January 1909

January 1, 1909 (Friday)

• The Old Age Pensions Act 1908 went into effect in Great Britain, and the first payments were made to qualified persons at least 70 years old and whose income was less than 12 shillings per week. Roughly 490,000 persons received the pension during the first year.
• The Disenfranchisement Act of 1908 took effect in Georgia, the last legislation designed to block African Americans from voting. The new law required a "literacy test", whereby a person had to explain the meaning of a section of the state constitution, if he owned less than of property. Descendants of U.S. or Confederate military veterans were exempt from the test.
• The City of Honolulu and the County of Oahu were formally incorporated.
• Born: Stepan Bandera, Ukrainian ultranationalist leader; in Staryi Uhryniv, Austria-Hungary

  January 2, 1909 (Saturday)

• Yuan Shikai was dismissed from his job as Viceroy of Zhili by Prince Chun, the regent for the young Emperor of China. Facing execution, Yuan fled from Beijing. Two years later, he became China's first President.
• Aimee Kennedy Semple was ordained as a Pentecostal missionary in Chicago, the start of a career of evangelism. She would later become famous as Aimee Semple McPherson.
• Born: Barry Goldwater, U.S. Senator and 1964 presidential candidate; in Phoenix, Arizona
• Died: Marta Abreu, 64, Cuban philanthropist

  January 3, 1909 (Sunday)

• The Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie was founded in Berlin by Max Weber, Rudolf Goldscheid, Ferdinand Tönnies, Georg Simmel, and others.
• In Italy, the volcano on Stromboli Island erupted. The volcano gave its name to the strombolian eruption, in which small amounts of lava are fired high into the air.
• Born: Victor Borge, Danish entertainer; as Børge Rosenbaum in Copenhagen

  January 4, 1909 (Monday)

• Explorer Aeneas Mackintosh of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition escaped death by fleeing across ice floes.
• The Odes of Solomon, a collection of forty-two hymns that had been considered lost, was rediscovered by Professor J. Rendel Harris, who found them in a 15th-century Syriac manuscript that had been in his possession. The odes have been described as "Jewish Christian hymns celebrating the union of Christ and the believer", and are believed to have been composed in the 3rd century AD.
• The Real Federación Española de Fútbol, governing body for Spanish soccer football, was founded in Madrid.
• Born: J. R. Simplot, American billionaire who made his fortune from potatoes; in Dubuque, Iowa

  January 5, 1909 (Tuesday)

• Mulai Abd-el-Hafid was acknowledged to be the rightful Sultan of Morocco by France and other European powers. He would reign until 1912, when Morocco was made a French protectorate by the Treaty of Fez.
• Orville Wright told reporters, "I do not believe the aeroplane will ever take the place of trains or steamships for the carrying of passengers... I believe ultimately the aeroplane may be put to special uses in the carrying of passengers, but never in excess of 10 or 20 persons."
• Crawford County, Pennsylvania, ordered a 100-day quarantine of the towns of Springboro, Conneautville, Meadville, Brookville and Linesville because of an outbreak of rabies in western Pennsylvania.
• Methodist minister John H. Carmichael, of Adair, Michigan, disappeared shortly after departing for Columbus. The next day, body parts were found burning inside two stoves inside his church. Though at first it was believed to be the dismembered body of Reverend Carmichael, subsequent investigation determined that the body was of Gideon Browning, and Carmichael was suspected of being a fugitive from murder. The case, which had made front pages across America, ended when Carmichael committed suicide in Carthage, Illinois, on January 11.
• Born: Stephen Cole Kleene, American mathematician; in Hartford, Connecticut

  January 6, 1909 (Wednesday)

• The Great White Fleet, consisting of 16 U.S. Navy battleships sailing the globe in a display of American naval power, successfully completed its passage through the Suez Canal, passing from the Indian Ocean into the Mediterranean Sea. It was the largest group of ships to pass through up to that time, and the Canal had been closed to all other traffic. The ships would return to the United States on February 22.
• Germany assumed control of diamond mining in German Southwest Africa. Diamonds had been discovered there on June 23, 1908.
• "Albertus", a magician who billed himself as superior to Houdini and Brindamoor, nearly drowned after attempting to escape a tightly laced straitjacket after plunging into the waters off of Atlantic City, New Jersey. A crew from the government life-saving station came to his rescue.

  January 7, 1909 (Thursday)

• The first pilot's licenses were issued in France, by the Aero-Club de France. The first eight "pilote-aviateur" licenses were presented in Paris to aviation pioneers Orville Wright, Wilbur Wright, Albert Santos-Dumont, Louis Blériot, Robert Esnault-Pelterie, Léon Delagrange, Henri Farman and Captain Ferdinand Ferber.
• Working at the Kodaikanal Solar Observatory, British astronomer John Evershed made the important discovery that gas radiates over the surface of sunspots, from the inner border to the outer edge, and described it in a paper later that year. The phenomenon is now referred to as the Evershed effect.

  January 8, 1909 (Friday)

• The U.S. House of Representatives accepted, 212–35, a committee report condemning outgoing President Theodore Roosevelt, in effect voting to censure him. The same day, the U.S. Senate voted to direct its Judiciary Committee to investigate wrongdoing by the President during the Panic of 1907. Roosevelt had, on December 8, 1908, included in his annual message to Congress the statement that Congress opposed the expansion of the Secret Service because there were "criminals in the legislative branch".
• Born: Willy Millowitsch, German actor and director; in Cologne
• Died: Harry Seeley, 69, British paleontologist

  January 9, 1909 (Saturday)

• The Nimrod Expedition to the South Pole, led by Ernest Shackleton, arrived further south than any prior expedition, at 88°23' S, within of the Pole. On the 6th, Shackleton had realized that he did not have enough rations left to reach the pole, but planted the flag of the United Kingdom within less than. The crew then made its way back to.
• Colombia formally recognized the independence of Panama, which had seceded in 1903 with the help of the United States. Under the terms of a trilateral treaty, Panama would pay "rental" to Colombia at the rate of $250,000 per annum for ten years, and the United States would give Colombia special privileges in the use of the canal.
• The Mauritanian emirate of Adrar became a French protectorate. Emir Shaykh al-Hasana was deposed and replaced by Sidi Ahmad wuld Ahmd 'Ayda.
• The very first issue of La Follette's Weekly Magazine was published, and opened with an article by Lincoln Steffens. Founded by U.S. Senator Robert M. La Follette, the new magazine billed itself as "A publication that will not mince words or suppress facts, when public welfare demands plain talk, about public men, legislative measures, or social and industrial wrongs.". . In 1929, it would be re-branded as a monthly magazine and become The Progressive.
• Born: Anthony Mamo, the first President of Malta ; in Birkirkara

  January 10, 1909 (Sunday)

• In Sion, Switzerland, 40 worshippers were killed and 60 others injured when their church collapsed during services. The pillars of an ancient crypt beneath the church had given way.
• The explosion at the Leiter Colliery in Zeigler, Illinois, killed 26 coal miners. Only two men survived the blast.

  January 11, 1909 (Monday)

• The Boundary Waters Treaty was signed by U.S. Secretary of State Elihu Root and British Ambassador to the United States James Bryce, at Root's home. Ratified by both nations in 1910, the treaty regulated the usage of all waters shared by the United States and Canada, including the Great Lakes and Niagara Falls.
• The death penalty was carried out in France for the first time since the turn of the 20th century, as the four murderers in the Pollet gang died on the guillotine as a crowd in Béthune cheered.
• William Howard Taft was elected President of the United States, receiving 321 of the electoral votes won in the election held on November 3. Challenger William Jennings Bryan got the other 162 votes.
• Died: Joseph Wharton, 82, American industrialist and education benefactor who co-founded Bethlehem Steel company and Swarthmore College, and later endowed the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, one of the most prestigious business schools in the world

  January 12, 1909 (Tuesday)

• A mine explosion at Switchback, West Virginia, killed at least 105 men and trapped another 100. The blast, which occurred at 8:30 in the morning, happened fifteen days after 51 men had been killed at the same mine.
• Died: Professor Hermann Minkowski, 44, Polish mathematician and colleague of Albert Einstein and David Hilbert ; from sepsis from appendicitis. Less than four months earlier, Minkowski had presented the mathematical framework, now known as "Minkowski spacetime", by which Einstein's theory could be explained. Before he could extend his work, however, he became ill late in 1908 and developed peritonitis. Legend has it that on his deathbed at the hospital in Göttingen, he lamented, "What a pity that I have to die in the age of relativity's development."

  January 13, 1909 (Wednesday)

• Determined to make one more demonstration of his toughness in his last months in office, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt set off to ride on horseback in one day. Accompanied by his military aide, Captain Archibald Butt, Navy Surgeon General Presley M. Rixey, and Surgeon C. D. Grayson, President Roosevelt set out at 3:40 a.m., riding to Warrenton, Virginia, and returned to the White House, the last in a blizzard, at 8:40 that evening. The press, however, gave him credit for only. When reporters asked him for a quote, the President replied, "It was bully."
• Carrie Nation, infamous for her destruction of American saloons, was arrested at Newcastle upon Tyne for vandalizing a British pub. Nation, on a visit to the United Kingdom, was later released on bail.
• Born:
• *Danny Barker, American jazz banjoist; in New Orleans
• *Marinus van der Lubbe, Dutch native who was charged with the burning of the German Reichstag in 1933; in Leiden