February 1925

February 1, 1925 (Sunday)

• Ahmed Zog became the first President of Albania, in addition to continuing its Prime Minister and commander of the new Royal Albanian Army.
• W. T. Cosgrave, Irish President appealed to the U.S. for food aid. Ireland's potato crop had been severely curtailed by heavy rainfall the previous summer and autumn.
• The final leg of the serum run to Nome began as the team of Gunnar Kaasen and lead dog Balto set out from Bluff, Alaska at 10:00 p.m. into a blizzard.
• Dr. Miguel Paz Barahona was sworn into office for a four-year term as President of Honduras, after previously being a surgeon and the Central American nation as Vice President from 1921 to 1925.
• Polskie Radio Warszawa went on the air as the first radio station in Poland, doing test transmissions for 14 months, before beginning regular broadcasts on April 18, 1926.
• Herma Szabo of Austria won the Ladies Competition of the World Figure Skating Championships in Davos, Switzerland.
• Born:
• *Dr. Tomisaku Kawasaki, Japanese pediatrician who first identified and described Kawasaki disease, the leading cause of acquired heart disease in children; in Asakusa, Tokyo.
• *Mary Nesbitt Wisham, American AAGPBL baseball player for the Racine Belles, and 1945 AAGPBL batting champion; in Greenville, South Carolina
• *John F. Yardley, American aeronautical engineer for McDonnell Aircraft Corporation who served for NASA as launch operations manager at Cape Canaveral from 1960 to 1964, and technical director for Project Gemini from 1964 to 1978; in St. Louis

  February 2, 1925 (Monday)

• The serum run ended successfully as the team of Gunnar Kaasen and a team of 15 Siberian huskies fronted by Kaasen's lead dog, Balto, arrived in Nome, Alaska at 5:30 a.m. to deliver the antitoxin necessary to combat a diphtheria epidemic in the Alaska Territory.
• U.S. President Calvin Coolidge signed the Kelly Act into law two months after the legislation had been introduced in Congress by U.S. Representative M. Clyde Kelly. In addition to relieving the U.S. Post Office Department and the U.S. Army from responsibility for delivering airmail, the Act allowed the Postmaster General to make contracts with private air carriers, prompting multiple companies to venture into manufacturing aircraft. The U.S. Civil Aeronautics Board would opine 50 years later that "The history of civil aviation in the United States in practical terms" began with the Kelly Act. The Kelly Act has been described as "the foundation that commercial aviation is built upon." The first contracts were awarded to Colonial Air Transport, National Air Transport, Robertson Aircraft Corporation, Western Air Express and Varney Air Lines.
• Previously limited to catalog sales, Sears, Roebuck, & Co. opened its first department store at 8:30 in the morning at its headquarters at Homan Avenue and Arthington Street in Chicago. An ad proclaimed that "A sale unprecedented in Chicago's history will then begin. Never has any store in Chicago, or elsewhere, for that matter, been able to offer the savings Sears, Roebuck and Co. do! We can do it! We are the World's Largest Store."
• The location of the tomb of Egyptian queen Hetepheres I, mother of the Pharaoh Cheops and wife of the Pharaoh Sneferu in the 26th century BC, was inadvertently discovered at Giza more than 4,500 years after her burial. A photographer with the expedition of archaeologist George Andrew Reisner was setting up a camera tripod to take photos of the Great Pyramid of Giza when one of the legs of the tripod slipped into a crevice in the rock which turned out to be the seal to a shaft and a staircase. Removal of debris from the staircase showed it to be an entrance to the tomb of Hetepheres.
• Born:
• *Elaine Stritch, actress and singer; in Detroit
• *Lieutenant General Witarmin, Commander of Army Special Forces Command of Indonesia from 1970 to 1975; in Kutorejo, East Java, Dutch East Indies
• *Jeet Singh Negi, Indian musical composer known for the promotion of music from the Garhwal region of the Uttarakhand state; in Paidalsyun, Garhwal Kingdom, United Provinces of British India
• Died: Jaap Eden, 51, Dutch speed skater and bicycle racer who won the world speed skating championships in 1893, 1895 and 1896, and the track cycling world championships in 1894 and 1895

  February 3, 1925 (Tuesday)

• A newspaper reporter for The Courier-Journal, a daily newspaper in Louisville, Kentucky, interviewed Floyd Collins, who had been trapped underground while exploring a cave in Kentucky. William Burke Miller, a 20-year-old employee of the newspaper, had been assigned by his editor to cover the story of the attempted rescue of Collins, who had been trapped since January 30. Small enough to climb into cave opening, and hanging upside down to get close enough to Collins to provide drinks from a bottle of whiskey and a bottle of milk, Miller talked with the trapped man on three occasions as he led rescue parties. He quoted Miller as saying "I'm not afraid to die. I've no reason to be. I believe I would go to Heaven. But I don't believe I'm going to die. I feel I'm going to be taken out alive and that I'll not lose my foot.", and reported that Collins, unfortunately, would be dead 10 days later. Miller would receive a Pulitzer Prize in 1926 for his coverage of the Collins story.
• The discovery of the Taung Child fossilized skull in South Africa the previous November was first publicized.
• The first privately owned bank in Bulgaria, Girdap, declared bankruptcy after more than 43 years of operation, and its three managers, Boncho Boev, Ivan Kovachev and Nikola Kovachev, were placed under arrest.
• The first electric train in India ran between Victoria Terminus and Kurla in Bombay on a 16 km journey, using EMU's with 1500 V DC traction.
• Born:
• *John Fiedler, American character actor in film and television; in Platteville, Wisconsin
• *Leon Schlumpf, Swiss politician who served as President of the Swiss Confederation in 1984 and on the Swiss Federal Council from 1979 to 1987; in Felsberg
• *Alexinia Baldwin, African American educator known for creating the Baldwin Identification Matrix
• Died:
• *Oliver Heaviside, 74, English mathematician specializing in electromagnetic theory, known for the Heaviside step function and for predicting the existence of the Kennelly–Heaviside layer
• *Edward Scofield, 82, U.S. politician and former prisoner of war during the American Civil War, who later served as the Governor of Wisconsin from 1897 to 1901

  February 4, 1925 (Wednesday)

• Nels Nelsen set a new world record for ski jumping with a leap of 240 feet in Revelstoke, British Columbia. He was said to be sick with the flu when he made the jump.
• The tunnel that was being used to reach trapped cave explorer Floyd Collins collapsed, requiring a new tunnel to be dug.
• Born: Arne Åhman, Swedish track athlete and 1948 Olympic gold medalist for the triple jump; in Nordingrå
• Died:
• *Robert Koldewey, 69, German architect and archaeologist known for his excavations of the ancient city of Babylon in modern-day Iraq from 1899 to 1914, including the discovery of the foundations of the Ishtar Gate
• *William Haggar, 73, British filmmaker

  February 5, 1925 (Thursday)

• Ten people were arrested in the Soviet Union for conspiring to assassinate Grigory Zinoviev.
• U.S. Attorney General Harlan F. Stone was confirmed as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in order to replace Justice Joseph McKenna, who had resigned on January 5 because of cognitive problems caused by a stroke. The U.S. Senate voted, 71 to 6, in favor of confirming Stone, who would later serve as Chief Justice of the United States.
• Died:
• *Julius Fleischmann, 53, President of The Fleischmann Company since 1897, and Mayor of Cincinnati, Ohio, from 1900 to 1905, died of a heart attack while he was playing polo in Miami.
• *Pablo Ocampo, 72, Philippine lawyer and the first delegate to the U.S. Congress as the non-voting Resident Commissioner from the Philippine Islands

  February 6, 1925 (Friday)

• Prime Minister Chandra Shamsher Jang Bahadur Rana of Nepal announced his intention to abolish slavery in the country.
• Former German Chancellor Gustav Bauer resigned his Reichstag seat in disgrace, becoming the most prominent German politician to lose his job because of his involvement in the Barmat corruption scandal.
• In the U.S. state of New Jersey, the basketball team of Passaic High School lost after 159 consecutive victories since in almost six years, falling to the Hackensack High School Comets, 39 to 35, at Hackensack. The Passaic Indians' streak began after it had lost the New Jersey state high school championship on March 15, 1919. In the seasons since then, Passaic had outscored its opponents, by 9,413 points to 3,237.
• The end of the world and the Second Coming of Christ failed to take place despite a prediction of Margaret W. Rowen of California and Robert Reidt of New York, both members of the Reformed Seventh-day Adventist Church, that the world would end on February 6, 1925. Mrs. Rowen had made the prediction as early as January 20, 1924, to a gathering of followers at Pomona, California.
• Born: Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Indonesian novelist; in Blora, Dutch East Indies d. 2006

  February 7, 1925 (Saturday)

• The first elections were held in Trinidad and Tobago, at the time a British crown colony, as some residents were allowed to vote for seven of the 12 seats of the Legislative Council. However, the right to vote was limited to persons who owned rental property worth at least $60. Men had to be at least 21 years old, and women at least 30, and all voters were required to understand spoken English. People who had received poor relief six months before election day were ineligible. As a result, only six percent of the population could vote. The local candidates had to be men, literate in English, who owned property worth at least $12,000 or who received at least $960 of rent from tenants.
• Eleven crewmembers of the Japanese Imperial Navy cruiser Izumo were killed when the boat they were in was struck by a tugboat off the coast of Vancouver in Canada.
• World heavyweight boxing champion Jack Dempsey and Hollywood film actress Estelle Taylor were married in a small ceremony in San Diego.
• Born: Hans Schmidt, Canadian professional wrestler; in Joliette, Quebec