January 1901

January 1, 1901 (Tuesday)

• The British colonies of New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria and Western Australia federated as the Commonwealth of Australia. John Adrian Louis Hope, was appointed the first Governor-General of Australia; Edmund Barton became the first Prime Minister of Australia. The Barton ministry was made up of Protectionist Party members.
• The first day of the 20th century was celebrated. There was little celebration in Melbourne, Australia, because, as the local newspaper noted, "everybody who is anybody is in Sydney".
• Nigeria became a British protectorate.
• Pentecostalism was founded, at a prayer meeting at Bethel Bible College in Topeka, Kansas.
• The centenary of the Act of Union was celebrated by British forces in Ireland.
• The New Year Honours List for the United Kingdom and British Empire was published in The Times. Those honoured included Queen Victoria's physician Professor Thomas Barlow, who became a baronet.
• Between 11:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m., more than 5,300 members of the general public visited the White House for the annual New Year's Day tradition of being able to walk in and to shake hands with the President of the United States. In order to accommodate the remaining people in line in the final half hour, William McKinley shook hands "at the rate of sixty-five a minute by actual count". The President would be assassinated in September while shaking hands with the public.

  January 2, 1901 (Wednesday)

• While en route from Danzig to Kiel on 2 January 1901, the German battleship SMS Kaiser Friedrich III struck an underwater obstacle; the impact damaged four of the ship's watertight compartments, which then filled with water and caused the ship to list to port. The shock from the collision damaged the ship's boilers and started a fire in the coal bunkers. All of the ship's ammunition magazines, engine rooms, and storage compartments had to be flooded in order to prevent the fire from spreading. Two men were seriously injured while fighting the fire, and a third died of his injuries. After several hours the fire was extinguished and the engines were restarted. Throughout the incident, Prince Henry of Prussia steadfastly refused requests for him to leave the ship.
• In one of her final public appearances, Queen Victoria greeted Lord Roberts in his triumphant return from South Africa, meeting him at Osborne Castle on the Isle of Wight. Roberts was knighted as Order of the Garter and had the title of the First Earl Roberts conferred upon him.
• Ignatius L. Donnelly, 69, a former U.S. Congressman who wrote popular speculative books about long-destroyed civilizations supposed to have existed on Earth, died following a heart attack he suffered that evening at his father-in-law's home in Minneapolis. Donnelly's works included Atlantis: The Antediluvian World and Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel. Using the pen name "Edmund Boisgilbert, M.D.", he wrote the 1890 science fiction novel Caesar's Column, about what the world of 1988 would look like. The book was subtitled "A Story of the Twentieth Century". Donnelly lived only to see the first day of the 20th century, his passing took place three minutes after midnight.

  January 3, 1901 (Thursday)

• The Victor Talking Machine Company introduced the first 10-inch phonographic record, a breakthrough permitting the playing of at least three minutes of recorded music. A longer version of the 1900 hit song "When Reuben Comes To Town", sung by S. H. Dudley, was the first offering.
• The St. Louis Southwestern Railway purchased the Stuttgart and Arkansas River Railroad.
• Born:
• * Ngo Dinh Diem, Vietnamese state leader, first President of South Vietnam; in Quảng Bình, French Indochina
• * Alfred Tarski, Polish Jewish mathematician; in Warsaw
• * Eric Voegelin, German philosopher; in Köln

  January 4, 1901 (Friday)

• The United Kingdom announced its appointments of the new administrators for its colonies in southern Africa, with Sir Alfred Milner to be the British High Commissioner and the Governor of the Transvaal; Sir Walter Hely-Hutchinson as Governor of the Cape Colony; and Lieutenant Colonel Henry McCallum as Governor of Natal.
• Rootok Island, the smallest of the Krenitzin Islands, was set aside to house a lighthouse that would never be built.
• The United States Senate unanimously passed the Native Races Act, a resolution sponsored by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, declaring a policy that "aboriginal tribes and uncivilized people", both within the United States and its overseas possessions, should not be sold intoxicating beverages or opium.
• Born: C. L. R. James, Trinidadian writer and journalist; in Tunapuna

  January 5, 1901 (Saturday)

• In response to the imminent organization of the American League as a second major baseball league, the National League announced in Louisville, Kentucky that it was going to revive an old minor league, the "American Association". American League President Ban Johnson told reporters in Cleveland, "You can poo-hoo that story right from the start. I don't know if the National League contemplates such a move, but if they do, it will never be born." On January 19, the league was formally launched and the cities for the new AA were announced to be Baltimore, Boston, Detroit, Indianapolis, Louisville, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. The AA lineup happened to coincide with six of the eight American League teams, and Boston and Philadelphia had franchises in the NL and the AL. The sporting press reacted negatively to the anti-competitive proposal, and the National League would announce its abandonment of the idea on February 27.
• Syracuse University played its first college basketball game, a 21–8 loss to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Although the Syracuse men's team would make four appearances in the Final Four in later years, it would not be until 102 years after its first game that it would win the national championship.
• Typhoid fever broke out in a Seattle jail, the first of two typhoid outbreaks in the United States during the year.
• The ten games of the intermediate round of the 30th FA Cup were played in England.
• The nineteenth rugby union Home Nations Championship commenced in the United Kingdom, with Wales defeating England 13–0 in Cardiff.
• Born: Tommy Cook, English athlete who was a star both in professional cricket and in association football; in Cuckfield, Sussex

  January 6, 1901 (Sunday)

• At his apartment at 6 West 102nd Street in Manhattan, New York City, Theodore Dreiser began writing a new novel, Jennie Gerhardt, with the working title of The Transgressor. After four weeks, he would complete nine chapters, and 40 chapters by mid-April, but do repeated rewrites. In 1903, he would abandon it after suffering a nervous breakdown, but would resume writing in 1910 and publish the novel in 1911.
• Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid received the first telegram that opened a direct telegraph line between the Ottoman capital at Istanbul, and its largest Middle Eastern city at Dimeşk, the capital of its Suriye province. Prior to that time, the Palestinian city of Al-Salt was the furthest extent that the line would reach, hindering communications with the outer provinces in the Arabian Peninsula.
• Died:
• * Philip Armour, Sr., 68, American entrepreneur He acquired control of most of the American meatpacking industry through his corporation Armour and Company; the brand name still survives.
• * Frederick Vosper, 31, Australian journalist, newspaper proprietor and politician, died of appendicitis.

  January 7, 1901 (Monday)

• As the Second Boer War continued in South Africa, British positions along the Delagoa Bay Railway were attacked by Boer fighters, and both sides sustained heavy losses in the battle.
• Voters in Toronto approved municipal control of the city's natural gas plant.
• American prospector Alferd Packer was released from prison after serving 18 years in jail for manslaughter for cannibalism. Outgoing Colorado Governor Charles S. Thomas, in his last official act, paroled Packer because of "physical condition and advanced age" of almost 59 years. Packer would live another six years, dying on April 17, 1907.
• Died: James Dunwoody Bulloch, 77, diplomat for the Confederate States of America to the United Kingdom during the American Civil War. Bulloch retired to the United Kingdom after the defeat of the Confederacy, and was buried in Liverpool.

  January 8, 1901 (Tuesday)

• At his headquarters at San Isidro on the Philippine island of Luzon, U.S. Army Brigadier General Frederick Funston received a telegram revealing that the Filipino rebel president, Emilio Aguinaldo, was in a heavily guarded compound in the Sierra Madre mountains at Palanan. This bit of intelligence, obtained from American interrogation of a courier, Cecilio Segismundo, would lead General Funston to lead a mission to capture Aguinaldo, dead or alive.
• Irish Private John Barry, 27, surrounded by Boer troops on Monument Hill, South Africa, destroyed his Maxim gun to make it useless to the enemy, and was killed in doing so, an action for which he would be posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.
• Paul Deschanel was re-elected as the president of the French Chamber of Deputies, defeating challenger Henri Brisson by a margin of 296–220.
• The United States House of Representatives voted, 165–102, to approve the Burleigh reapportionment bill, increasing the number of U.S. Representatives from 357 to 387. The United States Senate would approve the bill three days later.
• Twenty-eight residents of an orphanage in Rochester, New York, were killed in a fire. All but three of them were children.
• The first national bowling tournament in the United States opened in Chicago, in conjunction with the convention of the American Bowling Congress. In all, 42 men's teams and five women's teams participated.