August 1901

August 1, 1901 (Thursday)

• A constitutional change that disenfranchised most African-American voters was approved in Maryland.
• W. F. Wright, a farmer and a former official with the Nebraska Department of Agriculture, ended his experiment at bring a rainfall by firing cannons at a clear sky after two days. Starting the previous afternoon, Wright and his assistants lined up 24 mortars at his farm near Lincoln, Nebraska, loaded them with gunpowder, and fired them once a minute until his supply of several thousand pounds of gunpowder was exhausted, to test Wright's own theory of "special vibration". Wright explained his theory that clouds were not formed from evaporation of water and that hydrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere could only combine to form water if "outside force is brought to bear upon them", and that the force was atmospheric electricity. The concussion from firing a cannon, Wright told reporters, created friction that would produce the atmospheric electricity necessary to form water. The next day, the area around Lincoln steadily cooled off and temperatures dropped 41 degrees over a period of 38 hours, and on August 3, heavy rain came down "throughout the northern portion of Nebraska, southern South Dakota and the northern portion of Iowa", and Wright declared that he had been the person responsible.
• Born: Francisco Guilledo, Filipino professional boxer who competed under the name "Pancho Villa" and was the one-time world flyweight boxing champion; in Ilog, Negros Occidental

  August 2, 1901 (Friday)

• The British government established colonial governments for Boer territory captured from the Orange Free State and the South African Republic, creating the Orange River Colony and the Transvaal Colony.
• Joseph Chamberlain, Secretary of State for the Colonies for the United Kingdom, stated in the House of Commons that the British concentration camps in South Africa were "the only humane alternative to leaving the women and general on the 'desert veld'.
• Born: Ignatius Kung Pin-Mei, Archbishop of Shanghai who was imprisoned by the People's Republic of China from 1955 until 1988; in Shanghai

  August 3, 1901 (Saturday)

• HMS Viper, the first navy ship ever to be powered by steam turbine propulsion and described as the "fastest vessel in the world", was wrecked beyond repair during Royal Navy maneuvers near the Channel Islands. Operating in poor weather, the lightweight Viper struck a reef near the island of Alderney, ripping out the bottom of its hull. Its sister ship, HMS Cobra, would be wrecked less than seven weeks later.
• Three explorers made the first ascent of Canada's Mount Assiniboine, described as "one of the classic mountaineering peaks of the world".
• Born:
• * Pavel Mif, Soviet Comintern organizer who guided the development of the Chinese Communist Party during the 1920s and 1930s, and oversaw the indoctrination of Chinese leaders at Moscow's Sun Yat-sen University; as Mikhail Fortus in Kherson, Ukraine
• * John C. Stennis, U.S. Senator for Mississippi from 1947 to 1989; near De Kalb, Mississippi
• Died: William W.B. Beach, 74, British politician who had been the "Father of the House of Commons" since 1899

  August 4, 1901 (Sunday)

• Prime Minister Katsura Tarō of Japan convened a secret meeting of the genrō, the empire's group of elder statesmen, and discussed an alliance with the British Empire. Former Prime Minister Itō Hirobumi, who had advocated an alliance with the Russian Empire as a means of averting the conflict over the control of the Korean peninsula, agreed with the rest of the elders that an alliance with the United Kingdom would be in Japan's best interests. and volunteered to prepare a draft proposal for negotiating with the British. With the possibility of an agreement with Russia no longer under consideration, relations between the Japanese and Russian Empires would continue to deteriorate and the two would go to war within two and a half years.
• Born: Louis Armstrong, American jazz musician; in New Orleans. During his lifetime, Louis Armstrong believed that he had been born on July 4, 1900. In 1988, seventeen years after Armstrong's death, however, biographer Gary Giddins located the record of the musician's 1901 baptism at the Sacred Heart of Jesus Church and found the true birthdate.

  August 5, 1901 (Monday)

• Peter O'Connor of Ireland set a new world record for the long jump, leaping almost 25 feet to 24'11¾" and gaining recognition from the International Association of Athletics Federations. O'Connor's mark would stand for 20 years.
• King Edward and Queen Alexandra came aboard RRS Discovery on the eve of its departure. Dr. Edward Wilson, the ship's surgeon, noted in his diary that "The King shook hands with us all round when he came on board, and again when he left. The Queen also. The King gave the Victorian Order of the Fourth Class to Captain Scott before leaving, having with great difficulty fished it out of his tail-coat pocket, which was a long way round on the wrong side of his stout figure."
• Robbers dug a tunnel underneath the vault of the Selby Smelting and Lead Company in Vallejo, California, and escaped with of gold, worth $280,000 at the time. The equivalent of $280,000 in 2016 would be over $7.5 million, but at more than $1,300 for an ounce of gold in 2016, the value of the haul would be more than $25 million. Most of the loot would be recovered four days later after a former employee confessed to the crime and led investigators to the hiding place.
• Died: Victoria, Empress of Germany, 60, the daughter of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom, sister of Edward VII, wife of Friedrich III, and the mother of Wilhelm II of Germany.

  August 6, 1901 (Tuesday)

• Captain Robert Falcon Scott of the Royal Navy and the research ship RRS Discovery, set sail from the port of Cowes on the Isle of Wight and departed the United Kingdom to start the British National Antarctic Expedition. Besides Scott, the Discovery carried with it five scientists, eleven other Royal Navy officers, and a 36-man crew. The ship would reach Antarctica on January 8, and anchor at McMurdo Sound on February 3.
• The Monacan steam yacht Princess Alice II, owned by Prince Albert of Monaco and loaned out by him for scientific exploration, set a record for the greatest depth, up that time, at which bottom trawling had ever taken place, collecting plankton and other undersea life at a depth of, at a location southwest of the Cape Verde Islands. The depth would not be exceeded until 1947, when the Swedish vessel Albatross trawled in the Puerto Rico Trench.
• The town of Lawton, Oklahoma, came into being as the United States Land Office began auctioning lots divided from a 320-acre townsite located near the United States Army's Fort Sill. The auction "drew an overnight population of ten thousand. Mostly it was made up of men, with their families, who had failed to secure 160-acre homesteads in the lottery of August 1 and came to the townsite in the hope of bidding successfully at the sale of lots. By August 3, in anticipation of the sale, four hundred temporary business structures, nearly all tents, had been raised; a newspaper, the Lawton State Democrat, was being printed; and three streets had been laid out."

  August 7, 1901 (Wednesday)

• Prime Minister Edmund Barton introduced the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 into the Australian House of Representatives as the Federation's first legislation to further the "White Australia policy". Barton informed his fellow MPs "We are guarding the last part of the world in which the higher races can live and increase freely for the higher civilization. I place before the House a measure of definite and high policy."
• Within Britain's Protectorate of Uganda, the Uganda Agreement was ratified by the Kingdom of Ankole and its King, the Omugabe Kahaya. The pact outlined Ankole's boundaries within southwest Uganda and defined British jurisdiction over its relations with the other kingdoms.
• Field Marshal Herbert Kitchener of the British Army issued a proclamation giving all Boer soldiers until September 15 to surrender, or to be exiled permanently from South Africa if captured and to have their property confiscated at war's end. "He was disappointed that it had no effect," an historian would write later, "for he was anxious to leave South Africa so that he could take up the post of Commander-in-Chief in India, an office that he had been promised by the Viceroy, Lord Curzon."
• The British House of Commons enacted an amendment to its cloture rule, reducing the number of votes necessary to end a filibuster against legislation. The rule was used the next day for the first time.
• The White Star ocean liner RMS Oceanic rammed and sank an Irish freight vessel, the Kincorn, off the coast of Tuskar Rock in Ireland. Seven of the Kincorn crew were drowned as the steamship went down, while 14 others were rescued.
• Future Baseball Hall of Fame inductee and Milwaukee Brewers manager Hugh Duffy punched an American League umpire, Al Mannassau, in the jaw after Mannassau's controversial call led to the team's 5–4 loss to the Cleveland Bluebirds. In the final inning, Milwaukee had a 4–3 lead in the final inning when Cleveland's Jack Bracken hit the ball deep into left field along the foul line. Duffy thought the ball was foul, and Mannassau ruled that it was fair, allowing two runs to come in and ending the game. Despite the magnitude of his offense, Duffy was suspended for 12 days rather than being banned for life from the American League, and would go on to a long career.
• The U.S. Navy gunboat Machias was dispatched to Colon on the isthmus of Panama, at that time still part of Colombia, in order to be on standby during the war between Colombia and Venezuela.
• Born: Ann Harding, American stage and film actress; at Fort Sam Houston near San Antonio, Texas
• Died:
• * General Oreste Baratieri, 61, who had commanded Italian troops in their defeat by Ethiopian soldiers in the Battle of Adwa
• * Virchand Gandhi, 36, British Indian religious leader and promoter of Jainism, died from a lung hemorrhage
• * Josiah Johnson Hawes, 94, called "the oldest photographer in the world". Sixty-eight years earlier, he and his business partner Albert Southworth had opened the Southworth & Hawes studio in Boston