April 1913

April 1, 1913 (Tuesday)

• The Turkish government approved the terms of peace to end the First Balkan War, losing 60,000 square miles of its territory to the Balkan nations.
• The first trial of the assembly line method of manufacturing was made, with the Ford Motor Company testing the process in the putting together of a magneto for a flywheel motor at its factory in Highland Park, Michigan. The assembly process was split among 29 employees, each putting together a part of the magneto and then sending it over to another employee. The production time for each magneto was lowered from 20 minutes to 13 minutes. When the height of the line was raised the next year, and a moving conveyor was added, the time dropped to eight minutes, and then five minutes, a quadrupling of the production rate.
• Philippe, the Duke of Montpensier and pretender to the French throne, was proclaimed as the King of Albania by the provisional government.
• Romania issued its first law regulating the military aeronautics, forming the Serviciul de Aeronautică Militară.
• Lord Northcliffe, the publisher of the British newspaper, the Daily Mail, offered a prize of £10,000 to the first persons who could make a direct flight across the Atlantic Ocean, within 72 hours or less. In 2013 money, the equivalent would be £730,000 or $1.1 million. The shortest trip was 1,900 miles between Ireland and Newfoundland, which John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown would accomplish on June 15, 1919.
• Former U.S. President William Howard Taft began serving as a professor of law at Yale University.
• The Riverview Hospital opened in Coquitlam, British Columbia as a mental health facility, and was handling just over 900 patients by the end of the year. It woul operate until 2012 and close to make way for new provincial mental health facility.
• The weekly newspaper Northern Herald began publication in Cairns, Australia. It would cease publication in 1939.

  April 2, 1913 (Wednesday)

• The Kingdom of Montenegro rejected demands from the five major European nations to withdraw its troops from Albania.
• The U.S. government released a group of Apache Indians held as prisoners of war at the Fort Sill Military Reservation in Oklahoma since 1894. Of the group, 163 elected to be relocated to New Mexico, while another 76 received allotments of land in Oklahoma, and the last Apaches would leave Fort Sill on March 7, 1914.
• British record label Polydor Records was established initially as a subsidiary to the Deutsche Grammophon company, becoming its own independent label in 1972.

  April 3, 1913 (Thursday)

• The long German dirigible Z-4, flying near the boundary with France in order to inspect French border defenses, strayed into French territory, ran out of fuel, and went down at the airfield at Lunéville in northeastern France where the French Army seized control of the ship and detained its crew of eleven. France allowed civilian repairmen to cross over from Germany, and the Z-4 left the next day, but not before it was photographed and measured in detail.
• Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the British suffrage movement, was sentenced to three years in prison after being convicted of the conspiracy to bomb the country home of David Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. She went on a hunger strike and was released nine days later.
• The ocean liner SS Vaterland, the largest ever built by Germany, was launched for the Hamburg America Line. The ship would be captured on April 6, 1917, by the United States while in the harbor at Hoboken, New Jersey, on the day of the American declaration of war against Germany in World War I, and would be renamed the SS Leviathan.
• Real County, Texas, named for Julius Real, was established from southeast Edwards County, southwest Kerr County, and western Bandera County.
• Born: Per Borten, Prime Minister of Norway 1965 to 1971; in Flå Municipality
• * Josino Levino Ferreira Brazilian farmer And Second oldest living man in the world

  April 4, 1913 (Friday)

• An angry mob in Mondak, Montana, carried out the lynching of a black construction worker, J. C. Collins, hours after Collins had shot and killed Sheridan County Sheriff Thomas Courtney and a deputized citizen, Richard Bermeister. Collins was forcibly removed from jail by a group who had overpowered his captors, then taken to a telephone pole and hanged; in some accounts, some of the citizens attempted unsuccessfully to set fire to the hanging corpse and, failing in that effort, shot the body with bullets. Booker T. Washington would mention the lynching in a July 15, 1913, letter to the Boston Transcript.
• The Maori Agricultural College was established in Hastings, New Zealand by Mormon missionaries exclusively for Maori students regardless of their religious affiliation. The college would be destroyed in the Napier Earthquake in 1931, the same year that the New Zealand government would take over the role of sponsorship of education.
• Born:
• *Muddy Waters
• *Jerome Weidman, American playwright, known for his musicals such as Fiorello! and I Can Get It for You Wholesale; in New York City
• *Frances Langford, American singer, best known for her hits "I'm in the Mood for Love" and "Chattanooga Choo Choo"; as Julia Frances Newbern-Langford, in Lakeland, Florida
• *Gene Ramey, American jazz musician, bass player for the Jay McShann Orchestra; in Austin, Texas
• *Dave Brown, Australian rugby player, centre for the Warrington Wolves and Eastern Suburbs from 1937 to 1941, and the Australia national rugby league team from 1933 to 1936; as David Brown, in Sydney
• Died:
• * Edward Dowden, 70, Irish literary critic and poet, best known his criticism on William Shakespeare and poetry collection, Letters
• * Emmanouil Argyropoulos, 23, the first Greek citizen to become a pilot, died ub the first fatal plane crash in Greece. Argyropoulos and his passenger, Konstantinos Manos, had been flying over the Langadas region near Thessaloniki when his Blériot airplane suddenly lost power at an altitude of and plummeted earthward, killing both men.

  April 5, 1913 (Saturday)

• The new constitution for the Republic of Nicaragua came into effect, providing for a 40-member Chamber of Deputies and a 13-member Senate.
• U.S. Navy destroyer was launched by Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts. It would serve briefly in World War I before it was decommissioned in 1922.
• Ebbets Field opened as the new home of baseball's Brooklyn Superbas, who played an exhibition game against the newly renamed New York Yankees from the rival American League. The Superbas won the game, 3–2, before 25,000 fans. Genevieve Ebbets, daughter of Dodgers owner Charles Ebbets, threw the honorary first pitch.
• The United States of America Foot Ball Association, now the United States Soccer Federation, was founded. The word "soccer" would not be made part of the organization name until 1945, and the word "football" would not be dropped until the USSF adopted its present name in 1974.
• Physicist Niels Bohr completed his groundbreaking paper concerning quantum theory of the hydrogen atom.
• Spanish pianist Ricardo Viñes conducted the first public performance of Veritables Preludes flasques by French composer Erik Satie during a concert at the Salle Pleyel in Paris. Satie used the occasional advertise that more compositions were coming in the same humorous style.
• Died: Gheorghe Grigore Cantacuzino, 79, Prime Minister of Romania 1899–1900 and 1906–1907

  April 6, 1913 (Sunday)

• The Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies was founded by decree of King Carol of Romania. It would have more than 35,000 undergraduate and 1,600 masters and doctoral students by the time of its centennial in 2013.
• A rail station opened in Keswick to serve the Seaford railway line in Adelaide, Australia.
• Born: Otto Schmitt, American engineer, pioneer of biomedical engineering, credited with coining the term biometrics; in St. Louis

  April 7, 1913 (Monday)

• Champ Clark was re-elected Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.

  April 8, 1913 (Tuesday)

• China inaugurated its first elected Parliament at Beijing, with more than 500 of the 596 Representatives and 177 of the 274 Senators present when the assembly opened at 11:00 am.
• The Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified by Connecticut, which became the 36th of the 48 states to favor the amendment for direct election of United States senators. The measure passed the state House, 150-77, and then passed unanimously by the state Senate.
• U.S. President Woodrow Wilson broke a 100-year tradition and personally appeared before a joint session of United States Congress to speak in support of a bill on tariffs.
• Charles F. O'Neall was elected mayor of San Diego with 52% of the vote.
• Norwegian ocean liner was launched by Cammell Laird in Birkenhead, England as the second major ship for the Norwegian America Line.
• German steamship Solfels was launched by Joh. C. Tecklenborg in Wesermünde, Germany to serve the Hansa Line. She was captured by the Royal Navy in World War I and recommissioned as SS Empire Advocate in 1919.
• Born:
• *Sourou-Migan Apithy, Beninese state leader, second President of Dahomey 1964–1965; in Porto-Novo, French Dahomey
• *Benedict J. Semmes Jr., American naval officer, commander of the USS Picking during World War II and the United States Second Fleet during the Cold War, recipient of the Navy Cross and Navy Distinguished Service Medal; in Memphis, Tennessee
• *Carlton Skinner, American public servant, first civilian Governor of Guam, 1949–1953; in Palo Alto, California