Feb 1, U.S. troops left Cuba after installing Jose Miguel Gomez as president.
Feb 4,
California law segregated Japanese schoolchildren.
Feb 5, Hendrik Baekeland, Belgian-born inventor,
presented a paper to the NY chapter of the American Chemical Society entitled: “The Synthesis, Constitution, and Uses
of Bakelite which is formed by the reaction under heat and pressure of phenol (a toxic, colourless crystalline solid) and
formaldehyde (a simple organic compound), generally with a wood flour filler, it was the first plastic made from synthetic
components. It was used for its electrically nonconductive and heat-resistant properties in radio and telephone casings and
electrical insulators, and was also used in such diverse products as kitchenware, jewellery,
pipe stems, and children's toys.
Feb 9, The 1st US federal legislation prohibiting narcotics
was directed at opium.
Feb 12, The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP) was founded.
Feb 17, A government commission reported that the tobacco industry was
controlled by six men with 86 firms that were worth $450 million.
Feb 17, Apache chief Geronimo died of pneumonia
at age 80, while still in captivity at Fort Sill, Okla.
Feb 22, The Great White Fleet returned
to Norfolk, Va., from an around-the-world show of naval power. 1st US fleet to circle the globe.
Mar
4, President Taft was inaugurated as 27th President during a 10" snowstorm. President Theodore
Roosevelt reached his end of term as 26th President of the United States.
Mar
18, Einar Dessau of Denmark used a short-wave transmitter to converse with a government radio post about six miles away in
what is believed to have been the first broadcast by a "ham" operator.
Mar 23, British
Lt. Shackleton found the magnetic South Pole.
Mar 26, Russian troops invaded Persia
to support Muhammad Ali as the Shah in place of the constitutional government.
Apr 6, 1st
credit union formed in US.
Apr 6, Explorers Robert E. Peary, Matthew A. Henson and four Inuits
became the first men to reach the North Pole along with 4 Eskimos.
Apr 18, Joan of Arc was declared
a saint.
May 1, Walter Reed Hospital opened in Washington DC as an 80-bed Army medical center.
May
14, Texan Samuel Franklin Cody became the first to make a powered airplane flight beyond one mile in the United Kingdom.
May
17, White firemen on Georgia RR struck to protest the hiring of blacks.
May, Biograph released
the 11 minute film “Resurrection” directed by D.W. Griffith
Jun 10, An SOS signal
was transmitted for the first time in an emergency as the Cunard liner SS Slavonia was wrecked off the Azores.
Jun
16, Jim Thorpe made his pro baseball pitching debut for Rocky Mount (ECL) with a 4-2 win.
Jul 2,
Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch of the BASF company succeeded in combining nitrogen from the air with hydrogen from coal to make
ammonia.
Jul 8, The 1st official evening baseball game was played in Grand Rapids. Mich. Grand
Rapids defeated Zanesville 11 to 10.
Jul 12, "Curly" Joe DeRita (Joseph Wardell) (The
Three Stooges: The Outlaw is Coming, Snow White and the Three Stooges, Have Rocket, Will Travel; died July 3, 1993), was born.
Jul 25, French aviator Louis Bleriot (1872-1936) made the first crossing of the English
Channel
Jul 27, Orville Wright tested the U.S. Army's first airplane, flying himself and a
passenger for 1 hour, 12 minutes and 40 seconds over Fort Myer, Virginia.
Jul 30, The Wright Brothers
delivered their 1st military plane to the army.
Jul, Imprisoned English suffragette Marion Dunlop
refused to eat. Prison officials, afraid that she might die and become a martyr to her cause, released her. Soon after, so
many suffragettes had adopted the same tactics that prison authorities began force-feeding the women. Mary Leigh told her
own story of being force-fed in the September 1909 edition of The Suffragette. The hunger strike was one of the most formidable
weapons in the arsenal of suffragettes in Britain and America.
Aug 2, The US Army Air Corps formed
as the Army took 1st delivery from the Wright Brothers.
Aug 7, US issued the 1st Lincoln
penny.
Aug 11, The SOS distress signal was first used by an American ship, the Arapahoe, off Cape
Hatteras, N.C.
Aug 19, The Indianapolis Motor Speedway opened with a 2.5 mile race track.
Aug
24, Workers started pouring concrete for Panama Canal.
Aug 29, World’s 1st air race was held
in Rheims France. American Glenn Curtiss won.
Aug 31, The A.J. Reach Co. patented the cork-centered
baseball.
Oct 2, Orville Wright set an altitude record, flying at 1,600 feet
Oct
4, The Cunard liner "Lusitania" crossed the Atlantic in four days, 15 hours and 52 minutes.
Nov
8, Katherine Hepburn, American actress, was born
Nov 11, Construction began on the naval base at
Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.
Nov 18, US invaded Nicaragua and later overthrew Pres Zelaya.
Nov
23, Wright brothers formed a million-dollar corporation for the commercial manufacture of airplanes.
Nov
27, U.S. troops land in Bluefields, Nicaragua, to protect American interests there.
Nov,
Mohandas Gandhi returned to South Africa from a trip to England to lobby the government to help repeal the Registration Act.
He founded a communal farm named "Tolstoy" to help support a few members of his Satyagrahi movement.
Dec
1, President Taft severed official relations with Nicaragua’s Zelaya government, and declared support for the revolutionaries.
Dec
10, Red Cloud, Sioux Indian chief, died.
Dec 14, The Labor Conference in Pittsburgh ended with
a "declaration of war" on U.S. Steel.
Dec 19, U.S. socialist women denounced suffrage
as a movement of the middle class.
Dec, Frederic Remington (b.1861), American Western painter and
sculptor, died.
Matisse made his bronze "Head of Fernande."
George
Bellows painted "Stag at Sharkeys," depicting a pair of boxers.
Marc Chagall painted
"The Red Nude," an early work with touches of Fauvism.
Adolf Hitler painted a series
of views around Linz, Austria, including the watercolor "Mountain Chapel."
Henri Matisse
painted “Dance,” commissioned for the stairwell of a Moscow mansion.
Rose Cecil O’Neill
(1874-1944), illustrator, drew the 1st Kewpie doll for an issue of Ladies Home Journal.
The Musicalist
movement in art began with the work of Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky.
Picasso sculpted
the head "Fernande," the first cubist sculpture.
John Sloan, American painter,
painted Chinese Restaurant.
George Bernard Shaw wrote his comedy play "Misalliance."
His play "Pygmalion" was first produced
Francis Hodgson Burnett wrote the classic children’s
story "The Secret Garden."
Freud authored his speculative monograph on Leonardo da Vinci
and invented psychobiography.
Maria Montessori (1870-1952) authored her first book, “The
Montessori Method,”
Sophie Tucker, cabaret singer, appeared in the Ziegfeld Follies.Sophie
Tucker, cabaret singer, appeared in the Ziegfeld Follies.
In NYC the Metropolitan Life Insurance
Tower was completed. The 50-story building was the tallest in the world for 4 years. It copied the Campanile in the Piazza
San Marco in Venice that collapsed in 1902.
Florence Nightingale Graham (b.1878) reopened
a NYC 5th Ave beauty salon and developed her own Venetian line of beauty preparations, following a failed partnership. She
took the name of Elizabeth Arden.
In California Stanley Ketchell, middleweight champion, fought
with Jack Johnson, the first Negro heavyweight world’s champion in Daly City. Johnson knocked Ketchell out.
The
Pittsburgh Pirates, led by pitcher Honus Wagner, defeated the Detroit Tigers 4-3 in the World Series. This marked the last
world series appearance by Ty Cobb
Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937), Italian engineer, won the Nobel
Prize for physics for his invention of wireless telegraphy
Coco Chanel opened her 1st shop, a millinery,
in Paris.
US Federal taxes were imposed on corporate income.
Congress
proposed the 16th Amendment to the Constitution, which proposed an income tax. It was ratified in 1916
Women
workers in New York City’s shirtwaist industry went on strike for better wages, working conditions and union recognition
Theodore
Vail of AT&T found encouragement in the Lee DeForest’s recent invention of the Audion, a precursor of the electronic
vacuum tube, and promised transcontinental service to all telephones in time for the 1914 Panama-Pacific Exposition.
GM
acquired Cadillac. (Ford's Model T -- 1908)
The Public Cup Vendor Co. was incorporated
to produce paper cups. By 1919 it was named the Dixie Cup Co.
The word geriatric was coined.
Wilhelm
Johanssen, Danish botanist, coined the word "gene."
Earl Douglass discovered dinosaur
bones in eastern Utah.
In France the physicist Georges Claude perfected the neon tube and patented
a long lasting electrode that he developed for it. 2 English chemists had discovered neon in 1898.
William
Howard Taft became the 27th President of the US.
Source:
http://timelines.ws/20thcent/1908_1909.HTML
Japan's
Prince Ito is Assassinated
The first animated cartoon, Gertie
The Dinosaur, was made from 10,300 drawings by newspaper cartoonist Windsor McCay.
W.C Handy's 
Memphis Blues — originally a political campaign song called Mr. Crump — became the first published American
blues song. It was later reworked as St. Louis Blues.
Source:
http://archer2000.tripod.com/1900.html
September
9 -- Halley's Comet was first recorded on a photographic plate.
Source:
http://www.leesaunders.co.uk/html/global/year/1909.php
In 1909, Zhan Tianyu was the first Chinese to be elected to the American Society of Civil Engineers.
Source:
http://us_asians.tripod.com/timeline-1900.html
February 12 -- National Negro Conference
Source:
http://womenshistory.about.com/od/aframwomentimeline/a/aaw1900_time.htm
February
24 - The Hudson Motor Car Company is founded.
March 18 - Einar Dessau
uses a short-wave radio transmitter becoming the first radio broadcaster
Construction
of the RMS Titanic, funded by the American J.P. Morgan and his International Mercantile
Marine Co., began on 31 March 1909.
July 26 - Work on the anti-aircraft gun commences.
October
8 - The first rugby football match played in Twickenham
September 28 - Al Capp, American cartoonist
(d. 1979)
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1909
