseptic surgery techniques were in use throughout the world.

Charles Feltman opens the first hot dog shop in the United States, located in Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York, and sells 3,684 in a year. He is credited with coining the word “hot dog.”

Veneto. Plebiscite for annexation to the Kingdom of Italy. Voters numbered 647,495, with 647,426 voting yes.

The Italo-Austrian Peace Treaty is signed, by which the Austrian Empire recognizes the Kingdom of Italy. The country thus completes its territorial unification, excluding only Rome (which will be conquered on September 20, 1870) and Trento.

Italy acquires the Veneto. Rome, annexed in 1870, is still missing; Trento with Trentino; and Trieste with Venezia Giulia, annexed between 1915 and 1919 (World War I or Fourth War of Independence). The new Italian state is reluctant to start a new war, while Italian revolutionaries are aiming for actions such as the Expedition of the Thousand, which, by leveraging the support of the local population, would allow the liberation of the territories. Garibaldi’s expedition against the Papal States is stopped by the Italian army, which fears war with France, the Papal States’ protector. In 1866, the Kingdom of Italy allies itself with Prussia against Austria. The war in Italy will be a failure, but the Prussian victory will allow the Kingdom of Italy to annex the Veneto.

Bezzecca. Garibaldi and his men achieve victory over the Austrians, but it is a useless victory: the war draws to a close thanks to the Prussian victory, and Garibaldi must halt the advance on Trento by order of the king, to which he responds with the famous “Obbedisco.”

Bernhard Riemann died of tuberculosis in Selasca near Verbania, on Lake Maggiore. He was buried in the local cemetery in Biganzolo. His work introduced the concept of extra dimensions to simplify the laws of physics, wormholes (Riemann’s cut), and the concept of gravity as a field. It would serve as a theoretical foundation for Maxwell and Einstein.