January 1902

January 1, 1902 (Wednesday)

• The first college football bowl game, the "Tournament of Roses East–West Football Game", was held in Pasadena, California, pitting the unbeaten and unscored upon University of Michigan Wolverines against the once-defeated Stanford University Indians. Michigan, the first of the "Point-a-Minute" football teams coached by Fielding H. Yost, had beaten all of its opponents by an average score of 50 to 0 in its regular season games, and was leading Stanford, 49 to 0, when the game was stopped eight minutes early. A crowd of 8,500 people attended at Tournament Park. The annual New Year's Day bowl is referred to now as the Rose Bowl.
• The Nurses Registration Act 1901 came into effect in New Zealand, the first nation in the world to require state registration of nurses.
• An earthquake of magnitude 7.0 struck the Fox Islands in the U.S. Alaskan Territory.
• Several smaller railways combined to form the Swiss Federal Railways.
• Born: Buster Nupen, South African cricketer, in Ålesund, Norway
• Died: Bertha Elisabeth Schippan, 13, Australian girl, victim of the "Towitta murder"; the perpetrator was never identified.

  January 2, 1902 (Thursday)

• In the second leg of the "World Championship" of soccer football, a friendly exhibition match between the winner of England's FA Cup and the winner of the Scottish Cup, played at Edinburgh after a scoreless tie between the two teams on September 2 in London, Heart of Midlothian won, 3 to 1.
• Born: Dan Keating, Irish republican, longest-surviving veteran of the Irish War of Independence, in Castlemaine, County Kerry, Ireland

  January 3, 1902 (Friday)

• Miss Alice Roosevelt, the oldest daughter of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, was "formally presented to Washington society" at a ball at the White House, a month before her 18th birthday.

  January 4, 1902 (Saturday)

• Tzu Hsi, the Empress Dowager of China, issued an imperial edict directing her subjects to resume friendly relations with foreign diplomatic personnel in Beijing.
• Martial law was declared in Barcelona by the government of Spain after labor strikes began.
• The Panama Canal Company offered to sell its property rights, franchises and equipment to the United States government for $40,000,000.

  January 5, 1902 (Sunday)

• Mrs. Warren's Profession, a controversial play dealing with prostitution, written by George Bernard Shaw in 1893, was performed for the first time, privately, at the New Lyric Club in London.

  January 6, 1902 (Monday)

• Nineteen people were killed in a collision between a British ship and a Spanish ship off of the coast of Portugal.
• Died: Jan Gotlib Bloch, 67, Polish-Russian industrialist and political scientist who wrote about the future of warfare

  January 7, 1902 (Tuesday)

• By a margin of only 394 votes, Republican Montague Lessler defeated Democrat Perry Belmont to fill a vacancy for the U.S. representative seat for the normally Democrat Seventh New York District.
• Died: Edward Clark, 79, Architect of the Capitol since 1865, who oversaw the completion of the United States Capitol dome and technological improvements including the addition of electricity, steam radiators and elevators.

  January 8, 1902 (Wednesday)

• A train collision inside the New York Central Railroad's Park Avenue Tunnel killed 17 people and injured 38— mostly by scalding from a ruptured boiler — leading to increased demand for electric-powered trains and to the banning of steam locomotives in New York City.
• José Santos Zelaya was re-elected as President of Nicaragua for a second four-year term.
• Born: Georgy Malenkov, Soviet Politician
• Died:
• * Marcellus Hartley, 74, American weapons manufacturer who owned the Remington Arms
• * General Francis J. Herron, 64, Union Army commander and Medal of Honor winner who allegedly died in poverty after his retirement

  January 9, 1902 (Thursday)

• The Discovery Expedition, an exploration voyage led by Captain Robert Falcon Scott, arrived at Cape Adare on the eastern side of Antarctica. Other members of the expedition included Ernest Shackleton, Tom Crean, Frank Wild and Edgar Evans.
• The United States House of Representatives voted, 307 to 2, in favor of the bill to construct the Nicaragua Canal.
• Born:
• * Sir Rudolf Bing, Austrian opera manager, in Vienna
• * Josemaría Escrivá, Spanish priest and Catholic saint, in Barbastro, Spain
• * Ann Nixon Cooper, African-American civil rights activist, in Shelbyville, Tennessee

  January 10, 1902 (Friday)

• New Zealander Ellen Dougherty became the world's first registered nurse.
• A German record for the longest balloon flight was set by meteorologist Arthur Berson and balloonist Hermann Elias, when they completed a 30-hour journey of from Berlin in the German Empire, to Poltava in the Russian Empire.
• The German imperial government announced that Friedrich Alfred Krupp, the owner and operator of the Krupp Arms Manufacturing Company, was the wealthiest man in the German Empire, with an annual income of 20,000,000 marks.

  January 11, 1902 (Saturday)

• The first issue of Popular Mechanics magazine was published. Founded by Henry Haven Windsor, it initially had only five subscribers and sold only a few hundred copies on newsstands, but would continue to be published more than a century later.
• An electrified streetcar line opened between El Paso, Texas, in the United States, and Ciudad Juárez in Mexico as part of a public transportation system that operated in both nations, as the El Paso Electric Railway Company began conversion of its horse-drawn system of trolleys to electric powered vehicles.
• Born:
• * Maurice Buckmaster, English head of Special Operations Executive, at Brereton, Staffordshire
• * Maurice Duruflé, French composer, in Louviers, France
• Died:
• * Johnny Briggs, 39, English cricketer, from an epileptic seizure
• * Horace Scudder, 63, American journalist, historian and children's author, known for being editor of The Atlantic Monthly and for the standard American school textbook ''A History of the United States of America''

  January 12, 1902 (Sunday)

• Sixty people were killed, and 100 people injured, by the explosion of a boiler in a textile mill in the municipality of Pont de Vilomara in Catalonia, Spain.
• The Uddevalla Suffrage Association, a Swedish political movement, was officially dissolved after twelve years of activity.
• Born: King Saud of Saudi Arabia, in Kuwait City

  January 13, 1902 (Monday)

• What one author describes as "the first wave of Korean immigration" to the United States began with the arrival of the steamer S.S. Gaelic in the U.S. Hawaiian Territory, carrying 102 emigres from the Kingdom of Korea. Over the next three years, a total of 7,291 Korean laborers would arrive by ship to work in Hawaiian sugar plantations, until Japan's assumption of protectorate status over Korea and the closing off of emigration.
• Friedrich Delitzsch, a professor of Assyriology at the University of Berlin, began his series of controversial lectures that he titled Babel und Bibel, referring to the ancient Kingdom of Babylon and the Bible. Delitzsch advanced his theory, based on his own archaeological research of ancient cuneiform records, that Judaism and the Old Testament were derivative of the ancient Babylonian religion.
• Born: Karl Menger, Austrian-American mathematician who postulated Menger's theorem, in Vienna

  January 14, 1902 (Tuesday)

• Arthur Pue Gorman was elected as the U.S. Senator for Maryland by the Maryland State Legislature.
• Died: William J. Parkinson, 57, Washington state senator and former President pro tempore of the Senate.

  January 15, 1902 (Wednesday)

• Fifteen of the 16 nations meeting at the Pan-American Conference in Mexico City, including the United States, signed their agreement to recognize the principles of compulsory arbitration of international disputes as outlined in the Hague Convention. Chile announced earlier that it would withdraw from the conference if compulsory arbitration was adopted.
• Joseph B. Foraker was elected as the U.S. Senator for Ohio by the Ohio State Legislature.
• Born: Nâzım Hikmet, Turkish poet, in Salonica, Ottoman Empire
• Died: Alpheus Hyatt, 63, American zoologist and paleontologist

  January 16, 1902 (Thursday)

• An earthquake of magnitude 7.0 struck Chilpancingo, the capital of the Mexican state of Guerrero. Despite the severity of the quake, only two people were killed and two injured.
• Underground public toilets were opened at Amagertorv, a central square in Copenhagen, Denmark.
• Born: Eric Liddell, Scottish athlete, in Tianjin, China

  January 17, 1902 (Friday)

• The Times Literary Supplement was published for the first time, as an addition to London's venerable daily newspaper, The Times.
• Almost two years before the first flight by the Wright brothers, German-American aviator Gustave Whitehead claimed to have made two notable flights over Long Island Sound in a heavier-than-air, 40 hp- 29.9-kW- engine-powered flying machine with wheels and an amphibious boat-shaped hull.

  January 18, 1902 (Saturday)

• The kidnapping of two women missionaries, Ellen Maria Stone of the United States and Katerina Cilka of Bulgaria, drew to a close as their captors, members of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, agreed to set them free in return for payment of a ransom of 14,000 Ottoman lira in gold. The two women, who had been taken hostage on September 3, 1901, were released in Strumica on February 2.
• The successful British musical A Country Girl premiered in London for the first of 729 performances, later being performed in the United States on Broadway.
• Died: Gideon Scheepers, 23, a leader of raids by the Orange Free State into Britain's Cape Colony during the Second Boer War in South Africa, was executed by a British Army firing squad