I find the study of history fascinating and intoxicating. For the last few years on my blog ‘The Catholic Bard’, I have been researching and then constructing the knowledge found in that research into accessible timelines that assemble lots of trivial facts about a lot of historical events into a birds-eye view of history. Timelines help you learn a little about a lot. In my opinion Trivia isn’t Trivial, it’s informational and helps you gain an inkling of knowledge about our existence in this reality we live it. This is the reason of Why I Like To Write Literary Timelines -Here Are Some Thoughts On Why Timelines Of History Are A Good Thing.

Last year in life I talked about

The 1st Full Decade Of Cinema & Sherlock Holmes-1890 -1899 |
A Look At Life In The 1890’s.

Having made my way through the 19th century, we now come into the century that has most affected the lives of those living today in the 21st century namely the

20th Century

We start from our place in 2025

125 Years Ago

1900

“The Flight Of The Bumble Bee” m. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

January 4, 1900 – James Bond, American ornithologist is born. (d. 1989)

February 5, 1900 – The United Kingdom and the United States sign a treaty for the building of a Central American shipping canal across Central America in Nicaragua.

May 1, 1900 – The Scofield Mine disaster in Scofield, Utah caused by explosion killing at least 200 men.

May 17, 1900

The publication of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

May 14, 1900 – The second Olympic Games, Paris 1900, open (as part of the Paris World Exhibition).

May 24, 1900 – Jean-Baptiste de La Salle is canonized.

June 25, 1900 – The Taoist monk Wang Yuanlu discovers the Dunhuang manuscripts, a cache of ancient texts that are of great historical and religious significance, in the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang, China, where they have been sealed since the early 11th century.

September 8, 1900 

Galveston hurricane leaves an estimated 6,000 to 8,000 dead. According to the census, the nation’s population numbers nearly 76 million.

 

December 26, 1900 – Flannan Isles Lighthouse is a lighthouse near the highest point on Eilean Mòr, one of the Flannan Isles in the Outer Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland. The lighthouse was manned by three men: James Ducat, Thomas Marshall, and Donald McArthur, with a rotating fourth man spending time on shore. When the crew of the Hesperus arrived, they found that all 3 lighthouse keepers had mysteriously disappeared.

Guy-Blaché’s (Alice Guy) 1900 version of La Fée aux Choux employed one actress (the fairy), two live babies, and a number of dolls.

124 Years Ago

1901 – Booker T. Washington – Up from Slavery

1901 -The Barry’s Tea company was founded in Cork.

January 1, 1901– The British colonies of New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria and Western Australia federate as the Commonwealth of Australia; Edmund Barton becomes the first Prime Minister of Australia. Also Nigeria in Africa becomes a British protectorate.

January 22, 1901 – Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom dies at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. She is 81 years old and, having ruled for nearly 64 years, will be the second longest-reigning monarch in British history. Her eldest son, Prince Albert Edward, “Bertie”, the longest-serving Prince of Wales to this time, succeeds his mother at the age of 59, reigning as King Edward VII, of the United Kingdom and in innovation the British Dominions and also becoming Emperor of India.

January 28, 1901 – Founding of the American League in baseball.

February 2, 1901 – The State funeral of Queen Victoria, held at St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, UK, is attended by many European royals, including Kaiser Wilhelm II and Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria.

February 5, 1900 – The Hay–Pauncefote Treaty is signed by the United Kingdom and United States, ceding control of the Panama Canal to the United States.

March 31, 1901– The Irish population census was taken. The population of the entire island was 4.5 million people. Roman Catholics outnumbered Anglicans and Presbyterians by almost three to one.

May 3, 1901 – The Great Fire of 1901 begins in Jacksonville, FL, USA.

August 6, 1901 – Discovery Expedition: Robert Falcon Scott sets sail from Britain on the RRS Discovery to explore the Ross Sea in Antarctica.

August 10,1901 –The Versailles Time-Slip    Two English women walked into the past. This is a documented true story that was extensively researched by the women who experienced this timeslip.

August 30, 1901 – Hubert Cecil Booth patents an electric vacuum cleaner, in the United Kingdom.

September 6, 1901 – President McKinley’s is shot by anarchist Leon Czolgosz in Buffalo, N.Y.

September 7, 1901 – The Boxer Rebellion in Qing dynasty China officially ends with the signing of the Boxer Protocol.

Before the Boxer Rebellion ended, here is A French political propaganda cartoon depicting China as a pie about to be carved up by the powers to be at the time. Here we have depicted Queen Victoria (United Kingdom), Kaiser Wilhelm II (Germany), Tsar Nicholas II (Russia), Marianne (France) and a samurai (Japan), while the Boxer leader Dong Fuxiang (a non-Muslim Han Chinese general who commanded Muslim Hui soldiers) protests.

September 14, 1901 – Vice President Theodore Roosevelt becomes the 26th president of the United States, upon President William McKinley‘s death.

October 15, 1901 – The Big Swallow is British silent comic trick film, directed by James Williamson, featuring a man, irritated by the presence of a photographer, who solves his dilemma by swallowing him and his camera whole. The three-shot trick film is, according to Michael Brooke of BFI Screenonline, “one of the most important early British films in that it was one of the first to deliberately exploit the contrast between the eye of the camera and of the audience watching the final film”.

October 16, 1901 – U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt invites African American leader Booker T. Washington to the White House. The American South reacts angrily to the visit, and racial violence increases in the region.

October 19, 1901 – Edward Elgar‘s first two Pomp and Circumstance marches premier in Liverpool.

December 10, 1901 – The first Nobel Prize ceremony is held in Stockholm, on the fifth anniversary of Alfred Nobel‘s death.

December 12, 1901 – Guglielmo Marconi receives the first trans-Atlantic radio signal, sent from Poldhu, England, to St. John’s, Newfoundland; it is the letter “S” in Morse code.

123 Years Ago

Pablo Picasso – Femme aux Bras Croisés

1902 -Remains of the second Tyrannosaurus rex specimen, the first recognized as such, are excavated by Barnum Brown in the Hell Creek Formation of Montana.

January 1, 1902 -The Nurses Registration Act 1901 comes into effect in New Zealand, making it the first country in the world to require state registration of nurses. On January 10, Ellen Dougherty becomes the world’s first registered nurse.

Nathan Stubblefield demonstrates his wireless telephone device in the U.S. state of Kentucky.

January 23, 1902 – The first example of a Sherlockian game – a study of inconsistencies of dates in Arthur Conan Doyle‘s The Hound of the Baskervilles (the serialization of which in The Strand Magazine concludes in April) by publisher Frank Sidgwick – appears in The Cambridge Review.

February 1902– A commission on yellow fever in the United States announces that the disease is carried by mosquitoes.

 

May 4, 1902– More than four hundred members of the East Side Hebrew Retail Butchers’ Kosher Guarantee and Benevolent Association convene to discuss how to respond to a rise in wholesale prices that has driven many out of business.

June 1902 – The centenary of the Congregation of Christian Brothers was celebrated with High Mass in the Holy Name Cathedral, Chicago.

July 2, 1902 – Philippine–American War ends.

July 6, 1902 – St. Maria Goretti dies.

July 14, 1914 – Peruvian explorer Agustín Lizárraga rediscovers the Inca citadel of Machu Picchu, Peru.

August 22, 1902 – Theodore Roosevelt becomes the first American President to ride in an automobile, a Columbia Electric Victoria through Hartford, Connecticut.

August 23, 1902 – A trolley park on the shore of Canobie Lake in Salem NH is founded which will eventually become Canobie Lake Park in which I spend a lot of my youth going to.

September 1, 1902 – The first science fiction film, the silent A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans La Lune), is premièred at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin in Paris, France, by actor/producer Georges Méliès, and proves an immediate success.

October 1902 – W. W. Jacobs – The Lady of the Barge (short stories, including “The Monkey’s Paw“)

November 16, 1902 – A newspaper cartoon depicting U.S. President “Teddy” Roosevelt refusing to shoot a bear cub inspires creation of the first teddy bear by Morris Michtom in New York City.

Teddy bear early 1900s – Smithsonian Museum of Natural History – 2012-05-15 An original “Teddy Bear” from 1903, manufactured by Benjamin Michton, son of the founder of the Ideal Toy Co. This bear was owned by Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson, Kermit.

November 18, 1902 – Former deceased U.S. president Benjamin Harrison was memorialized on several postage stamps. The first was a 13-cent stamp issued on November 18, 1902, with his engraved likeness modeled after a photo his widow provided. In all Harrison has been honored on six U.S. postage stamps, more than most other U.S. presidents.

November 30,1902 – On the American frontier, the second-in-command of Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch, Harvey Logan (“Kid Curry”), is captured after a shootout with lawmen in Knoxville, Tennessee. He is sentenced to a $5,000 fine and 20 years hard labor for robbery but escapes custody in 1903.

December 30, 1902 – Discovery Expedition: British explorers Scott, Shackleton and Wilson reach the furthest southern point reached thus far by man, south of 82°S.

Notable Books Published

• L. Frank Baum – The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus
• J. M. Barrie – The Little White Bird (includes the story “Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens“)
• Rudyard Kipling – Just So Stories for Little Children

• E. Nesbit – Five Children and It
• Beatrix Potter – The Tale of Peter Rabbit
• P. G. Wodehouse – The Pothunters

122 Years Ago
1903

Herminie Templeton – Darby O’Gill and the Good People (book publication)

Kate Douglas Wiggin – Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm

Helen Keller – The Story of My Life (book publication)

“You’re The Flower Of My Heart, Sweet Adeline” w. Richard H. Gerard m. Henry W. Armstrong

1903 -The remains of “Cheddar Man” are found within Gough’s Cave in Cheddar Gorge, Britain’s oldest complete human skeleton, dating to approximately 7150 BCE.

January 19, 1903 – The first west–east transatlantic radio broadcast is made from the United States to England (the first east–west broadcast having been made in 1901).

February 15, 1903 – Toy store owner and inventor Morris Michtom places two stuffed bears in his shop window, advertising them as Teddy bears.- | HISTORY

March 17, 1903– In Waterford, Saint Patrick’s Day was marked as a public holiday (to encourage temperance).

March 25, 1903 – The Alaska Boundary Dispute is settled in the United States‘ favour

April 11, 1903 – St. Gemma Galgani dies.

May 1903 –Vie et Passion du Christ was a 44-minute French silent film that was produced and released in 1903. As such, it is considered the first feature-length narrative film.

May 24, 1903 – The Paris–Madrid race for automobiles begins, during which at least eight people are killed; the French government stops the event at Bordeaux and impounds all of the competitors’ cars.

June 20, 1903 – Jack London‘s novel The Call of the Wild begins serial publication in the Saturday Evening Post.

June 27, 1903 – American socialite Aida de Acosta, 19, becomes the first woman to fly a powered aircraft solo when she pilots Santos-Dumont‘s motorized dirigible, “No. 9”, from Paris to Château de Bagatelle in France.

July 1–19, 1903 – The first Tour de France bicycle race is held; Maurice Garin wins it.

July 23, 1903 – The Ford Motor Company sells its first car Ford Model A.

August 4, 1903 – Pope Pius X succeeds Pope Leo XIII as the 257th pope.

October 1–13, 1903 – First modern World Series: The Boston Americans defeat the Pittsburgh Pirates in eight games.

December 1903 – The Great Train Robbery, directed by Edwin S. Porter, starring Broncho Billy Anderson – (US)

December 17, 1903 – Orville Wright flies an aircraft with a petrol engine, the Wright Flyer, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in the first documented and successful powered and controlled heavier-than-air flight.

December 19, 1903 – The first of G. K. Chesterton‘s short stories in the series The Club of Queer Trades, “The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown”, appears in Harper’s Weekly.

The first box of Crayola crayons is made and sold for five cents. It contains eight colors: brown, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet and black.

December 30, 1903

A fire at the Iroquois Theater in Chicago, USA kills 600.

121 Years Ago
1904

1904 – The Questing Beast  Henry Justice Ford  paints Arthur and the Questing Beast.

J. M. Barrie‘s play Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up premières at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London with Nina Boucicault in the title rôle and Gerald du Maurier as Captain Hook and Mr Darling; du Maurier is the uncle of the Llewellyn Davies boys, who inspired the story.

E. Nesbit – The Phoenix and the Carpet

“Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis” w. Andrew B. Sterling m. Kerry Mills

“Give My Regards to Broadway” w.m. George M. Cohan

The Impossible Voyage
A French silent trick film directed by Georges Méliès.

1904 –Clarence E. Mulford wrote the first Hopalong Cassidy. short story while living in Fryeburg, Maine.

1904 – M. R. James – Ghost Stories of an Antiquary– This is his first collection of Ghost Stories.

January – Mark Twain begins dictating his Autobiography.

January 5, 1904 – Elizabeth Magie files U.S. patent 748,626 for  The Landlord’s Game which was the precursor to Monopoly, to illustrate teachings of the progressive era economist Henry George.

January 7, 1904 – The distress signal CQD is established, only to be replaced 2 years later by SOS.

Also on this date – Ruth Cleveland the eldest of five children born to 22nd and 24th United States president Grover Cleveland and First Lady Frances Cleveland dies. She is the purported namesake of the Baby Ruth candy bar.

February 8–9, 1904 – Battle of Port Arthur: A surprise Japanese naval attack on Port Arthur (Lüshun) in Manchuria starts the Russo-Japanese War.

February 23, 1904 – For $10 million, the United States gains control of the Panama Canal Zone.

April 30, 1904 – The Louisiana Purchase Exposition World’s Fair opens in St. Louis, Missouri (closes December 1)

May 4, 1904 – Richard F. Outcault‘s Buster Brown makes its debut.

July 1904 – L. Frank Baum – The Marvelous Land of Oz -This is a copy my Aunt Linda gave me when I was young. It stirred up my love of books and of reading.

July 1, 1904 – The third Modern Olympic Games open in St. Louis, Missouri, United States, as part of the World’s Fair.

September 20, 1904 – José Maria de Yermo y Parres dies.

November 10-16, 1904- Vaccine Revolt in Rio de Janeiro takes place. Its immediate pretext was a law that made vaccination against smallpox compulsory, but it is also associated with deeper causes, such as the urban reforms being carried out by mayor Pereira Passos and the sanitation campaigns led by physician Oswaldo Cruz.

December 11, 1904 – Gerard Majella is canonized.

December 31, 1904 – In New York City, the first New Year’s Eve celebration is held in Times Square.

“The Yankee Doodle Boy” w.m. George M. Cohan

120 Years Ago

1905

Comedian Max Linder’s First Movie First Night Out 

January 5, 1905 – Baroness Emma Orczy‘s play The Scarlet Pimpernel, adapted by Julia Neilson and Fred Terry, who play the leads, makes its London debut at the New Theatre, followed shortly by publication of the novel.

January 26, 1905 – The Cullinan Diamond, the largest diamond in the world at 3,106 carats (621.2 g), is discovered by Captain Frederick Wells at Cullinan.

June 19, 1905 – The term Nickelodeon was popularized by Harry Davis and John P. Harris. They opened a small storefront theater with the name on Smithfield Street in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Although it was not the first theater to show films, a 1919 news article claimed that it was the first theater in the world “devoted exclusively to exhibition of moving picture spectacles”.

A nickelodeon theatre in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, c. 1910. Nickelodeons often used gaudy posters and ornamented facades to attract patrons, but bare walls and hard seats usually awaited within.

September 27, 1905 –Albert Einstein submits for publication his paper “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?”, in which he puts forward the idea of mass–energy equivalence by publishing the equation E = mc² (published November 21).

October 15, 1905 – Winsor McCay‘s Little Nemo in Slumberland makes its debut in the New York Herald. It will run until 26 December 1926.

November 1905 – The Plaza Grill and Cinema, Ottawa, Kansas, possibly the oldest movie theater in the United States that is still in operation.

December 16, 1905 – Variety, an entertainment trade newspaper that would later cover the film industry, is published for the first time in New York City.

Also on this date –  In Rugby Union, The “Match of the Century” is played between Wales and New Zealand at Cardiff Arms Park.

Cartoon by William Blomfield, published in the New Zealand Observer in 1905. “Aha,” Gallaher is depicted as saying, “I’ll have to give the tail of the British Lion another twist to stir him up. And they said England was the home of Rugby Football.”

119 Years Ago

1906

The Birth, the Life and the Death of Christ
directed by Alice Guy-Blaché.

• Edith Nesbit
  • The Railway Children (book publication)
  • The Story of the Amulet

1906 – “The Grand Old Rag” (aka “You’re a Grand Old Flag“) w.m. George M. Cohan

February 19, 1906 –Kellogg’s Cereal Company was founded by Will Keith Kellogg as the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company in Battle Creek, Michigan, U.S.

Also on This Date – Dream of a Rarebit Fiend, directed by Edwin S. Porter – (US) It is a seven-minute live-action film adaptation of the comic strip Dream of the Rarebit Fiend by American cartoonist Winsor McCay.

 

March 21, 1906 – Theodore Roosevelt signs the Antiquities Act into law, authorizing the President to restrict the use of certain parcels of public land with historical or conservation value.

April 10, 1906 – O. Henry  –The Four Million (1906), collection of 25 short stories including The Gift of the Magi.

 April 18 , 1906 –5:12 a.m Wednesday – The 1906 San Francisco earthquake struck the coast of Northern California at. on with an estimated moment magnitude of 7.9 and a maximum Mercalli intensity of XI (Extreme).

One of the survivors was…

Ruth Newman 
(September 23, 1901 – July 29, 2015)

She was a validated American supercentenarian who was, along with William Del Monte and Katherine Gomery, one of the last three survivors of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, and aside from that, one of the 10 oldest validated living people in the world and was, at the time of her passing, believed to be the second-oldest living American-born person (behind Susannah Mushatt Jones).

April 29, 1906 –The first episode of Lyonel Feininger‘s The Kin-der-Kids is published. It will run until 18 November.

June 25, 1906 – Stanford White was murdered during a musical performance at the rooftop theatre of Madison Square Garden by Harry Kendall Thaw.  The resulting trial of Thaw was dubbed the “Trial of the Century” by contemporary reporters. 

July 27th, 1906 – Poltergeists!  A Viennese member of the Society for Psychical Research briefly describes a case where tools and other objects are flung around a workshop, causing damage and sometimes hitting the occupants. Vienna Workshop Poltergeist | Psi Encyclopedia (spr.ac.uk)

September 24, 1906 – U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt proclaims Devils Tower in Wyoming as the nation’s first National Monument.

October 1906 – Jack London – White Fang

October 11, 1906 – San Francisco sparks a diplomatic crisis between the United States and Japan by ordering segregated schools for Japanese students.

November 9, 1906 – Theodore Roosevelt is the first sitting President of the United States to make an official trip outside the country, doing so to inspect progress on the Panama Canal.

Also on this date – St. Elizabeth of the Trinity dies.

November 1906 – The Automobile Thieves (1906) features the screen debut of Florence Lawrence  often referred to as the “first movie star”, and was long thought to be the first film actor to be named publicly  until evidence published in 2019 indicated that the first named film star was French actor Max Linder. At the height of her fame in the 1910s, she was known as the “Biograph Girl” for work as one of the leading ladies in silent films from the Biograph Company. She appeared in almost 300 films for various motion picture companies throughout her career.

December 10, 1906 – U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the mediation of the Russo-Japanese War, becoming the first American to win a Nobel Prize in any field.

December 24, 1906 – Reginald Fessenden transmits the first radio broadcast that included a phonograph record of Ombra mai fu (Largo) by George Frideric Handel, followed by Fessenden playing Adolphe Adam’s carol O Holy Night on the violin and singing Adore and be Still by Gounod, and closing with a biblical passage: “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to men of good will” (Luke 2:14).

December 26, 1906 – The world’s first feature film, The Story of the Kelly Gang, is released.

118 Years Ago

1907

Edvard Munch, The Sick Child, 1907. 3rd in the series

The Cisco Kid is a fictional character found in numerous film, radio, television and comic book series based on the fictional Western character created by O. Henry in his 1907 short story “The Caballero’s Way”, published in Everybody’s Magazine, v17, July 1907, as well as in the collection Heart of the West (1907). Originally a murderous criminal in O. Henry’s story, the Kid was depicted as a heroic Mexican caballero later in films, radio and television adaptations.

Lord of the World is a dystopian science fiction novel by the English Catholic priest Robert Hugh Benson that centers upon the reign of the Antichrist, which is enabled by a movement towards global peace and the unification of religious and political thought. It has been called prophetic by Pope Francis and Pope Benedict XVI.

1907 – U Dhammaloka (1856–1914) founded the Buddhist Tract Society in Rangoon, which produced a large number of tracts founded the Buddhist Tract Society in Rangoon, which produced a large number of tracts. He was an Irish-born migrant worker turned Buddhist monk, strong critic of Christian missionaries, and temperance campaigner who took an active role in the Asian Buddhist revival around the turn of the twentieth century.  Known as the “Irish Buddhist” he wanted to warn other Buddhists of the threats Christian missionaries posed to their religion and culture.

1907 –Weighing the Soul?    The 21 grams experiment refers to a scientific study published in 1907 by Duncan MacDougall, a physician from Haverhill, Massachusetts. MacDougall hypothesized that souls have physical weight, and attempted to measure the mass lost by a human when the soul departed the body. MacDougall attempted to measure the mass change of six patients at the moment of death. One of the six subjects lost three-quarters of an ounce (21.3 grams).

MacDougall stated his experiment would have to be repeated many times before any conclusion could be obtained. The experiment is widely regarded as flawed and unscientific due to the small sample size, the methods used, as well as the fact only one of the six subjects met the hypothesis.  The case has been cited as an example of selective reporting. Despite its rejection within the scientific community, MacDougall’s experiment popularized the concept that the soul has weight, and specifically that it weighs 21 grams.

January 6, 1907 –The Mystery of Egypt’s Heretic Pharaoh  The potential tomb of the famous Pharaoh Akhenaten is discovered by Edward R. Ayrton in The Valley of the Kings. As a pharaoh, Akhenaten is noted for abandoning Egypt’s traditional polytheism and introducing Atenism, or worship centered around Aten.

March 17, 1907 –“Vesti la giubba” Performed by Enrico Caruso.

Enrico Caruso‘s recordings of the aria, from 1902, 1904 and 1907, were among the top selling records of the 78-rpm era and reached over a million sales.

1907 – Alfred Russel Wallace publishes the book Is Mars Habitable?, a refutation of Percival Lowell‘s theory of mars canals, and the first work in the emerging field of astrobiology.

April 24, 1907 – Al Ahly SC is founded in Cairo by Omar Lotfi, as a gathering place for Egyptian students’ unions in the struggle against colonization; it is the first association football club officially founded in Egypt or Africa.

August 15, 1907 – Ordination in Constantinople of Fr. Raphael Morgan, the first African-American Orthodox priest, “Priest-Apostolic” to America and the West Indies.

September 29, 1907 – The cornerstone is laid at the Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul (better known as Washington National Cathedral) in Washington, D.C..

October 24, 1907 – A major United States financial crisis is averted when J. P. Morgan, E. H. Harriman, James Stillman, Henry Clay Frick and other Wall Street financiers create a $25,000,000 pool to invest in the shares on the plunging New York Stock Exchange, ending the bank panic of 1907.

November 15, 1907 – Mutt and Jeff, (November 15, 1907 – June 26, 1983) by Bud Fisher (April 3, 1885 – September 7, 1954) was the first successful daily comic strip in the United States.

November 16, 1907 – President Theodore Roosevelt proclaims that Oklahoma has become the 46th U.S. state.

“In the Land of the Buffalo” Williams, Van Alstyne

117 Years Ago
1908

Claude Monet – San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk

Kenneth Grahame – The Wind in the Willows is published.

Lucy Maud Montgomery – Anne of Green Gables is published.

G. K. Chesterton – The Man Who Was Thursday

1908 – “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” w. Jack Norworth m. Albert Von Tilzer

With that in mind, here is a more modest claim: 1908, by whatever quirk of history or cosmology, was one hell of a ride around the sun. –Jim Rasenberger -America, 1908: The Dawn of Flight, the Race to the Pole, the Invention of the Model T and the Making of a Modern Nation (2006)

April 15, 1908 – Natural Bridges National Monument is established in Utah.

April 21, 1908 – Frederick Cook claims to have reached the North Pole on this date.

May 10, 1908 – Mother’s Day is observed for the first time in the United States, in Grafton, West Virginia.

June 30, 1908:   Tunguska The Tunguska Event–On the morning of this day the Tunguska event (occasionally also called the Tunguska incident) occurred. It was an approximately 12-megaton  explosion that occurred near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Yeniseysk Governorate (now Krasnoyarsk Krai), Russia,

July 13–25, 1908 – The 1908 Summer Olympics are held in London. (Originally scheduled to be in Rome, but changed due to the Mount Vesuvius eruption of 1906. Figure skating events are held in London from October 28–29.)

July 14, 1908 – D. W. Griffith becomes a director at the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company in New York City. Between 1908 and 1913, Griffith will direct nearly 500 films starting with the release of The Adventures of Dollie.

August 8, 1908 – Wilbur Wright makes his first flight at a racecourse at Le Mans, France. It is the Wright Brothers’ first public flight.

September 27, 1908 – Production of the Model T automobile begins at the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant in Detroit.

October 1, 1908 – Ford Model T automobiles are offered for sale at a price of US $825.

November 3, 1908 – William Howard Taft is elected the 27th President of the United States.

116 Years Ago
1909

Comet Halley first becomes visible on a photographic plate.

1909 – The U.S. penny is changed to the Abraham Lincoln design.

1909 – “By The Light Of The Silvery Moon” w. Edward Madden m. Gus Edwards

1909 -Excavation of the dinosaur bone beds at what will become Dinosaur National Monument in the Uinta Mountains of the United States by paleontologist Earl Douglass working for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

Dinosaur National Monument is an American national monument located on the southeast flank of the Uinta Mountains on the border between Colorado and Utah at the confluence of the Green and Yampa rivers. Although most of the monument area is in Moffat County, Colorado, the Dinosaur Quarry is located in Utah, north of the town of Jensen, Utah. The nearest Colorado town is Dinosaur while the nearest city is Vernal, Utah.

March 23, 1909 – Theodore Roosevelt leaves New York for a post-presidency safari in Africa. The trip is sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution and National Geographic Society.

April 6, 1909 – Robert Peary, Matthew Henson and four Inuit explorers – Ootah, Ooqueah, Seegloo and Egigingwah – come within a few miles of the North Pole.

April 17, 1909 – Joan of Arc is beatified in Rome.

May 12, 1909 – Mr. Flip (1909) is released, the first film to feature someone being hit in the face with a pie. It was directed by Gilbert M. ‘Broncho Billy’ Anderson and starring Ben Turpin.

May 24, 1909 – Two Memories (1909) directed by D. W. Griffith. The film marks the onscreen debut of Mary Pickford.

June 22, 1909 – Construction begins on the Cape Cod Canal, which will separate Cape Cod from mainland Massachusetts.

June 26, 1909 – The Science Museum in London comes into existence as an independent entity.

July 1, 1909 –Ben’s Kid (1909) It was Fatty Arbuckle‘s film debut.

July 19, 1909 – Harriet White Fisher and her entourage set off to drive around the world. She is known for being the first woman to circle the globe in a Locomobile. Her planned companions were Harold Fisher Brooks (a relative), a chef named Albert, and a maid. She also traveled with a pet monkey, a Bull Terrier, and a Pug.

August 9, 1909 – St. Mary MacKillop dies.

August 20, 1909 – Dwarf planet Pluto is photographed for the first time, at the Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, U.S., 21 years before being identified.