April 1909

April 1, 1909 (Thursday)

• The Children's Charter went into effect in Great Britain, providing new rules for protection of children, including more severe penalties for the death of a child, and prohibitions against juvenile begging or smoking, and creation of reform schools.
• The day after the raising of the Cuban flag over Camp Columbia, the last American troops left Cuba.
• A law banning the importing of opium into the United States went into effect.
• The New York Times reported that Rameses II, a toad "aged 1,000 years or more", died at the Bronx Zoo. Miners had discovered the toad in 1898 inside a stone near Butte, Montana.
• The six members of the polar expedition – Robert Peary, Matthew Henson, Ootah, Ooqueah, Egingwah, and Seegloo, set off from a point from the North Pole, and their last supply team turned back.

  April 2, 1909 (Friday)

• The Jewish Territorialist Organization released its report from its expedition to Cyrenaica, concluding that the lack of water in the North African nation made it inhospitable as a Jewish homeland.
• The Spring Creek raid, last of the violent attacks in Wyoming's "sheep wars" between cattlemen and sheep ranchers, took place near Tensleep Creek when seven masked cowboys attacked the camp of rancher Joe Allemand, killing him and two of his men, along with several dogs and all 5,000 of his flock of sheep. The public uproar over the senseless crime brought a campaign that ended the feuding.

  April 3, 1909 (Saturday)

• In Rome, the former home of poets John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley was dedicated as a memorial to both poets. An international committee of writers had raised money to buy and renovate the home near the Scala di Spagna.
• The "$10,000 Marathon Derby" was staged in New York City, promoted as a pro race between the world's six greatest marathon runners. The run took place at the Polo Grounds, where 30,000 turned out to watch a rematch between Dorando Pietri and Johnny Hayes, but Henri St. Yves won the race and the prize money.
• Died: Admiral Pascual Cervera, 70, commander of the Spanish fleet during the Spanish–American War

  April 4, 1909 (Sunday)

• The first speed limits for automobiles took effect in New York City, with a speed limit of. On the first day, 19 people were arrested. The first person to be caught was William Hobby, the Police Commissioner for Mount Vernon, New York, who was arrested after trying to elude bicycle patrolman Charles Silberbauer.
• Sport Club Internacional was founded in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.

  April 5, 1909 (Monday)

• The hoax began of the existence of ancient Egyptian ruins in the Grand Canyon in the U.S. state of Arizona, as the Phoenix Gazette published a story headlined "Explorations in Grand Canyon: Mysteries of Immense Rich Cavern Brought to Light". According to the story, a professor S. A. Jordan of the "Smithsonian Institute " found a vast network of interlinking tunnels and chambers nearly a mile beneath the walls of the Canyon with room to house 50,000 people and filled with treasures and mummies. As another author would note later, "In 1909 the start of the Internet Age was still eighty-five or so years away. But the World Wide Web played a pivotal role in keeping alive a story published as fact."
• Born:
• *Albert R. Broccoli, American film producer who co-produced the first eight James Bond movies; in New York City
• *Walton Musser, American inventor; in Mount Joy, Pennsylvania
• *Mikhail Ryazansky, Soviet Russian engineer who designed the transmission system and for the first satellite signals and the ground control guidance units; in Leningrad

  April 6, 1909 (Tuesday)

• Robert E. Peary, Matthew Henson, Ootah, Ooqueah, Egingwah, and Seegloo, reached the northernmost point of their expedition, and Peary planted the United States flag, along with four smaller flags at what Peary believed to be the North Pole, after measuring the angle of the sun and concluding that he was at 90 degrees north. He wrote in his diary "The Pole at last! My dream and goal for twenty years!" Henson recounted later that the four Eskimos said "Ting neigh tim ah ketisher", which in the Inuit language means "We have got there at last." The six men stayed 30 hours at the Pole, spending the night, and then started back at. Upon his return to Canada, Peary telegraphed news of his discovery on September 6, only to learn that Frederick Cook had claimed on September 1 to have reached the North Pole the year before. Though Cook's claim was not substantiated, later studies concluded that the location where Peary planted his flags was not the actual Pole. In 1989, the National Geographic Society released a study concluding that Peary had come within of the North Pole.
• Born: William M. Branham, American Christian minister and faith healer; in Cumberland County, Kentucky

  April 7, 1909 (Wednesday)

• U.S. President William Howard Taft issued an executive order directing that deaf-mutes and deaf persons would not be barred from taking the civil service examination.
• Born: Robert Grugeau, French writer and pioneer of the "ancient astronauts" theory; in Payroux

  April 8, 1909 (Thursday)

• Japan's parliament, the Diet, passed a law providing for cooperative societies.
• Great Britain and France announced they assented to the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by the Austrian Empire. Russia and Serbia had prepared to go to war against Austria-Hungary over the 1908 annexation but accepted it in March. The acquiescence of the British and the French brought the crisis to a close.
• A. Leo Stevens announced a forerunner of the airphone, with a specially designed wireless telephone that weighed only pounds and had been installed on a balloon. "Wireless telephone stations will be established at the top of some high buildings in New York and Boston", Stevens said, "and we expect to be able to give a detailed account of our trip as we are sailing through the air."
• Born: John Fante, American novelist and screenwriter; in Denver

  April 9, 1909 (Friday)

• South Dakota became the first U.S. state to officially recognize Mother's Day by proclamation of Governor Robert S. Vessey. Governor Vessey designated "the second Sabbath in our national memorial month of May", a date that remains in the U.S. and many other nations.
• April 9, 1909, is sometimes cited in error as the date that Robert Peary said that he had reached the North Pole, but April 6 was the date recorded in his diary.

  April 10, 1909 (Saturday)

• Professor Ross G. Marvin of Cornell drowned in the Arctic Ocean as Robert Peary's crew returned from the North Pole. Marvin's demise was the only fatality of the expedition.
• Cipriano Castro, ex-President of Venezuela, was forcibly expelled from Martinique by the French government. When Castro refused to leave his hotel, gendarmes placed him on a stretcher and carried him out, then placed him on the ship Versailles to be sent to St. Nazaire.
• The Russification of Finland continued as Tsar Nicholas II approved a recommendation for "laws of general Imperial interest concerning Finland" to be enacted by Russia's parliament rather than Finland's legislature. Finland's participation in the process would be limited to having one representative in the Duma and the Council of State.
• Canada opened up the Métis lands in Alberta to homesteaders, and 250 claims by French Canadians were registered on the first day. The Métis people, descended from intermarriage of European and Canadian Indians, had been provided a colony before the province of Alberta had been established.
• Died: Algernon Charles Swinburne, 72, English poet and inventor of the roundel poem

  April 11, 1909 (Sunday)

• A group of 100 settlers, living in the Ottoman-ruled city of Jaffa in Palestine, founded a new community on a 5 hectare plot of sand dunes they had purchased and divided into 60 lots. Referred to at first as Ahuzzat Bayit as buildings and water lines were constructed, the settlement would be renamed on May 21, 1910, for the Hebrew words for a burial mound and for a new spring, combining old and new, as the city of Tel Aviv.

  April 12, 1909 (Monday)

• Doc Powers, the popular catcher for baseball's Philadelphia Athletics, became seriously ill after the first game played at the new Shibe Park. In front of a record crowd of 30,162 the hometeam A's won 8–1. Over the next two weeks, Powers underwent three intestinal operations and died of peritonitis on April 26. Powers said at the time that his problems had happened as a result of eating a cheese sandwich prior to the game, while other observers thought he had been hurt while straining to catch a foul ball, or crashing into a wall.

  April 13, 1909 (Tuesday)

• Following the assassination of newspaper editor Hassan Fehmi Effendi, a rebellion broke out among thousands of troops in Constantinople, who surrounded the Parliament House and forced the resignation of the democratically elected Prime Minister, Grand Vizier Hüseyin Hilmi Pasha, and killing the Minister of Justice. Tewfik Pasha replaced Hilmi as Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire. The revolution was funded by Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who sought to regain the absolute power that he had prior to democratic reforms, but would backfire on him before the end of the month.
• Born:
• *Eudora Welty, American writer and Pulitzer prize winner; in Jackson, Mississippi
• *Stanislaw Ulam, Polish-American mathematician and nuclear physicist known for the Teller–Ulam design for thermonuclear weapons; in Lemberg, Austria-Hungary

  April 14, 1909 (Wednesday)

• After an uprising in the Ottoman Empire province of Adana, the massacre of thousands of Armenians began, with the predominantly Moslem government troops beginning the killing of the predominantly Christian Armenians over a three-day period. Later in the month, a second wave of killings began.
• The Anglo-Persian Oil Company was incorporated in order to exploit oil resources in Iran. The name was changed to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1935, and in 1954, the British Petroleum Company, now known worldwide as BP.
• Minnesota outlawed the sale and distribution of cigarettes within the state, effective August 1.