August 1901


The following events occurred in August 1901:

August 1, 1901 (Thursday)

  • A constitutional change that disenfranchised most African-American voters was approved in Maryland.
  • W. F. Wright, a farmer and a former official with the Nebraska Department of Agriculture, ended his experiment at bring a rainfall by firing cannons at a clear sky after two days. Starting the previous afternoon, Wright and his assistants lined up 24 mortars at his farm near Lincoln, Nebraska, loaded them with gunpowder, and fired them once a minute until his supply of several thousand pounds of gunpowder was exhausted, to test Wright's own theory of "special vibration". Wright explained his theory that clouds were not formed from evaporation of water and that hydrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere could only combine to form water if "outside force is brought to bear upon them", and that the force was atmospheric electricity. The concussion from firing a cannon, Wright told reporters, created friction that would produce the atmospheric electricity necessary to form water. The next day, the area around Lincoln steadily cooled off and temperatures dropped 41 degrees over a period of 38 hours, and on August 3, heavy rain came down "throughout the northern portion of Nebraska, southern South Dakota and the northern portion of Iowa", and Wright declared that he had been the person responsible. Born: Francisco Guilledo, Filipino professional boxer who competed under the name "Pancho Villa" and was the one-time world flyweight boxing champion; in Ilog, Negros Occidental

August 2, 1901 (Friday)

August 3, 1901 (Saturday)

August 4, 1901 (Sunday)

  • Prime Minister Katsura Tarō of Japan convened a secret meeting of the genrō, the empire's group of elder statesmen, and discussed an alliance with the British Empire. Former Prime Minister Itō Hirobumi, who had advocated an alliance with the Russian Empire as a means of averting the conflict over the control of the Korean peninsula, agreed with the rest of the elders that an alliance with the United Kingdom would be in Japan's best interests. and volunteered to prepare a draft proposal for negotiating with the British. With the possibility of an agreement with Russia no longer under consideration, relations between the Japanese and Russian Empires would continue to deteriorate and the two would go to war within two and a half years.Born: Louis Armstrong, American jazz musician; in New Orleans. During his lifetime, Louis Armstrong believed that he had been born on July 4, 1900. In 1988, seventeen years after Armstrong's death, however, biographer Gary Giddins located the record of the musician's 1901 baptism at the Sacred Heart of Jesus Church and found the true birthdate.

August 5, 1901 (Monday)

August 6, 1901 (Tuesday)

  • Captain Robert Falcon Scott of the Royal Navy and the research ship RRS Discovery, set sail from the port of Cowes on the Isle of Wight and departed the United Kingdom to start the British National Antarctic Expedition. Besides Scott, the Discovery carried with it five scientists, eleven other Royal Navy officers, and a 36-man crew. The ship would reach Antarctica on January 8, and anchor at McMurdo Sound on February 3.
  • The Monacan steam yacht Princess Alice II, owned by Prince Albert of Monaco and loaned out by him for scientific exploration, set a record for the greatest depth, up that time, at which bottom trawling had ever taken place, collecting plankton and other undersea life at a depth of, at a location southwest of the Cape Verde Islands. The depth would not be exceeded until 1947, when the Swedish vessel Albatross trawled in the Puerto Rico Trench.
  • The town of Lawton, Oklahoma, came into being as the United States Land Office began auctioning lots divided from a 320-acre townsite located near the United States Army's Fort Sill. The auction "drew an overnight population of ten thousand. Mostly it was made up of men, with their families, who had failed to secure 160-acre homesteads in the lottery of August 1 and came to the townsite in the hope of bidding successfully at the sale of lots. By August 3, in anticipation of the sale, four hundred temporary business structures, nearly all tents, had been raised; a newspaper, the Lawton State Democrat, was being printed; and three streets had been laid out."

August 7, 1901 (Wednesday)

August 8, 1901 (Thursday)

  • Alberto Santos-Dumont was nearly killed on his third attempt at flying a dirigible around the Eiffel Tower to win the Deutsch Prize 100,000 French francs. As before, his task was to depart the Longchamp Racecourse, fly to the Tower and circle it three times, then return to his starting point in less than half an hour. Departing at 6:12 in the morning, he reached the Tower and completed the circuits within nine minutes, but then lost control of the airship on his way back. The balloon deflated, and several of the wires connecting the framework and Santos-Dumont were severed by the turning screw that propelled the ship forward, sending the Brazilian-born aviator skimming over rooftops before wrecking on the roof of the Exposition Trocadro hotel. A team of firemen rescued him after the frame became wedged between two buildings. Asked what he would do now that his airship was wrecked, Santos-Dumont reportedly said, "Why begin again, of course. One has to have patience."Born: Ernest Lawrence, American physicist and 1939 Nobel Prize laureate for his invention of the cyclotron; in Canton, South Dakota Died:
  • * Prince Edmond de Polignac, 67, French classical music composer
  • * Jesse Jamison, Principal Chief of the Seneca Nation in western New York, was killed in a gunfight with another member of the Seneca tribe.

August 9, 1901 (Friday)

  • U.S. President William McKinley made arrangements to attend the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York on September 5, after meeting at his summer home in Canton, Ohio with the president and the director of the exposition, who designated the 5th as "President's Day". The original plan was for the presidential party to visit the event, then to "spend a day at Niagara Falls before returning to Cleveland" to attend an encampment of American Civil War veterans, the Grand Army of the Republic. Instead of returning home, however, the President would visit the Pan-American event a second day, and would be fatally wounded by anarchist Leon Czolgosz on September 6.
  • The city of Rantoul, Illinois, which would later serve the nearby Chanute Air Force Base, was destroyed by a fire that had been ignited by an Illinois Central Railroad train passing through downtown. Hot cinders from the locomotive set fire to the contents of a grain elevator during a heat wave and drought, and strong winds spread the blaze through the business district, destroying 54 businesses and nine homes, at an estimated loss of $314,000.

August 10, 1901 (Saturday)

August 11, 1901 (Sunday)

  • The German Antarctic Expedition, led by Professor Erich von Drygalski, began with the departure of the ship Gauss from Kiel. Guided by Captain Hans Ruser, the ship had a crew of five officers, 27 crew, and Drygalski's five-member team. After reaching the previously-unexplored area of Antarctica between 60° E and 100° E, the ship would come within of the coast of what Drygalski would claim for Germany as Kaiser Wilhelm II Land, but would be trapped in an icefield on February 22, 1902, and be unable to depart for 14 months. After getting free, the Gauss would successfully return to Kiel on November 24, 1903.
  • Venezuela and Colombia severed diplomatic relations following the second of two invasions from Colombia by Venezuelan exiles. Colombia authorized the American chargé d'affaires in Caracas to act on its behalf.

August 12, 1901 (Monday)

August 13, 1901 (Tuesday)

  • Serial killer Jane Toppan claimed her last victim, with the death of Minnie Davis Gibbs. During the summer of 1901, the nurse nicknamed "Jolly Jane" because of her cheerful disposition had come to work for the Davis family in Boston, and within the space of six weeks, Minnie's mother, father and two sisters had died. When Minnie died, the cause of death was listed as "exhaustion", blamed on her grief from losing her family, but her father-in-law was suspicious and sought the help of Dr. Edward S. Wood of Harvard University's College of Medicine. Minnie's body would be exhumed for an autopsy, which would show high levels of arsenic, morphine and atropine, and Toppan would be arrested on October 29.

August 14, 1901 (Wednesday)

  • German-born American aviator Gustave Whitehead drove the Condor 21 along a road in Bridgeport, Connecticut, pulled its canvassed wings taut, and flew for fifty feet, banked sharply to avoid hitting a stand of chestnut trees, and continued "through the air for more than a mile" before landing again, according to his own account and that of a reporter for the Bridgeport Herald. However, no photograph was ever taken of the Condor 21 in flight, nor of even longer flights that the newspaper reported to have been made in the two years before the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Reproductions of the Condor, constructed from Whitehead's blueprints, would be flown in 1986 and in 1997. More than 35 years after the event, on April 2, 1937, a person identified as a Whitehead assistant in the Herald articles, James Dickie, would write, "I believe the entire story in the Herald was imaginary, and grew out of comments of Whitehead in discussing what he hoped to get from his plane. I was not present and did not witness any airplane flight on August 14, 1901."
  • Russia declared its right of suzerainty over the Chinese port of Nuzhuang.
  • In Havana, American nurse Clara Maass, who had already survived allowing herself to be bitten by an infected mosquito on June 24 for the cause of discovering a vaccine against yellow fever, volunteered for the experiment a second time, "hoping to prove that her earlier case of yellow fever had immunized her against the disease." Instead, she would become even more severely ill, and die ten days later. The Las Animas Hospital would be renamed in her honor, and she would be honored decades later as a martyr to the cause of medicine, on postage stamps issued in Cuba in 1951, and in the United States in 1979.Born:
  • * Muhammad Ayub Khuhro, Chief Minister of Pakistan's Province of Sindh when the nation became independent in 1947, and later Defense Minister of Pakistan; in Larkana, Bombay Presidency, British India
  • * Alice Rivaz, Swiss writer; in Rovray, Vaud canton

August 15, 1901 (Thursday)

August 16, 1901 (Friday)

  • The population of Canada was announced as 5,338,883 people, an increase of ten percent in the previous decade.

August 17, 1901 (Saturday)

August 18, 1901 (Sunday)

  • In Pierce City, Missouri, all of the African-American residents were driven from town by a white mob following the murder of Gisella Wild, a 24-year-old white woman. The vigilantes invaded the black section of the segregated town, burned and looted houses, and ordered the more than 200 black citizens to get on a train leave permanently, or risk being killed. Other rural towns and counties in southwestern Missouri would follow Pierce City's example, including neighboring Barry County, Monett and Neosho. Stroud, Oklahoma followed the Pierce City example two weeks later. Miss Wild's murderer was never convicted, but one black suspect was taken from jail by the mob and lynched, while another was tried and acquitted, and two others were released without being indicted. The 2010 census for Pierce City would show two African-American residents among its population of 1,292 people. Disgusted by the mob mentality in his home state of Missouri, author Mark Twain would write an essay, "The United States of Lyncherdom", commenting on "man's commonest weakness, his aversion to being unpleasantly conspicuous, pointed at, shunned, as being on the unpopular side. Its other name is Moral Cowardice, and is the commanding feature of the make-up of 9,999 men in the 10,000." He added that in the case of a lynching, most of the vast majority of people were "right-hearted and compassionate, and would be cruelly pained by such a spectacle— and would attend it, and let on to be pleased with it, if the public approval seemed to require it."Born:
  • * Lucienne Boyer, French singer; in Paris
  • * Jean Guitton, French writer and philosopher; in Saint-Étienne, Loire département
  • * Wing-tsit Chan, Chinese-born American philosopher, in Kaiping, Guangdong province Died: Edmond Audran, 61, French composer

August 19, 1901 (Monday)

August 20, 1901 (Tuesday)

  • In the years when only one umpire was provided for a major league baseball game, it was not unusual for players not in the lineup to handle the officiating if the regular umpire failed to show up, in which case the procedure was for the opposing managers to each select a player to handle officiating duties. Al Orth of the Philadelphia Phillies earned the distinction of umpiring and playing in the same game, when he was put in as a pinch hitter in the ninth inning, and hit a single to drive in a run in a 3–2 loss to the Brooklyn Dodgers. Orth's feat would later be described as "the first instance on record where an umpire was called to bat to win a game."
  • The battleship USS Iowa was dispatched to the Pacific coast of the isthmus of Panama as the third U.S. Navy ship to monitor fighting between Colombia and Venezuela.
  • The disenfranchisement of African-American voters in Alabama was made possible as the constitutional convention in Montgomery closed with the approval for a draft of the state's 1901 constitution, which would be ratified by the voters on November 21. Born: Salvatore Quasimodo, Italian poet, 1959 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate; in Modica, Sicily

August 21, 1901 (Wednesday)

August 22, 1901 (Thursday)

  • Wilbur and Orville Wright departed from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina after the failure of their experiments with a glider that could be adapted to become a heavier-than-air flying machine. Their design for a wing provided only one-third of the lift that they had predicted from their calculations. Wilbur would recount later that on the train back to Dayton, Ohio, he told Orville, "Not within a thousand years will man ever fly!" Upon their arrival, however, they concluded that the problem lay in the data gathered by Otto Lilienthal and John Smeaton was incorrect and "they decided to recheck all the earlier data, taking nothing as proven until they proved it themselves."

August 23, 1901 (Friday)

August 24, 1901 (Saturday)

  • A war between the Ottoman Empire and the British Empire seemed imminent after the Ottoman gunboat Zuhaf was turned back by a British warship as it attempted to enter the harbor of Kuwait City. Concerned that the Ottomans would attempt to take the port, the British government ordered the Royal Navy to prevent any Ottoman soldiers from debarking. The captain of the British ship warned the Zuhaf captain that any attempt to land men or supplies at Kuwait would be resisted by force, and the Ottoman captain misunderstood and telegraphed a report to Istanbul that the United Kingdom had conquered the Kuwaiti emirate as a colony. The German Empire, alarmed over the perceived change of the balance of power in the Middle East, would join the Ottomans in accusing the British Foreign Office of reneging on its previous pledges. In clearing up the misunderstanding the powers would come to a new agreement that Britain would permit the Kuwait's right to self-rule but not to the extent that Kuwait would have control over its foreign relations.
  • Died: Clara Maass, 25, American nurse who sacrificed her life in an attempt to contribute to a cure for yellow fever, died after deliberately infecting herself in an attempt to build an immunity to the virus

August 25, 1901 (Sunday)

August 26, 1901 (Monday)

August 27, 1901 (Tuesday)

  • In the Congo Free State, a column of Belgian and Congolese soldiers invaded the Kasaï region, where the Batetela tribesmen and their leader, King Kabongo, had been conducting raids against the Luba people for the previous four years. The two sides, both armed with rifles, fought a pitched battle at the village of Kakipango, and the Belgians defeated the Batetela, although small groups would continue to make sporadic raids for another ten years.

August 28, 1901 (Wednesday)

  • A boiler explosion killed 24 people on board the steamer City of Trenton exploded. The ship was racing up the Delaware River toward Philadelphia with 150 passengers on board, and was 10 minutes behind schedule when the ship's captain ordered it to move full steam. Reports the next day speculated that Captain Worrell had been attempting to catch up to the Twilight, a steamer from a rival company, which began speeding up as the Trenton approached it. At about 2:00 in the afternoon, the explosion of the port side boiler caused the ship to list and threw passengers from upper decks into the river, while others were scalded by clouds of escaping steam. The final death toll was reported on September 4 to be 24.
  • Silliman University, the first American private school in the Philippines, was founded by Presbyterian missionaries David Sutherland Hibbard and his wife, Laura Crooks Hibbard, as the Silliman Institute, a primary school for Filipino boys, with money given by a New York City philanthropist, Dr. Horace Silliman. It would become a university in 1938.
  • Voters in Los Angeles approved a bond issue to purchase the privately owned Los Angeles Water Company. The final vote was 6,284 in favor, 1,267 against, well above the necessary two-thirds majority required to allow the city to borrow two million dollars for the purchase. Control of the distribution of water would help the city of 103,000 people triple in size by 1910, and surpass one million residents by the end of the 1920s. Born:
  • * Babe London, American film actress and comedian; in Des Moines, Iowa
  • * Al Ritz,, American film actor and comedian and the eldest of the Ritz Brothers comedy trio; in Newark, New Jersey
  • * Pyotr Novikov, Soviet mathematician known for the Novikov–Boone theorem; in Moscow Died:
  • * Zina Huntington Young, 80, Mormon religious leader who had been President of the Church's women's auxiliary, the Relief Society, since 1888. Mrs. Young had been married to the Church's first President, Joseph Smith, until his death in 1844, and to its second President, Brigham Young, until he died in 1877.

August 29, 1901 (Thursday)

  • The British concentration camp at Standerton, in South Africa, became the first to be completely enclosed by barbed wire fences. With 3,329 inmates occupying 550 tents, the camp was surrounded by two rows of fences, by order of the British superintendent, Frank Winfield, who had ordered the inmates to erect the enclosure. On August 11, a party of Boer soldiers had raided the camp and stolen 157 cattle, and the ostensible purpose was to keep in the livestock and keep the enemy from making further raids. However, as author Reviel Netz would note later, this was "a new phenomenon: a human settlement whose boundaries are defined by barbed wire... while raised to prevent motion of Boer men from outside the camp to its inside, the fence immediately served also to prevent the motion of Boer women inside the camp to its outside. They were no longer under curfew; they were now imprisoned."
  • The German passenger liner SS Deutschland set a new record for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic Ocean, steaming into New York Bay at 1:20 in the morning, only 5 days, 12 hours and 5 minutes after its departure from Liverpool on Friday evening, August 23. The new mark was 24 minutes faster than the previous record, set by the Deutschland on September 1, 1900.

August 30, 1901 (Friday)

  • British inventor Hubert Cecil Booth patented the first motorized vacuum cleaner, after concluding that if a motor could blow air to disperse dust, it could also be reversed to suck dust into a container. Booth originally used his invention as part of his cleaning service "using a large horse-drawn, petrol-driven unit, which was parked outside the building to be cleaned, with hoses stretching through the windows."
  • Commanded by Eduard von Toll, the Russian Polar Expedition resumed after the ship Zarya was able to free itself from the ice of the Kara Sea, outside of Nansen Island, located at a latitude of 76°30" N.
  • Thirty-six workers who were riding on the Great Northern Railroad through Montana were killed when freight cars from one train crashed into the one on which they were riding. According to reports at the scene, a line of 18 railcars broke loose from a freight train that was climbing a grade near Essex, Montana, and headed downhill toward the station at Nyack, colliding with Great Northern's Passenger Train No. 3 at almost 9:00 in the evening.Born:
  • * Roy Wilkins, American civil rights leader and NAACP Executive Secretary from 1955 to 1977; in St. Louis
  • * John Gunther, American journalist who authored the 1947 bestseller Inside U.S.A.; in Chicago

August 31, 1901 (Saturday)

  • Leon Czolgosz, a 28-year old former millworker from northern Ohio, arrived in Buffalo, New York by train from Chicago, after learning that U.S. President William McKinley was going to be visiting the Pan-American Exposition September 5. Czolgosz rented a hotel room above John Nowak's Saloon at 1078 Broadway Street at the corner of Broadway and Loepere, and perfected his plan to shoot the President.