February 1901


The following events occurred in February 1901:

February 1, 1901 (Friday)

February 2, 1901 (Saturday)

February 3, 1901 (Sunday)

February 4, 1901 (Monday)

February 5, 1901 (Tuesday)

  • Thomas Edison discovered and patented the rechargeable nickel–iron battery system and made plans to market it commercially, but would soon come into conflict with Swedish inventor Waldemar Jungner, who had filed a patent in Europe only two weeks earlier for a process using nickel-iron storage cells. The technologies would later be superseded by improvements on Jungner's nickel–cadmium battery.
  • The United States Senate voted to declassify all United States Department of State papers relating to the peace negotiations that ended the Spanish–American War, including U.S. President William McKinley's instructions to the American negotiators. These would reveal, among other things, that the only territory that the United States originally had wanted Spain to completely give up was Puerto Rico and its surrounding islands. Other correspondence showed that the principal reason for acquiring "Porto Rico" was to expand the prestige of the United States in competition with other colonial powers.
  • In Evansville, Indiana, a fire burned through the business district, causing $175,000 of damage.
  • Henry E. Youtsey was sentenced to life imprisonment for being the principal conspirator in the 1900 assassination of Kentucky Governor-elect William Goebel. After serving nearly 18 years of his sentence, however, Youtsey would be paroled on December 11, 1918, and given a pardon by outgoing Governor James D. Black on December 1, 1919.
  • By act of the Alabama Legislature, the city of Daphne, Alabama, ceased to be the county seat for Baldwin County and all county government offices and records were moved to the smaller town of Bay Minette. The legislation would precipitate a fight between the two cities, all the way to the state supreme court, as well as a violent confrontation during the October removal of the records.
  • The West Florida Annexation Association, a group of businessmen led by Colonel J. J. Sullivan of Pensacola, appeared before the Alabama Legislature and presented their proposal for annexation of that part of the state to Alabama.
  • Abraham Esau, 35, a coloured citizen of the Boer Cape Colony, worked as a British spy during the Second Boer War after local Boer commander refused to let the coloured citizens take up weapons to lead the fight. After the Boers retook the town of Calvinia, Esau was eliminated by being dragged to the outskirts of town and shot, and his body was then displayed in the village as a warning. When the British routed the Boers the next day, Esau was buried with full British Army honors. Born: Gaston Schoukens, Belgian film director who made numerous comedies, melodramas and documentaries, including the first Belgian sound film, La famille Kelpkens, and the popular 1950 comedy Un Soir de Joie, as Felix Bell in Brussels

February 6, 1901 (Wednesday)

February 7, 1901 (Thursday)

  • German immunologist Paul Uhlenhuth published his paper A Method for Investigation of Different Types of Blood, Especially for the Differential Diagnosis of Human Blood. In an understatement about the significance of his findings, Uhlenhuth commented as an aside, "It is noteworthy... that, after drying blood samples from men, horses and cattle on a board for four weeks and dissolving them in physiological NaCl solution, I was able to identify the human blood at once using my serum— a fact that should be of particular importance for forensic medicine." As an author would note more than a century later, "With these few words, Uhlenhuth announced the world that he had found the Holy Grail of serology: a definitive test for the presence of human blood."
  • Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands was married to Prince Henry, with a civil ceremony at 11:00 a.m. at The Hague, and a religious ceremony at noon.
  • American sailors from the USS Lancaster were attacked and beaten by a mob after they went ashore at the city of La Guaira in Venezuela.
  • Representatives of the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations in Oklahoma signed a draft of a proposed agreement with the United States Department of the Interior for division of their tribal lands in Indian Territory, but the initial plan would be rejected by the United States Congress. A binding agreement, as supplemented, would pass into law on July 1, 1902.Born: Alison Marjorie Ashby, Australian botanist and artist, in North Adelaide, Australia Died: Benjamin Edward Woolf, 64, British-American violinist, composer, and playwright, best known for the operas The Mighty Dollar and ''Westward Ho''

February 8, 1901 (Friday)

February 9, 1901 (Saturday)

  • United States Secretary of War Elihu Root notified Leonard Wood, the American Governor-General of Cuba, of five points that needed to go into the Constitution that Cuba was to adopt before independence could be granted. All of the points — American approval of Cuban treaties, limitations on Cuba's ability to borrow money, the American right of intervention to maintain a stable government, continuation of laws implemented by the American occupational government, and permission to establish naval bases in Cuba — meant that Cuba would function as an American protectorate rather than a fully independent nation.
  • Taking inspiration from the crusade of Carrie Nation, an estimated 1,000 men and women in Holton, Kansas, assembled at local Methodist Church and then marched to the Hicks Saloon and destroyed its contents. According to reporters, "the gutters were deluged with a mixture of beer, whisky, and the usual poisonous decoctions dealt out by the Kansas jointists" and then removed the bar fixtures, furniture, glassware, and a large mirror and destroyed them with sledgehammers. Thomas Balding and John Bimrod, two other proprietors, had removed their liquors earlier in anticipation of a raid, pledged that they would ship everything out of town by Monday, "and each gave his oath never to sell another drop of liquor in Holton". Born:
  • * Sebastian Kunjukunju Bhagavathar, Indian stage actor, in Ambalappuzha, Kerala, India
  • * Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, German state official, leader of the National Socialist Women's League, the women's wing of the Nazi Party
  • * James Murray, American film actor Died:
  • * Fred Harvey, 65, American entrepreneur, founder of the first American restaurant chain, the Harvey House restaurants that were adjacent to railroad stations on the Santa Fe Railroad
  • * George Earl Maney, 74, American army officer and diplomat, brigadier general for the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War, who later became the American ambassador to several different nations in South America after reaffirming his allegiance to the United States

February 10, 1901 (Sunday)

February 11, 1901 (Monday)

  • The Chicago Daily Tribune published a report that Florence Maybrick, an American woman who had been imprisoned since 1889 in the United Kingdom after being convicted of poisoning her husband, was pardoned by King Edward after more than 11 years and released from the women's prison at Aylesbury, England. To everyone's great disappointment, the story turned out to be false and was retracted the next day in the newspaper, but not before being reprinted by news outlets across the country.
  • By a 15–14 vote, the Cuban constitutional convention changed an existing rule, making it possible for General Máximo Gómez to become eligible to be the nation's president.Died: Milan, 47, King of Serbia from 1882 until his sudden and unexplained abdication in 1889, in exile

February 12, 1901 (Tuesday)

February 13, 1901 (Wednesday)

February 14, 1901 (Thursday)

February 15, 1901 (Friday)

  • At about 11:00 in the morning, 69 coal miners at the Wellington Colliery Company, near Cumberland, British Columbia, were killed in an explosion. More than half of the fatalities were Asian, and the other 27 were white. In the aftermath, the white miners who lived at nearby Nanaimo blamed the Chinese workers, and signed petitions protesting that the foreign-born workers were "dangerously incompetent" and demanded that all employees take a test to show their proficiency in either English or French. Soon afterward, calls were made for excluding all Asian immigrants from British Columbia, and James H. Hawthornthwaite would win a by-election to the provincial legislature to champion the anti-Asian cause.
  • The Right-of-Way Act was signed into law by U.S. President William McKinley and permitted the United States Secretary of the Interior to grant rights of way through any federally owned-land, including the Indian reservations and the four national parks then in existence, the sole standard being whether it was "incompatible with the public interest". A conservationist would write later, "The act was in most respects perfectly tailored for looters of the parks, for it authorized the Secretary to grant rights of way... for practically any sort of business that might want a right of way."
  • The Alianza Lima football team was founded in Peru.Born: João Branco Núncio, Portuguese bullfighter, in Alcácer do Sal, Portugal Died: Karl G. Maeser, 73, German-American academic, immigrant who was the first principal of the Brigham Young Academy and considered to be the founder of Brigham Young University

February 16, 1901 (Saturday)

  • At Saint Petersburg, Russian Foreign Minister Vladimir Lamsdorf presented a revised treaty proposal to China's Ambassador to the Russian Empire, Prince Yang-ju. Under the 12-article treaty, China would retain ownership of Manchuria, but Russian troops would be allowed to occupy the territory to guard the railways there, and China would be forbidden from granting rail or mining privileges to anyone without Russian consent. The Chinese then "decided to try their hand at balance-of-power politics", leaking various versions of the treaties to the Russian Empire's rivals, the Japanese and British Empires.
  • After the United States raised the tariff on imported Russian sugar, Russia retaliated with a 30 percent increase on the tariff on American goods made of iron or steel.
  • The town of South Hill, Virginia, was chartered, after having been laid out in 1889.
  • Most of the members of both houses of the Alabama Legislature arrived in Pensacola, Florida, at the invitation of the West Florida Annexation Association, to discuss the possibility of the western portion of that state being annexed. There were enough interested legislators to fill six passenger cars on a specially chartered train. The plan envisioned by a committee was for Alabama to pay two million dollars to Florida to purchase Calhoun, Escambia, Holmes, Jackson, Santa Rosa, Walton and Washington Counties "if the rest of Florida and the Congress of the United States are willing, and if Governor Sanford of Alabama endorses the project, as do a majority of the Alabama legislators".
  • Macedonian demonstrators in Sofia demanded independence for Bulgaria from the Ottoman Empire.

February 17, 1901 (Sunday)

  • William Knapp Thorn became the first person to drive a Mercedes automobile in a race, when he entered his recently purchased Daimler-Mercedes in the Circuit du Sud-Ouest that started at the French city of Pau. Only two kilometers in to the 330 kilometer race, Thorn's car flipped after a horse-drawn cart crossed into his path.Das klagende Lied, composed by Gustav Mahler in 1883 and then revised several times afterward, was performed for the very first time. Mahler himself conducted the Weiner choir and the Vienna Court Opera Orchestra at the Musikverein in Vienna, nearly 18 years after writing it.
  • Carles Casagemas, 19, an art student and the best friend of artist Pablo Picasso, died by shooting himself in the head after being rejected in love. Picasso's "Blue Period" started, and for the next three years, Picasso, depressed at the loss of his friend, would paint his works in various shades of blue and blue-green. Born: Philotheus Boehner, German Franciscan priest and scholar, as Heinrich Boehner in Lichtenau, Westphalia, Germany

February 18, 1901 (Monday)

  • Dr. Ronald Ross, in a letter to the colonial government in British India, became the first person to propose bringing malaria epidemics under control by extermination of mosquitoes of the genus Anopheles. In 1902, he would perfect the organization of the campaign against the Anopheles insects in a book Mosquito Brigades, and would receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine later in that year.
  • German Field Marshal Alfred von Waldersee announced that he would conduct new military campaigns to secure territory in China. In their first engagement at Paoting-fu, the Germans lost one soldier and killed 200 Chinese soldiers after a patrol allegedly came under attack.
  • Four days after becoming a member of the House of Commons of the United Kingdom future Prime Minister Winston Churchill gave his maiden speech, a rebuttal to an address given by another future Prime Minister, David Lloyd George. At 10:30 when Lloyd George had finished an eloquent speech decrying the carnage against the Boers during the Second Boer War, Churchill responded that British policy should be "to make it easy and honourable for the Boers to surrender, and painful and perilous for them to continue in the field." Churchill would say later that "It was a terrible, thrilling yet delicious experience". Died: Gaëtan Henri Léon de Viaris, 54, French cryptanalyst who invented a printing cipher machine, and furthered the use of mathematical relations to cryptology, particularly linear substitutions.

February 19, 1901 (Tuesday)

  • Thomas O'Donnell, an Irish Nationalist member of the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, stunned his fellow members of parliament when he rose to speak, and then started to address the group in the Irish language. A representative for the constituency of West Kerry, began by saying, in Irish, "As an Irishman from an Irish-speaking constituency, a member of a nation which still preserves a language of its own and is still striving bravely for freedom..." before he was interrupted by the House Speaker, William Gully, who recognized what O'Donnell was doing. As O'Donnell's fellow Irish MPs applauded, Gully called for order and informed him that he was "not entitled to address the Commons in a language which they did not understand". O'Donnell then asked the Speaker, in Irish, "Is it not true that Irish is my native language, the language of my ancestors, the language of my country?" John Redmond then pointed out that there was "no written or unwritten rule against a member using the language which is most familiar to him", and Gully replied that there was no precedent for a member of Commons to give a speech in anything but English, and that "Not in the one hundred years of union has any Irishman tried to speak in Irish in this House until now." The next day, The Times of London commented that "Public gratitude is due to one ingenious Irish gentleman— Mr. Thomas O'Donnell, M.P., for West Kerry, for relaxing the severity of the Parliamentary situation last night" during a bitter debate over the Second Boer War.
  • After criticizing General Carrington in print, the Rhodesian Times was seized by British authorities under martial law and the staff was evicted.Born: Florence Green, last surviving World War I veteran, as a member of the Women's Royal Air Force; in Edmonton, London, England Died: Paul Armand Silvestre, 63, French poet

February 20, 1901 (Wednesday)

February 21, 1901 (Thursday)

  • At the insistence of the United States, the Eight-Nation Alliance occupying China agreed that none of their nations would acquire any additional Chinese territory without the approval of the others. Count Alfred von Waldersee called off his intended expedition the following day.
  • China's Imperial government began turning over the North China Railway to British control.
  • In Zürich, German-born physicist Albert Einstein became a citizen of Switzerland. In 1922, the Swiss legation to Berlin would respond to an inquiry and notify Germany's Federal Foreign Office that Einstein had renounced his German citizenship.
  • Scottish clergyman and amateur astronomer Thomas David Anderson became the first person to notice the nova GK Persei. By February 23, it was the brightest star in the sky, reaching zero magnitude, but faded to 4th magnitude by March 15, and to a 7 by year's end. Photographs taken from Harvard University of the Perseus constellation on February 19 did not show GK Persei among stars as dim as the 11th magnitude, indicating that its explosion had been very rapid, increasing by at least eight magnitudes within 48 hours. Later identified as being 1,533 light years from Earth, GK Persei had apparently exploded in the year 367 AD.
  • Delegates in Havana signed the final version of the new Constitution for Cuba, in preparation from its transition from a United States possession to a quasi-independent republic under American protection.
  • By a margin of 26 to 37, the United States Senate defeated a measure that would have provided funds for post offices to create pneumatic tube delivery systems in American cities. The vote was on a proposed amendment to the post office appropriation bill that would have budgeted $500,000 toward the technology. Besides stopping the expansion of the service, the vote also meant that the pneumatic tube systems operating in New York City, Brooklyn, Boston and Philadelphia would halt at the end of the fiscal year on June 30.

February 22, 1901 (Friday)

  • As General Christiaan de Wet led a force of 5,000 Boers toward Prieska, General John French of the British Army intercepted the group and forced them to retreat.
  • A breakthrough in food preservation was demonstrated by a Dr. Von Olden in Copenhagen, who showed potential investors proof that he had sealed a container of butter a year earlier, in front of a notary public, and then opened it in front of dairymen, who found it to be untainted. News of the Von Olden Process would soon go outside of Denmark, and the Associated Press would cable the report to American readers on March 25. Soon afterward, Dr. Von Olden was exposed as a con man whose real name was Christianson; after the notary had certified that the container had been sealed in his presence "on February 22, 1901", Christianson carefully altered the 1901 to "1900".
  • The City of Rio de Janeiro, a passenger liner operated by the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, struck a reef as it was entering San Francisco Bay on its way through a dense fog as it was arriving from Honolulu, and sank within 20 minutes. Of the 208 people on board, 131 drowned. The sinking happened so quickly that lifeboats that could not be lowered in time went down with the ship, along with the people inside the boats. Other people jumped overboard as the ship steamer went down and were pulled down by the suction of the sinking vessel.Born:
  • * Mildred Davis, American silent film actress who later married her leading man, Harold Lloyd, in Philadelphia
  • * Stefan Lorant, Hungarian-American filmmaker and photojournalist, in Budapest Died:
  • * George Francis FitzGerald, 50, Irish physicist and mathematician, known for the Length contraction, following exploratory surgery for a perforated ulcer
  • * Laura Matilda Towne, 75, American educator and abolitionist who founded the first freedmen's schools for the education of newly freed slaves
  • * Rounsevelle Wildman, 37, American consul-general to Hong Kong, along with his family, in the sinking of the ''Rio de Janeiro''

February 23, 1901 (Saturday)

February 24, 1901 (Sunday)

  • After 53 ballots without any single candidate attaining a majority, the legislature of Oregon elected former Senator John H. Mitchell to be one of its two United States Senators.
  • Given a choice between committing suicide or being put to death, former Imperial Chinese officials chose the former, cutting their throats in the presence of the Governor of Shaanxi province.

February 25, 1901 (Monday)

  • Marcelo Azcárraga Palmero resigned as Prime Minister of Spain, along with his entire cabinet, after he declared that the group "regarded the mission for which it took office being accomplished by the marriage of the Infanta Maria de las Mercedes to Prince Charles of Bourbon".
  • George M. Cohan's first Broadway show, The Governor's Son, opened, but would close after a month because of a disastrous first night in front of the critics.
  • U.S. Steel was incorporated in New Jersey by industrialist J. P. Morgan, as the first billion-dollar corporation, with total capital valued at more than $1,400,000,000.
  • The town of Buhl, Minnesota was incorporated.
  • Professional boxers Jack Johnson and Joe Choynski fought a bout inside Harmony Hall in Galveston, Texas, and were both arrested after Choynski knocked out Johnson in the third round, for violating the state law against fighting for professional gain. The arrest would prove to be a big break for Johnson, an African-American rookie; he and Choynski, a white 33-year-old boxer described as "the first Jewish American athlete to rise to international repute", shared a jail cell for the next 24 days, during which "Choynski taught Johnson the defensive style that he would perfect during his career". The two men were freed after a grand jury declined to indict them, and Johnson would go on to become the world heavyweight boxing champion.
  • After again posting bail and being released from jail, Carrie Nation set off on another destructive raid on a saloon. During the fracas, a Topeka, Kansas citizen was shot and seriously wounded.
  • Thirty-two miners at the Diamondville Coal and Coke Company, in Diamondville, Wyoming, were killed in a fire in a mine shaft.
  • Arizona's territorial Capitol Building, which would continue as the state capitol building when Arizona became a state in 1912, was dedicated in Phoenix. Born:
  • * Vince Gair, Australian politician, 27th Premier of Queensland, Chairman of the Democratic Labor Party
  • * Zeppo Marx, American comedian, one of the Marx Brothers, in New York City

February 26, 1901 (Tuesday)

  • Chi-hsui and Hsu-cheng-yu, Boxer Rebellion leaders, were publicly beheaded in Beijing in front of a crowd of about 10,000. The two had been in the custody of the Japanese Army and were remanded to China's "Board of Punishments" for the executions. According to Lieutenant Colonel Goro Shiba, the Japanese legation's military attaché, he treated the two condemned men to champagne, and Chi-hsui told him "I do not know what I have done to make me deserving of death, but if beheading me will make the foreign troops evacuate Peking and my Emperor return, I am satisfied to die. I will die a patriot."
  • Reports from Bombay in British India showed that 400 people had died in a plague epidemic in just two days.
  • Figures from the latest census of the German Empire were released from Berlin. As of December 1, 1900, the German population was 56,345,014 "of which number 27,731,067 were males". The growth rate of 7.70% in five years was the highest increase in 30 years.
  • Died: Lucyna Ćwierczakiewiczowa, 82, Polish writer

February 27, 1901 (Wednesday)

February 28, 1901 (Thursday)