October 1901

October 1, 1901 (Tuesday)

• Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim, about the life of Irish orphan Kimball O'Hara in British India, was published as a book for the first time and soon became a bestseller. The story had first been printed in monthly installments as a serial in the United States in McClure's Magazine, running from December 1900 to the October 1901 issue, and in the United Kingdom in Cassell's Magazine starting in January 1901. The Macmillan & Co. book in the United Kingdom was sold for six shillings a copy. and by Doubleday, Page & Co. in the United States
• Voters in Connecticut voted overwhelmingly to write a new state constitution to replace the one promulgated in 1818. A convention would be held in 1902 and a revised constitution would be drawn, which voters would reject even more overwhelmingly, by a more than 2 to 1 margin.
• Born: Partap Singh Kairon, India politician and Chief Minister of the Punjab from 1956 to 1964

  October 2, 1901 (Wednesday)

• The Royal Navy's first submarine, HMS Holland 1, was launched from the Vickers-Armstrongs shipyard at Barrow-in-Furness, England.
• Governor Henry Gage of California successfully brokered a settlement of the San Francisco dockworkers' strike that had tied up the harbor since July 21.
• The National Commission on Indigenous Peoples, still a Philippine government agency, was created by the American occupational government as the Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes with the dual mission of conducting research studies in the ethnology of the Philippine Islands, and investigating and analyzing the conditions of "pagan and Muslim tribes".
• Born:
• * Charles Stark Draper, American physicist and engineer known as "the father of inertial navigation" for his creation of the guidance system for the Apollo crewed space program; in Windsor, Missouri
• * Kiki de Montparnasse, French nightclub singer and actress, as Alice Prin, in Châtillon-sur-Seine, Côte-d'Or département

  October 3, 1901 (Thursday)

• Abdur Rahman Khan, known as "The Iron Emir" for his authoritarian rule as King of Afghanistan, died after a reign of 21 years. His son, Habibullah Khan, announced the death later that morning and became the new King of Afghanistan, giving himself the title Siraj al-Millat wa'd-Din, and would reign until his assassination on February 20, 1919.
• Inventors Eldridge R. Johnson and Emile Berliner founded the Victor Talking Machine Company, producing Berliner's 3-minute disc shaped gramophone records and Johnson's modification of the Berliner gramophone that used a spring-driven motor to mechanically spin the discs, as well as an improved sound system and a process for mass-pressing records on wax rather than hard rubber. The disc format would prove more popular than the cylinder format used by Edison Records and by Columbia.
• At the annual meeting of the clergy of the Episcopal Church of the United States, held in San Francisco, delegates from the Diocese of Milwaukee and the Diocese of Colorado presented separate resolutions urging the denomination to change its name to "The American Catholic Church".

  October 4, 1901 (Friday)

• The American yacht Columbia, owned by American financier J. P. Morgan of the New York Yacht Club and skippered by Charlie Barr, defeated the British yacht Shamrock II, owned by tea magnate Sir Thomas Lipton, in the third of the best-3-of-5 race series to retain the United States' hold of the America's Cup; Shamrock II actually crossed the finish line two seconds ahead of Columbia but, because of the Yacht Racing Association rules that calculated a 43-second time allowance to the Columbia based on the size of both yachts' sails, Columbia was declared the winner by 41 seconds.
• Born:
• * Gregory Dix, Anglican Benedictine monk and liturgical reformer; in London
• * Daniel E. Noble, American electronics engineer and inventor of the portable FM radio transmitter for military use; in Naugatuck, Connecticut

  October 5, 1901 (Saturday)

• Hartford, Connecticut, became the first American city to have its electric supply powered entirely by steam, as new technology, a steam turbine driven power generator began operations for the Hartford Electric Light Company.
• Born:
• * Atilano Cruz Alvarado, Mexican Roman Catholic priest who was canonized as a saint in 2000, almost 72 years after he was martyred in the Cristero War, in Teocaltiche
• * John Alton, Hungarian-American cinematographer and winner of an Academy Award for An American in Paris; as Johann Altmann in Sopron, Kingdom of Hungary, Austria-Hungary

  October 6, 1901 (Sunday)

• Tzu Hsi, the Empress Dowager of China, began her return to the national capital, departing Xi'an toward the Zhengding to Beijing railway, accompanied by a party of thousands of Imperial officers. Journalist George Ernest Morrison would note that in the journey to reach the train, "the Imperial party traveled in yellow sedan chairs, escorted by a huge bodyguard of cavalry, an enormous suite of officials, eunuchs, servants, and a baggage-train of some 3,000 gaily flagged and caparisoned carts."
• On the last day of the season for both major leagues, Cy Young won the pitching triple crown with the Boston Americans and Nap Lajoie won the batting triple crown playing for the Cleveland Bluebirds. This was also the first year the American League was a Major League. The National League champions were the Pittsburgh Pirates and the American League was won by the Chicago White Stockings. It would be 2 more years before the league champions faced off in the World Series.

  October 7, 1901 (Monday)

• The Associated Oil Company, at one time one of the three corporations that dominated the oil industry on the West Coast of the United States, was incorporated and marketed gasoline throughout its affiliated "Flying A" gas stations. It would later be merged into the Tidewater Associated Oil Company and, in 1967, be acquired by Getty Oil.
• Born:
• * Ramón Beteta Quintana, Mexican economist, deputy foreign minister during the 1930s and Finance Minister of Mexico from 1946 to 1952; in Mexico City
• * Frank Boucher, Canadian National Hockey League star and Hockey Hall of Fame member who played centre and was later head coach for the New York Rangers; in Ottawa
• * Lloyd Brown, the last surviving U.S. Navy veteran of World War I; in Lutie, Missouri
• * Ralph Rainger, American film score composer; in New York City
• * Prince Souvanna Phouma, Prime Minister of Laos during most of the Laotian Civil War in the 1950s and during its last 13 years ; in Luang Prabang
• * Franz Stark, American-German war criminal and captain of the SS Einsatzgruppen, described by one biographer as "one of the most loyal, blind, and stubborn followers of Nazi orders"; in St. Louis. Stark would avoid prosecution for nearly two decades after the German surrender, but would be one of 14 war criminals tried in Koblenz, Germany in 1962 and would be sentenced to life imprisonment on May 21, 1963.

  October 8, 1901 (Tuesday)

• Joachim III, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople and leader of millions of Christian adherents of the Greek Orthodox Church, issued the church's condemnation of a recently published translation of the New Testament from First Century Greek into Modern Greek. The work of Biblical scholar Alexandros Pallis was derided by Joachim III as "philological vandalism, a distortion and desecration of the sacred original"
• Donations to the worldwide fund for the ransom of Miss Ellen Stone, the American Christian missionary kidnapped in Bulgaria, surpassed $50,000 on the day of the expiration of the Bulgarian kidnappers' initial demand.
• Near the Black River in the Arizona Territory, Deputy Sheriff William Thomas Maxwell of the Apache County Sheriff's Office and Carlos Tafolla of the Arizona Rangers were killed in a shootout while tracking the Smith Gang with a posse. The shooter, who escaped to Argentina, was never caught.

  October 9, 1901 (Wednesday)

• Martial law was declared by the British High Commissioner for South Africa, Lord Alfred Milner, in the Cape Colony in South Africa, suspending the constitution across the entire colony. The action followed a meeting with Milner by the Cape Colony Premier, Sir Gordon Sprigg, and Under Secretary of Native Affairs James Rose Innes.
• Voting concluded in nationwide elections for the Országgyűlés, the Parliament for the Kingdom of Hungary, allied with the Empire of Austria as part of the nation of Austria-Hungary. Hungary's Liberal Party, the Szabadelvű Párt, continued more than two-thirds majority, winning 277 of the 413 seats, and Kálmán Széll retained his position as the Kingdom's prime minister.
• Born: Alice Lee Jemison, American Indian journalist and political activist of the 1930s; in Silver Creek, New York

  October 10, 1901 (Thursday)

• Two automobile manufacturers, Alexander Winton of Cleveland and Henry Ford of Detroit, competed against each other at a track in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, in a race that "would set the future of American automobile and tire sales", according to one historian. The meeting at the Grosse Pointe horse racing track attracted various drivers, but Ford and Winton were the only two who felt that their cars could go the distance in the third and most important race, the $1,000 ten-lap, "ten-mile sweepstakes event". The Winton Motor Carriage Company auto was the 40-horsepower Bullet, and Winton was the most successful race car driver in America. Ford had never raced a car before, and was using the smaller, 26-horsepower Detroit Automobile Company vehicle, but he had one feature in his design, "a spark coil wrapped in a porcelain insulating case fashioned by a dentist", an early version of the spark plug. Heavily favored to win, Winton took the early lead, and was ahead after, particularly because he was on the inside and better at rounding curves and Ford often "shut off power and ran wide on each curve". Ford, however, gradually closed the gap on the straightaways and was catching up by the sixth lap. Winton, on the other hand, began to have trouble as the ball bearings in his engine were overheating. After, Ford passed Winton on the eighth lap, and won with an average speed of. The upset win not only brought Ford nationwide fame, but also attracted Detroit investors who wanted to form a new corporation, which would be named the "Henry Ford Company" to capitalize on Ford's celebrity. Despite the loss to Ford, Winton won most of the headlines, because he had broken the world record for the fastest speed to drive a mile, setting a new mark of one minute, 12.4 seconds and an average speed of.
• Thousands of spectators in Toronto heard the song O Canada for the first time in their lives, as the band of The Royal Canadian Regiment played the music while troops marched past the visiting Duke of York. O Canada, which would become the Canadian national anthem, had been performed in Quebec since 1880, but had rarely been heard outside of the province because there was no English translation to the French words. Augustus Vogt, the conductor of the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, was among the listeners and requested Dr. Thomas Bedford Richardson to compose an English-language version.
• Laurent Tailhade, editor of the French anarchist newspaper Libertaire, was sentenced to a year's imprisonment and fined 1,000 French francs as punishment for his "incendiary" comments made during the Russian Tsar's visit to France.
• General Redvers Buller of the British Army said in a speech that he had recommended the surrender of the fortress of Ladysmith during the Second Boer War, making remarks that would lead to his censure and removal from command.
• Born:
• * Frederick D. Patterson, African-American educator, founder of the United Negro College Fund, and president of the Tuskegee Institute from 1935 to 1953; in Washington, D.C.
• * Alberto Giacometti, Swiss sculptor; in Borgonovo
• Died: Lorenzo Snow, 87, president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints since 1898