December 1901


The following events occurred in December 1901:

December 1, 1901 (Sunday)

  • French Roman Catholic priest Charles de Foucauld began his North African desert ministry, offering his first mass to French Foreign Legion soldiers at the Algerian oasis of Béni Abbès. At the time, "He was the only priest, and often the only Christian, for 250 miles," and, until his murder in 1916, would minister to both French Christians and North African Muslims, as well as purchasing the freedom of slaves.
  • A crowd of 100,000 people turned out at Hyde Park, London to demonstrate in sympathy for recently fired British Army General Redvers Buller.
  • Died: George Lohmann, 36, English cricketer regarded as one of the greatest bowlers of the 19th century, of tuberculosis

December 2, 1901 (Monday)

December 3, 1901 (Tuesday)

  • The Immigration Restriction Act 1901 was passed by the Parliament of Australia, primarily to restrict non-Europeans from permanently entering the country. Under the new law, which was given royal assent on December 23, a person seeking to legally immigrate was required "to write a passage of 50 words in a European language chosen at the examiner's discretion" as dictated by the examiner.
  • The British warship HMS Condor sank in a gale the day after it departed from the port of Esquimalt, British Columbia, en route to Honolulu, Hawaii. Wreckage was recovered on the Canadian and American coastlines, and none of the crew of 130 officers and men were ever seen again.
  • During a celebration at the Portuguese Indian city of Goa for the feast day of Saint Francis Xavier, an overcrowded launch capsized and sank from shore, drowning 140 Roman Catholic celebrants.
  • The weekly Romanian magazine Sămănătorul was published for the first time, and would endure until 1910.
  • The Aero Club of Great Britain was founded by Frank Hedges Butler, his daughter Vera Butler, and Charles Rolls for "the encouragement of aero auto-mobilism and ballooning as a sport".
  • King C. Gillette applied for the patent for the first safety razor that would use disposable razor blades. U.S. Patent 775,134 would be granted on November 15, 1904. Gillette, whose American Safety Razor Company would become the multibillion-dollar Gillette Company, is said to have been given the idea by his employer, inventor William Painter, who suggested that Gillette's success would come from something which could be used and eventually thrown away.
  • U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt gave his first message to the United States Congress, but in the manner that was customary for that time, with the text being read aloud by persons other than the President. Roosevelt's speech was more than 20,000 words. With antitrust measures as his first item, Roosevelt asked Congress to create what would become the United States Department of Commerce and Labor with a Bureau of Corporations, as well as an expansion of the United States Navy. He also placed conservation high on the list of national goals, asking Congress to develop irrigation and forestry in the U.S. and, in light of the September assassination of President William McKinley by an anarchist, called for a tightening of immigration laws to bar "all persons who are of a low moral tendency or unsavory reputation".

December 4, 1901 (Wednesday)

December 5, 1901 (Thursday)

December 6, 1901 (Friday)

  • The secret Turkish organization Committee of Union and Progress, composed of members of the Young Turks movement, approved a plan to carry out the assassination of Abdul Hamid II, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. One of the people at the meeting, however, was a spy for the Sultan, and informed security forces, who shut down the CUP's center in Istanbul.
  • The French Parliament passed a law allowing the French government to borrow against the Chinese indemnity payments that it expected would be made over the next 39 years, and directed the immediate payment of the French military for the expedition costs and the reimbursement for French missionaries, industrialists and private individuals who suffered damages during the Boxer Rebellion.
  • Austria's Reichsrath, the lower house of the Austrian side of the Austria-Hungary empire, rejected a bill to establish a university for its Slav minority.
  • The London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst Jews received a transfer of land holdings in Haifa, then a part of Palestine, from David Christian Joseph, a former Jew who had converted to Christianity and founded a Christian mission in Haifa.
  • The first five people to venture to the new Finnish colony on British Columbia's Malcolm Island, Sointula, departed Nanaimo on a 175-mile journey by sailboat. One of the men, Johan Mikkelson, was injured when his shotgun misfired, and had to be dropped off at Alert Bay for treatment, but the other four arrived at the island on December 15.
  • A mishandled execution at Danville, Arkansas, left the victim alive even after he had been removed from the scaffold. Bud Wilson, a prisoner who had killed a guard at the Yell County jail, was hanged at 9:45 in the morning, and, 20 minutes later, lowered into a coffin. "Before the lid was placed upon the coffin," a report the next day noted, "the body began moving about. Wilson opened his eyes and his whole frame shook with tremors." Rather than rendering him medical treatment, the county deputies saw to it that he was "carried up the steps to the scaffold for the purpose of hanging him again", but he died from his injuries before he could be executed.
  • Born: Carl Langbehn, German lawyer and resistance leader who was hanged for treason after making a secret trip to Switzerland to meet with the American OSS; in Padang, Dutch East Indies

December 7, 1901 (Saturday)

December 8, 1901 (Sunday)

December 9, 1901 (Monday)

December 10, 1901 (Tuesday)

December 11, 1901 (Wednesday)

December 12, 1901 (Thursday)

  • Millicent Fawcett and the "Ladies' Commission" that had been sent by the British Government to follow up on the reports by Emily Hobhouse of mistreatment of internees at concentration camps in South Africa, completed its report, confirming many of Miss Hobhouse's statements.
  • Guglielmo Marconi received the first trans-Atlantic radio signal, sent from Poldhu in Cornwall, England to Signal Hill in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada. It was the letter "S". The breakthrough would be announced to the world three days later, on December 14. Marconi said in a statement, "On arriving in Newfoundland and installing my station on Signal Hill, the entrance to St. John's, I sent up kites every day this week with the vertical aerial wire appended, by which our signals are received. I had previously cabled to Cornwall Station to begin sending the prearranged signal. Tuesday my kite broke away and nothing resulted. Wednesday, however, I had better luck. My arrangement was for Cornwall to send at five-minute intervals between 3 and 6 o'clock p.m. the Morse letter 'S', which consists of three dots. The hours named were equivalent to from noon to 3 p.m. at St. Johns, and on Wednesday, during the hours, myself and my two assistants received these signals under such conditions as assured us they were genuine... on Thursday, we tried again during the same hours and were again rewarded with audible signals, though fainter than on Wednesday." "hile some scientists still debate the technical detail of that experiment," an author would note later, "there was no doubt that the principle of wireless communication had arrived on a transatlantic scale... This was a utility, and would prove itself beyond argument as a vital aid to shipping and military communication."

December 13, 1901 (Friday)

  • British geologist John Walter Gregory began his expedition to the fossil beds of Lake Eyre in South Australia, departing on a two-day railroad journey from Adelaide to Hergott Springs, and thence by camel caravan across the desert to the dead lake. Eyre would later write of his findings in his book The Dead Heart of Australia.
  • Nearly three months after being sworn in as President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt was found entitled to a fortune of at least $100,000 from his uncle, Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt, Jr., who had died in 1887. During the 14 years that followed, the will of the President's uncle had been in litigation. The amount of the inheritance— between $100,000 and $200,000 — would be worth between $2.7 million and $5.4 million in 2016.
  • Died: Nakae Chōmin, 54, Japanese journalist and author of ''A Discourse by Three Drunkards on Government''

December 14, 1901 (Saturday)

  • The popular French humor magazine Le Rire took a stand against government censorship of French theatre, devoting an entire issue to the crusade to remove restrictions on prior approval of scripts and productions.
  • The Liga Paulista de Futebol, the longest-operating and oldest soccer football league in Brazil, was founded by teams from various cities in the Brazilian state of São Paulo, to begin play in the winter of 1902.
  • Albert Spalding was elected president of baseball's National League in a controversial vote that had seen the eight team owners deadlocked after 24 ballots after more than three days. New York Giants owner Andrew Freedman had four votes, while Chicago Cubs owner Spalding had the other four. At 4:00 in the morning, Freedman and his three supporters left the room for a conference, but Spalding had directed his club secretary to remain in the room to prevent any tricks. Philadelphia Phillies owner John Rogers then called for a vote, ruling that since representatives of five of the eight league teams were present at the meeting, there was a sufficient quorum for a vote under the bylaws, and Spalding was elected, 4–0. Freedman would sue, the vote would be invalidated, and Nicholas Young would continue as President, with neither Spalding nor Freedman ever operating the National League.
  • A post office was created for Adaven, Nevada, informally making the Nye County ranching settlement its own town of about 25 people. Originally named "Sharp, Nevada", for the local postmaster, the town would rebrand itself in 1939 by spelling "Nevada" backward. The palindromic village would become one of Nevada's ghost towns shortly after everyone had moved away, and the post office would close on November 30, 1953.Born:
  • * Marvin Farber, American philosopher; in Buffalo, New York
  • * Berthold Lubetkin, Georgian-born British architect and designer; in Tbilisi
  • * Paul of Glicksbourg, King of Greece from 1947 to 1964, grandson of King George I of Greece; in Athens

December 15, 1901 (Sunday)

  • General Pieter H. Kritzinger, who had led the Boer attacks against Britain's Cape Colony in South Africa earlier in the year, was captured by Britain's Lieutenant General John French.
  • The four-masted British sailing barque Sindia ran aground in the beach resort of Ocean City, New Jersey, during a raging blizzard, carrying with it a cargo of fine Chinese silks, 3,000 crates of porcelain and art works reportedly worth two million dollars; the crew had been under the impression that it was sailing into New York Harbor. The long ship was broken up and although all 33 members of the crew escaped and salvaged as much as they could, "the wreck is now completely buried beneath the beach off Seventeenth Street in Ocean City... under as much as thirty feet of sand".

December 16, 1901 (Monday)

December 17, 1901 (Tuesday)

December 18, 1901 (Wednesday)

  • Future British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, a Liberal member of the House of Commons, spoke to a hostile crowd of thousands of people in the Town Hall in Birmingham, after being invited by the Birmingham Liberal Association to give a speech against the Second Boer War and in criticism of Birmingham's MP, Joseph Chamberlain. Despite being asked by the Chief Constable of Birmingham to cancel the address because the police could not guarantee his safety, Lloyd George refused and nearly found himself the victim of a riot. There were 30,000 pro-war protesters surrounding the Hall, which was guarded by 350 policemen, and although the "peace meeting" inside was supposed to be attended only by people who had an invitation, many of the 7,000 people inside began shouting and throwing objects as soon as Lloyd George rose to speak. Lloyd George was shouted down after delivering his opening line, which caused the crowd outside to being breaking windows and pelting the walls with bricks and other missiles. In order to effect his escape, Lloyd George dressed in a policeman's uniform marched out of the Hall in the middle of a large group of Birmingham police.
  • Alfred Milner, British High Commissioner for Southern Africa, and Manuel Rafael Gorjão, the Portuguese Governor-General of Mozambique, signed an agreement for Mozambican workers to labor in South Africa's mines. For each worker supplied, the South African colonial government agreed to pay Portuguese authorities 13 shillings for one year's service, along with an additional sixpence for each month beyond the initial contract, as well as paying half of each worker's salary to Portugal "in gold at a favourable rate of exchange".
  • "Barbados Joe" Walcott, a black native of British Guiana, won the world welterweight boxing championship, defeating white boxer James "The Kansas Rube" Ferns, with a technical knockout in the fifth round at a bout in Buffalo, New York. Arnold Cream, an admirer of the Barbadian fighter, would win the world heavyweight boxing title while fighting as "Jersey Joe Walcott".
  • Albert Einstein resigned from his job as a high school mathematics teacher in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, to apply for an opening at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern.

December 19, 1901 (Thursday)

December 20, 1901 (Friday)

December 21, 1901 (Saturday)

December 22, 1901 (Sunday)

  • Bengali philosopher Rabindranath Tagore established a co-educational school, the Brahmacharaya Ashram, at Santiniketan in what is now the West Bengal state of India, with five students and five teachers. After winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, Tagore would expand the school beyond primary and secondary education to create the Visva-Bharati University in 1921.
  • Forty-five people were killed when a fire broke out at a public market in Zacatecas City, Mexico.
  • Charles Aked, a Baptist minister in Liverpool, said about the war in South Africa: "Great Britain cannot win the battles without resorting to the last despicable cowardice of the most loathsome cur on earth — the act of striking a brave man's heart through his wife's honour and his child's life. The cowardly war has been conducted by methods of barbarism... the concentration camps have been Murder Camps." A crowd followed him home and broke the house's windows.
  • Italy's Chamber of Deputies reportedly voted 184–58 to gradually abolish the tax on flour and bread.
  • Venezuelan General Juan Vicente Gómez defeated rebel Araguan Governor Mendoza in battle at Villa de Cura, crushing the three-day long rebellion there, but Mendoza was able to escape with the aid of rebel General Antonio Fernandez.Born: Andre Kostelanetz, Russian-born American conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and recording artist who composed numerous "easy listening" albums; in Saint Petersburg

December 23, 1901 (Monday)

December 24, 1901 (Tuesday)

December 25, 1901 (Wednesday)

December 26, 1901 (Thursday)

December 27, 1901 (Friday)

December 28, 1901 (Saturday)

  • Major Littleton Waller of the U.S. Marines led his men on the disastrous March across Samar in the Philippines, ostensibly to scout the route for a telegraph cable from one side of the island of Samar to the other. He started with three junior officers, 54 enlisted men, and 35 Filipino natives to serve as scouts and carriers of supplies, but had miscalculated the amount of food necessary on the march through the Samar jungle, and was unprepared for the constant rain during the three-week expedition. By march's end, 10 of Major Waller's Marine troops would die, and after a mutiny by some of the carriers, Waller would have 11 of the Filipinos executed without trial.
  • The USS Missouri, second of the new Maine-class battleships, was launched from Newport News, Virginia.Died: Franz Xaver Kraus, 61, German priest and art historian

December 29, 1901 (Sunday)

  • At the Fifth Zionist Congress, held in Basel, Switzerland, the Jewish National Fund was created to fund the purchase and development of land in the Palestine portion of the Ottoman Empire, particularly the territory that had been occupied by the ancient Kingdom of Israel and Kingdom of Judah. By 1921, the JNF would begin purchasing large sections of land. By 1947, the JNF accounted for half of the Jewish-owned land in Palestine, and after Israel's independence in 1948, it changed its focus to planting trees and land improvement. "Within a short time the JNF, known worldwide for the little blue-and-white coin boxes that still grace Jewish homes," historians would write later, "was not only buying land but draining swamps, rehabilitating river beds, cutting new roads, planting forests, creating picnic areas and parks, and making desert soil fertile," and over the next 100 years, it would own 17% of the land in Israel and plant 200 million trees. Johann Kremenezky, an electrical engineer from Vienna, made the first donation to the JNF and would become its first administrator a month later.
  • Alma Bridwell White founded the Methodist Pentecostal Union Church, originally headquartered in Denver, Colorado, and now based in Zarephath, New Jersey, and carrying the name Pillar of Fire.
  • The University of Cincinnati, which would win two NCAA championships played its first intercollegiate basketball game, defeating Yale University, 37 to 9.

December 30, 1901 (Monday)

December 31, 1901 (Tuesday)