January 17, 1912: Scott discovers that Amundsen reached the South Pole firstJanuary 6, 1912: New Mexico becomes 47th U.S. stateJanuary 22, 1912: The Overseas Railroad opens in FloridaJanuary 11, 1912: American Textile workers unite in walkout
The Republic of China was established as Dr. Sun Yat-sen took the oath of office as the Provisional President at Nanjing.[1] According to Homer Lea, an advisor to Sun and the only Westerner to witness the ceremony, a band played "Behold, the Conquering Hero Comes" and the hymn "God Be with You till We Meet Again." Although Sun's supporters controlled most of southern China, Yuan Shikai retained power in the north as the chief of the Emperor's army in Beijing, and would soon become president of a united nation.[2]
The Swiss Civil Code, adopted on December 10, 1907, came into operation under the Berne Convention. The code was the work of law professor Eugen Huber and the product of 15 years of refinement. As one commentator[who?] noted, "There was nothing hurried in the preparation or adoption of this code."[3]
With 4,000 Russian troops occupying the Persian city of Tabriz, the Russian authorities executed eight of the Iranian leaders who had supported the Persian Constitutional Revolution and had failed to leave the city. The date chosen coincided with Shi'ite holiday of the 10th of Muharram.[10]
Neurologist Ernst Trömner introduced a test for what he called the Fingerbeugephänomen, though it is more commonly called "Trömner's reflex," at a meeting of the Hamburg Medical Society. The reflex is tested on a patient's fingers for signs of a lesion of the cervical nerves.[12]
The Royal Charter of the Boy Scouts Association was granted by King George, granting corporate status to the British organization that had been founded in 1908.[15]
The Moon was at its closest point to Earth in the 20th century, at 221,451 miles distance (356,375km). On March 2, 1984, the Moon would be furthest away during the century, at 252,731 miles. The closest approach in the 21st century was on November 14, 2016, at 221,535 miles, and the most distant took place on March 14, 2002 (252,728 miles).[16]
Dr. Sun Yat-sen issued the "Manifesto from the Republic of China to All Friendly Nations," shifting a change in its foreign policy with a promise to end the isolationism of the Manchu Emperors, and "to rejoin China with the international community."[17] On the same day, Dr. Sun met with women's suffragist Lin Zongsu and pledged to aid in allowing women the right to vote in the new republic.[18]
A colonial force of 200 men left the port of Dili for the inland to suppress a growing revolt in East Timor.[19]
The Tong Wars in New York City's Chinatown resumed, one year and two days after the January 3, 1911, truce between the Hip Sing and On Leong gangs. Lung Yu, the vice-president of the Hip Sing Tong, was killed in a shootout at a gambling hall on 21 Pell Street.[20][21]
The Moscow Art Theatre opened with a production of Hamlet, a production that drew international acclaim and brought the theater company "to the world's stage."[22]
The first airplane crash in Australia occurred, when pilot W. E. Hart was forced to crash land between Mount Druitt and Rooty Hill in New South Wales. He and his companion were able to escape with minor injuries.[24]
At a meeting of the Geological Association of Germany at Frankfurt am Main, Alfred Wegener first presented the theory of continental drift, reading his paper, Die Herausbildung der Grossformen der Erdinde (Kontinente und Ozeane) auf geophysikalischer Grundlage ("The geophysical basis of the evolution of large-scale features of the earth's crust").[25]
William Morgan Shuster resigned as treasurer-general of Persia, bringing to an end the war with Russia. In return for his resignation, the Russians guaranteed safe passage through occupied territory for Shuster and his family. He left Tehran on January 11 by automobile, and departed the country on the Russian steamer Teheran on January 14, returning to the United States by way of Russia.[26]
The African National Congress (ANC) was founded as the South African Native National Congress in a four-day meeting at Bloemfontein, South Africa. African lawyer Pixley ka Isaka Seme wrote letters to the leaders of South Africa's various tribes and organized the meeting, giving the opening address to 60 delegates. Reverend John Langalibalele Dube, who published the Zulu language newspaper Ilange Lasa Natal, was elected as the organization's first president, with Sol Plaatje as secretary and Seme as treasurer. The ANC adopted its present name in 1923.[29]
The common council in San Diego passed a resolution limiting public space for soap box presentations, a common means for local activists to communicate to local citizens, in response to citizen complaints that activist groups such as the Industrial Workers of the World were blocking traffic. The resolution initiated months of labor violence and vigilantism in San Diego before disappearing by the autumn.[32]
The 130-foot tall Equitable Building, New York City's first skyscraper, was destroyed by a fast moving fire, killing 6 people.[33] The blaze had started at 5:00 in the morning and the offices of three of the nation's largest financial institutions — Equitable Life, Mercantile Safe Deposit, and many law firms — were destroyed. Fireproof vaults protected several billion dollars of securities, stocks and bonds from destruction.[34][35]
The official results of the 1911 French Census were released. There were 39,601,509 French residents, an increase of 349,264 people from 39,252,245 in the 1906 Census.[37]
French Prime MinisterJoseph Caillaux and his cabinet were forced to resign, two days after the French Senate concluded that he had secretly negotiated the give-away of French territory without the President's knowledge in working out a treaty with Germany. French Foreign Minister Justin de Selves declined to deny the accusations against Caillaux.[42][43]
The Russian steamer Russ, on its way across the Black Sea from Galați, Romania to Odessa, sank in with 172 people on board. Among the casualties were the new Consul General, Carl Anseff, and his family.[44]
Lawrence textile strike– Receiving their paychecks a day before the rest of the employees at the Everett Mills Company in Lawrence, Massachusetts, mostly Polish-speaking women employed as weavers found that the company had cut their pay (already low, ranging from 9+1⁄2 cents to 20 cents per hour) after a new state law had gone into effect limiting the work week to 54 hours. The women immediately walked off the job. The next day, the strike would spread to the other companies in the city.[45]
With 208 seats in the Reichstag at stake in the first round of the German parliamentary election, the Socialists won 64 of the seats and increased their margin by 26 while the government coalition lost 29. The second round was set for January 23, with 121 seats to be filled.[46]
The Lawrence textile strike began a day after the first group of textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, received smaller paychecks, other employees at the Everett Mills got their reduced pay, and walked off the job. Employees at the other companies—American Woolen, Arlington Mills and Pacific Mills—followed suit.[47] Men, women and children from 25 different nationalities defied attempts to break up the strike, holding out for nine weeks until March 13, when American Woolen agreed to the strikers' demands, raising wages by 5 to 25%, and giving 25% extra for overtime.[48][49][50]
The General Post Office of the British government assumed control of the National Telephone Company, "leaving the United States as the only major nation in which the network was privately owned."[51]
The lowest temperatures ever measured in Iowa (-47°F at Washta, matched on February 3, 1996, in Elkader)[53] and in Minnesota (-40°F in Pipestone) were recorded on the same day during the height of a cold wave across much of the northern United States. Pipestone also set the record for Minnesota's highest temperature (108°F) on four occasions between 1930 and 1936.[54]
Cattle baron John Beal Sneed shot and killed Albert Boyce, Sr., former manager of the famous XIT Ranch in the Texas panhandle, when the two crossed paths at the Metropolitan Hotel in Fort Worth, Texas. The two had been bitterly feuding when Sneed's wife Lenora had an affair with Boyce in late 1911. The murder kicked off one of the most sensational trials in the history of Texas up to that point and furthered the violent feuding between the two families which resulted in another six deaths.[59][60]
Camp Trouble, the first training site for U.S. Navy aviators, was opened on a peninsula in San Diego Bay, consisting of a set of tents and three airplanes. By May, all three of the planes had been wrecked, and the squadron was transferred to Annapolis, Maryland, on May 2, 1912.[65]
The General Assembly of the Ottoman Empire was dissolved, three days after a proposed constitutional amendment that would allow Sultan Hamid to dissolve parliament in time of war, failed to receive more than 125 votes out of 188 that would have been necessary in the 376 member chamber.[67][68]
British Antarctic Expedition– One day away from the South Pole, Captain Robert Falcon Scott wrote in his journal, "The worst has happened, or nearly the worst." After starting the afternoon "in high spirits," the party saw "the remains of a camp; sledge tracks and ski tracks going and coming and the clear trace of dogs' paws- many dogs. This told us the whole story. The Norwegians have forestalled us and are first at the Pole."[69]
An attempt was made on the life of China's Premier Yuan Shikai. Three bombs were thrown at him as he was returning from an audience at the Imperial Palace in the Forbidden City. Yuan was unhurt, but twenty people around him were injured.[70]
The British Antarctic Expedition, consisting of Robert Falcon Scott and his team of four explorers, reached the South Pole, only to find the flag of Norway that had been planted by the Norwegian Expedition led by Roald Amundsen. "The Pole," Scott wrote in his journal; "Yes, but under very different circumstances from those expected. We have had a horrible day." He added, "Great God! This is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority. Well, it is something to have got here. Now for the run home and a desperate struggle. I wonder if we can do it."[73]
French scientist Alexis Carrel, working at the Rockefeller Institute in New York City, removed a piece of the heart of a chicken embryo, then kept the fragment alive for the remaining 32 years of his life.[74] Carrel, who won the Nobel Prize later in the year (though not for the experiment),[specify] died on November 5, 1944.[citation needed] The tissue lasted until September 1946.[75]
Over 1,000 people in Ecuador were killed in the fighting between troops from the Quito national government and the Guayaquil rebel government at Yaguachi, northeast of Guayaquil. General Julio Andrade, leader of the Quito troops, defeated the rebels. General Flavio Alfaro, commander of the rebel troops, was wounded.[77]
The ship Wistow Hall with 57 people on board, sank in a gale off of the coast of Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Only the captain and three other people were saved.[78]
The results of the British Miners' Federation vote on a strike were released, showing 445,801 in favor and 115,921 against.[80] The strike, aimed at securing a minimum wage for coal miners, would begin on March 1 and last until April 4, 1912.[81]
U.S. President William Howard Taft pardoned Charles W. Morse after the Wall Street financier had served more than a year of a 15-year prison sentence, upon being advised that Morse was terminally ill.[84] Morse recovered and outlived Taft, dying in 1933.[85]
British Antarctic Expedition– In despair over having been beaten to the South Pole by Roald Amundsen of Norway, exhausted and with limited supplies, Robert Falcon Scott and his four fellow explorers set off on a 900-mile journey northward to their base. Caught in unusually cold weather, none of them would survive.[86]
The first successful strike in Mexican history was settled after 25 days, as company owners agreed to reduce the workday to ten hours and increase weekly wages by ten percent.[89]
The second round of Reichstag elections began, with 77 seats, followed by 80 on Monday and concluding with 34 on January 25.[90]
Two days after a woman and her four children in Crowley, Louisiana, were hacked to death in their home by the killer later dubbed the "Mulatto Ax Murderer," Felix Broussard, his wife and three children were killed in similar fashion in Lake Charles, about fifty miles west. Six people had been killed in November in Lafayette, 25 miles to the west of Crowley. The killings had started in January 1911 in Rayne, 15 miles from Crowley, and occurred in Texas as well. The Broussard killings marked 24 murders to that point.[91]
Joseph Conrad achieved his first popular success as the New York Herald began serializing his novel Chance, having bought the rights to the unfinished work, halted in 1906, in June, 1911. Conrad continued to work on finishing the book while the first chapters were appearing weekly in the Herald, completing it on March 26.[92]
Sun Yat-sen and Yuan Shikai completed their negotiations on the unification of the Republic of China and the area in Northern China, with Dr. Sun agreeing to yield the presidency to Yuan upon the abdication of the Emperor.[93]
Four black residents were lynched in Hamilton, Georgia, following the alleged murder of a white landowner,[94][95] who in some historical accounts had been a notorious sexual predator of black women in Harris County, Georgia.[96]
The Overseas Railroad carried its first passengers from Palm Beach to Key West with the completion of the six-year construction of the Key West Extension of the Florida East Coast Railway. Henry Flagler, the railway's owner, financed the seemingly impossible project of building bridges and landfill to lay 169 miles of railroad tracks across the waters to link the islands of the Florida Keys.[97] Flagler, 82, arrived with the other passengers at 10:43a.m. to a cheering crowd of 10,000 people, and told the gathering, "Now I can die happy. My dream is fulfilled." He would pass away 1 year and 4 months later.[98]
Former Illinois Central Railroad company President J.T. Harahan and three other passengers were killed in a wreck near Kinmundy, Illinois, when the private car of Vice-President F.O. Melcher of the Rock Island line was struck from behind by another train.[99]
The International Opium Convention was signed at The Hague by 12 nations.[100] The signatories resolved to work toward "the gradual suppression of the abuse of opium, morphine, cocaine, as also of the drugs prepared or derived from these substances which give rise or might give rise to similar abuses."[101]
The town of Forgan, Oklahoma, was incorporated as the end of the line for the Wichita Falls & Northwestern Railroad Company.[102]
An earthquake measuring 6.5 in magnitude struck the Greek island of Zakynthos, killing 51 people.[103][104]
General Pedro Montero, who had been proclaimed President of Ecuador on December 29, 1911, by rebelling Ecuadorian troops, was sentenced to 16 years in prison following his court-martial in Guayaquil. Montero had been captured in battle three days earlier on January 22. After former president Leónidas Plaza announced the military court's decision to the crowd outside of the Government Palace, several members of the crowd outside rushed inside and shot General Montero to death. They carried his corpse outside, where the mob beheaded and burned it in a bonfire.[107]
Voting in elections for the Reichstag concluded, with the Socialists having the largest number of seats—100 out of 397—and the Radical and National Liberal parties having 44 and 47, for a total of 191 seats, still short of a majority. Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg was able to find a new government.[109]
Karl Grulich, German aviator, tripled the record for staying aloft with multiple passengers, flying for 1 hour and 35 minutes in a Harlan monoplane over Johannistal, Germany. The prior record had been 31 minutes by Frenchman M. Busson on March 10, 1911, over Reims, France.[110][111]
A group of 47 generals and commanders of China's Imperial Army, all of whom had pledged their allegiance to the monarchy earlier in the month, signed a petition to the Emperor and the regent, asking that the Manchu rulers give way to a republic under Yuan Shikai. "This memorial dealt a lethal blow to the dynasty," an author would note later.[who?][112]
In Walla Walla, Washington, Assistant Fire Chief Robert J. Wolf was killed after becoming trapped in the basement of the Jones Building while fighting a fire.[116]
According to his own letter to the magazine Popular Astronomy, amateur astronomer Frank B. Harris was observing through his telescope and saw an object crossing the Moon, which he described as something that "was fully as black comparatively as marks on this paper, and in shape like a crow poised." Harris estimated it as being 250 miles long and 50 miles wide.[117] Although nobody else reported witnessing the phenomenon, the story has been repeated in the decades that followed.[citation needed] The briefly reported event has been described as something "that launched the 'modern' period of anomalous lunar happenings."[118]
A mob in Quito, Ecuador stormed the penitentiary where former PresidentEloy Alfaro and his brothers Flavio and Medardo had been held as prisoners of war since their capture on January 22, 1912. Eloy, who had been the 15th President of Ecuador and had served from 1895 to 1901, and again from 1906 to 1911, and Flavio, who had been proclaimed president by rebels in Guayaquil, were lynched along with the others. The resulting violence instigated the Concha Revolution.[119]
The Lin-shih ts'an-i-yuan, also known as the Nanking Assembly and the first legislature for the Republic of China, convened at Nanjing with representatives from all of the provinces.[120]
Renowned trial lawyer Clarence Darrow was indicted by a grand jury in Los Angeles, on charges of attempted bribery of a juror in the case that he was defending for J.B. McNamara. Arrested, he was released on $20,000 bail. Darrow would be acquitted in August of 1912 after a three-month trial. In a separate case, the jury deadlocked with eight of twelve jurors. The district attorney agreed not to renew the charges as long as Darrow agreed never to practice in California again.[126]
In an interview with the Chicago Evening Post, former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt announced for the first time that he would accept the nomination for the presidency, though he would not actively seek a return to the White House.[citation needed]
Captain Carlo Montu of the Italian Army became the first pilot to be wounded in combat, after he was struck by anti-aircraft fire from Ottoman forces.[128]
Classification of S.A.R. Engines with Renumbering Lists, issued by the Chief Mechanical Engineer’s Office, Pretoria, January 1912, pp. 7, 12, 15, 46 (Reprinted in April 1987 by SATS Museum, R.3125-6/9/11-1000)
The Britannica Year-Book 1913: A Survey of the World's Progress Since the Completion in 1910 of the Encyclopædia Britannica] (Encyclopædia Britannica, 1913) pp. xxi-xxii.
Afary, Janet (1996). The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, 1906-1911: Grassroots Democracy, Social Democracy, & the Origins of Feminism. Columbia University Press. p.337.
Robertson, Donald B. (1986). Encyclopedia of Western Railroad History: The Desert States: Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah. Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers. pp.77, 102. ISBN0-87004-305-6.
Benedetti, Jean. 1999. Stanislavski: His Life and Art. Revised edition. Original edition published in 1988. London: Methuen. ISBN0-413-52520-1, p. 199.
William Morgan Shuster, The Strangling of Persia: A Story of the European Diplomacy and Oriental Intrigue that Resulted in the Denationalization of Twelve Million Mohammedans, a Personal Narrative (The Century Company, 1912) pp. 224-230
Franks, Norman, Aircraft vs. Aircraft: The Illustrated Story of Fighter Pilot Combat From 1914 to the Present Day, London: Grub Street, 1998, ISBN1-902304-04-7, p. 9.
J. M. Barrie, Scott's Last Expedition - The Personal Journals of Captain R. F. Scott, C.V.O., R.N., on His Journey to the South Pole (1913, reprinted by READ BOOKS, 2009) pp. 423-424.
"Mexican textile workers: from conquest to globalization", by Jeffrey Bortz, in The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 1650-2000 (Ashgate Publishing, 2010) pp. 346-347.
Roald Amundsen, with Arthur G. Chater, The South Pole: An Account of the Norwegian Antarctic Expedition in the "Fram," 1910-1912 (J. Murray, 1913) p. 353.
