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After passing the entrance examinations and gaining admission to Radcliffe College, Helen Keller began classes. "The many friends of Helen Keller, the phenomenal blind deaf-mute, will be gratified to learn that she has passed the entrance examination to Radcliffe College with flying colors ...", The New York Times noted on its front page of October 8.
In Munich, Prince Albert, nephew of King Leopold of Belgium, married Duchess Elisabeth of Bavaria. King Leopold, who had no male heirs, had the right to appoint his own successor, but waited to see if Albert intended to marry before naming Albert as the heir to the throne. Prince Emmanuel, who had married Albert's older sister, Princess Henriette, is said to have been King Leopold's backup if Albert had not married. After he and Elisabeth had two sons, Albert was named heir to the throne and became King of Belgium upon Leopold's death in 1909.
October 3, 1900 (Wednesday)
Apolinario Mabini, who had been the first Prime Minister of the First Philippine Republic during its temporary independence from Spain, was briefly released from prison by American authorities despite his refusal to take an oath of allegiance to the United States. After continuing his criticism of the American territorial administration and of Filipino collaborators, Mabini would be re-arrested, and deported to Guam.
The Dream of Gerontius, written by Edward Elgar, was first performed in Birmingham, England. With less than two weeks of rehearsal, the debut under the direction of Hans Richter was a disaster. One observer noted that the concert "seemed to continue for an eternity ... it was evident that the chorus did not know the parts they were trying to sing ... The whole thing was a nightmare."
U.S. Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan denounced the administration of U.S. President William McKinley for permitting slavery to exist in American territory. "We fought then", said Bryan of the American Civil War, "for the adoption of a constitutional amendment that provided that no man could own a slave, and yet before the Philippine war is ended we have the Sulu treaty, which recognizes slavery."
Died: Charles Alexander Mentry, founder in 1876 of the town of Mentryville, California, was stung by an insect and died at the age of 54. Without him, the Los Angeles County town would steadily decline in population and be abandoned by the 1930s, with the exception of Mentry's house.
In China, revolution broke out in Huizhou, in the Guangdong Province, after Sun Yat-sen called on the Revive China Society (Xingzhonghui) to begin an insurrection. Several hundred men, under the command of Zheng Shilian, began the attack on government offices in Shenzhoutian, and the revolt spread to Shawan and Zhenlong. The rebels were defeated by October 23.
Max Planck hosted fellow physicist Heinrich Rubens for tea, and considered news that Rubens' experiments had contradicted Planck's theories. Later that evening, Planck reviewed his calculations and refined them to what would be announced, on October 19, as Planck's law or the radiation distribution function.
The Paris Aero Club sponsored the Gran Prix of ballooning, with six balloons lifting off at 5:20 pm from Vincennes, France to fly east toward Russia. Count Henri de la Vaulx and Count de Castillen de Saint-Victor, flying the Centaure, arrived in the Ukrainian city of Korostyshiv, 333⁄4 hours later, after flying 1,153 miles (1,856 km) to win the race.
An earthquake of 8.3 magnitude occurred off the coast of Alaska, but caused no significant damage.
October 10, 1900 (Wednesday)
The Wright Glider No. 1 was wrecked after the Wright brothers put it through its third test. The glider was tethered to a wooden derrick and controlled with various cables, but a 30-mile-per-hour (48 km/h) gust tore the apparatus. After the crash, the Wrights abandoned the derrick as unsafe and, eight days later, flew on the rebuilt glider without restraints, a giant step forward in manned flight.
Escorted by Russian troops, Li Hongzhang, the Viceroy of Zhili, arrived in Beijing to negotiate terms of peace, on behalf of China's Imperial Government, with the Eight-Nation Alliance.
The submarine force of the United States Navy began with the commissioning of USS Holland, purchased for $150,000 in April. The Holland, which could carry seven men and four torpedoes, was scrapped in 1910.
October 13, 1900 (Saturday)
Major General Leonard Wood, U.S. Military Governor of Cuba, met with Major Walter Reed in Havana and gave the authorization for further funding of experiments to establish that yellow fever was spread by the mosquito Aedes aegypti. One author has described this as "one of the most important meetings in the history of medicine".
Lieutenant T. L. Fuller of the Frontier Battalion of the Texas Ranger Division was assassinated while washing his face in an Orange, Texas barber shop, possibly in retaliation for his self-defense killing of a gang leader in December 1899. Fuller was the last member of the Frontier Battalion killed in the line of duty before its disbandment in 1901.
U.S. Marshals arrested Alexander McKenzie, operator of the Alaska Gold Mining Company. McKenzie, a North Dakota politician who had arrived on July 19, had secured the appointment of a federal judge in hopes of having exclusive control of the gold fields, just long enough to make a fortune.
Pierre Giffard founded L'Auto-Velo, later referred to simply as L'Auto, the first daily publication devoted exclusively to automobiles and cycling.
Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands announced her engagement to Prince Henry. They were married on February 7, 1901, and Prince Henry served as consort until his death in 1934.
The anthracite coal miners strike in Pennsylvania ended after one month, with the companies agreeing to a 10 percent raise for all miners.
October 18, 1900 (Thursday)
The Wright brothers began their first untethered glider flights at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, after concluding that restraining the glider with cables had hindered their research on controlled flight. In six days of untethered tests, ending on October 23, Wilbur and Orville perfected control of unpowered flight.
Max Planck presented, to the German Physical Society in Berlin, what is now called Planck's law of black-body radiation, described as "a discovery that opened the way to the development of the quantum theory and provided the initial formulation for that theory".
Cornelius L. Alvord, Jr., was revealed to have been the perpetrator of the largest bank robbery, up to that time, in American history. Alvord, a teller at the First National Bank of New York (now part of Citibank) had embezzled more than $700,000 from the bank over a period of six years. By contrast, Butch Cassidy's largest bank robbery, committed the month before, netted less than $33,000. Alvord, one of the great white collar criminals of his day, was arrested six days later in Boston. He served eight years in Sing Sing prison and died on September 10, 1912, in Stockport, New York.
Jimmy Governor, Australian mass murderer, was captured after a three-month manhunt. His brother and partner in crime, Joe Governor, was killed while trying to elude capture on October 31. Jimmy, who had murdered nine people (including four children), was hanged in 1901.
The vaudeville team of Joe and Myra Keaton was appearing at a matinee show at the Wonderland Theater in Wilmington, Delaware, when they decided to bring their five-year-old son on stage. Joseph Frank Keaton, nicknamed "Buster", was instructed to simply sit at the side and stare at this parents, and the theater manager, William Dockstader, told the parents that the child had been a distraction to the act. Days later, however, Dockstader allowed the child to appear in the Keaton family show because there would be children in the audience. This time, Joe made Buster Keaton part of continuing comedy sketches about a mischievous child and an exasperated father, and the child began a career of making theater (and, later, film) audiences laugh.
An explosion at the Tarrant & Company pharmaceutical warehouse killed 38 people and injured more than 200, and destroyed two city blocks in New York City. At about 12:45 pm, thirty minutes after a fire began on the upper floors, a blast leveled the seven-story building at 275 Washington Street, and destroyed eight surrounding stores.
October 30, 1900 (Tuesday)
William Rush Merriam released the results of the 1900 United States census and found the total population of the United States was 76,295,220. There were 74,627,907 in the forty-five states, and another 1,667,313 in the Territories, the District of Columbia, and stationed overseas. An additional 134,158 American Indians were not included in the total. Mr. Merriam added, "The figures of the population are the result of a careful computation by means of the latest tabulating machines.
Clayton Edwards, A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines: A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure, from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. (Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1920), pp. 278–281
Salman, Michael (2001). The Embarrassment of Slavery: Controversies Over Bondage and Nationalism in the American Colonial Philippines. University of California Press. pp. 46–47.
R. Floyd Clarke, "A Permanent Tribunal of International Arbitration: Its Necessity and Value", The American Journal of International Law (April 1907) pp. 382–88
"Names for Hall of Fame", New York Times, October 13, 1900, p. 7
Robert McKenna, The Dictionary of Nautical Literacy (McGraw-Hill Professional, 2003), p. 163
Ossad, Stephen L. (September 2003). "The Frustrations of Leonard Wood". ARMY Magazine.
Glenn Stout and Richard A. Johnson, Red Sox Century: The Definitive History of Baseball's Most Storied Franchise (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005), pp. 6–7
dos Santos Silva, Isabel (1999). Cancer Epidemiology: Principles and Methods. IARC. p. 386.
Bunch, Bryan H. (2004). The History of Science and Technology: A Browser's Guide to the Great Discoveries, Inventions, and the People who Made Them, from the Dawn of Time to Today. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p. 450.
