October 1903

[October 1], 1903 (Thursday)

• Reinhold Burger received a German patent for an isolating vessel for everyday use.
• The first known car crash in South Africa occurred in Maitland, Cape Town, when a driver entered a level crossing and found the opposite gate closed. The Johannesburg express train ran into the car at full speed. The driver sustained only minor injuries, and his passenger was thrown clear.
• The 1903 World Series, the first modern World Series, began between the Boston Americans and the Pittsburgh Pirates.
• Born:
• * George Coulouris, English actor; in Manchester, Lancashire, England
• * Mary Katherine Herbert, World War II Special Operations Executive agent
• * Vladimir Horowitz, American pianist; in Kyiv, Russian Empire
• * Richard Loo, American actor; in Maui, Territory of Hawaii
• * Yoshiyuki Tsuruta, Japanese Olympic champion swimmer; in Ishiki, Kagoshima, Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan
• * Pierre Veyron, French Grand Prix motor racing driver; in Berc, Lozère, France
• Died: Francis Augustus Wright, 68, English-Australian merchant sailor, gold miner and politician

  [October 2], 1903 (Friday)

• The Mürzsteg Agreement, a joint proposal of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and Franz Joseph I of Austria for reforms in Macedonia, was signed at the Mürzsteg Hunting Lodge in Mürzsteg, Styria, Austria-Hungary.
• 30-year-old Wong Yak Chong, the owner of a laundry in Roslindale, was shot and killed on Harrison Avenue in Chinatown, Boston, Massachusetts. Chong was a member of the Hip Sing Tong. Two Chinese men were arrested for Chong's shooting, one of whom was wearing a chain mail shirt and carrying a hatchet. Chong's killing was reported to be the first-ever murder in Boston's Chinese community, but over the next several days Boston newspapers presented the residents of Chinatown as a threatening foreign element in the city's fabric.
• Born:
• * Michele Mara, Italian cyclist; in Busto Arsizio, Lombardy, Italy
• * Lajos Maszlay, Hungarian Olympic fencer; in Budapest, Austria-Hungary
• Died: Friedrich Lippmann, 64, German art historian and collector

  [October 3], 1903 (Saturday)

• In Kidderminster, England, 50-year-old Mary Swinbourne was murdered on Saturday night. A cowman discovered her body the next morning, stabbed and slashed in a manner reminiscent of the victims of the Whitechapel murders. A man with whom she had been hop-picking would be tried and acquitted of her murder.
• Four people were killed and five injured by the explosion of a cooker at the Corning Distilling Company in Peoria, Illinois.
• In New York, William Nelson, a 24-year-old General Electric employee, was killed when he fell off a new motorized bicycle he had invented.
• American author Richard Henry Savage, a veteran of the Spanish–American War, was run over by a delivery wagon at Sixth Avenue and 42nd Street in New York City. He would die of his injuries on October 11.
• While sailing from Menominee, Michigan to Egg Harbor, Wisconsin, the SS Erie L. Hackley capsized during a squall on Green Bay, killing eleven people. The steamer Sheboygan rescued eight survivors the following morning.
• Born:
• * William Berke, American film director; in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
• * Sigurd Eek, Norwegian footballer; in Gjerpen, Norway
• * Wim Tap, Dutch Olympic footballer; in The Hague, Netherlands
• Died:
• * Benedetto Junck, 51, Italian composer
• * George Washington Scott, 74, Confederate States Army officer and businessman
• * Orland Smith, 78, American railroad executive and Union Army colonel

  [October 4], 1903 (Sunday)

• Pope Pius X issued the encyclical E supremi.
• A sailor was fatally attacked by three sharks after falling overboard from a steamer in Havana Harbor, Cuba.
• Born:
• * Bona Arsenault, Canadian historian, genealogist and politician, member of the Canadian Parliament; in Bonaventure, Quebec, Canada
• * John Vincent Atanasoff, American physicist and computer engineer; in Hamilton, New York
• * Ilio Bosi, Italian communist politician and trade unionist; in Ferrara, Italy
• * Medard Boss, Swiss psychoanalytic psychiatrist; in St. Gallen, Switzerland
• * Pierre Garbay, French Army general; in Gray, Haute-Saône, France
• * Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Austrian SS official, major perpetrator of the Holocaust; in Ried im Innkreis, Upper Austria, Austria-Hungary
• * Cyril Stanley Smith, British metallurgist and historian of science; in Birmingham, England
• Died:
• * Hermann Cremer, 68, German Protestant theologian
• * Otto Weininger, 23, Austrian-Jewish author, shot himself to death.

  [October 5], 1903 (Monday)

• The American cargo ship Benjamin Sewall was severely damaged by a typhoon in the Pacific Ocean near Taiwan. Captain J H Hoelstad gave the order to abandon ship. The ship's complement departed in two lifeboats, one commanded by Captain Hoelstad and the other by Chief Mate Joseph Morris.
• Born:
• * M. King Hubbert, American geologist and geophysicist; in San Saba, Texas
• * Ermanno Roveri, Italian actor; in Milan, Italy
• Died:
• * William Daldy, 86–87, sailor and New Zealand politician
• * Bradley Tyler Johnson, 74, Confederate brigadier general
• * William Henry McCluskey, 64, Irish soldier and a survivor of the sinking of HMS Birkenhead, was murdered while working as a security guard for De Beers at Bultfontein, South Africa.

  [October 6], 1903 (Tuesday)

• The High Court of Australia sat for the first time.
• The Benjamin Sewall lifeboat commanded by Captain Hoelstad landed safely on the South Cape of Taiwan.
• The tunnel hole-through of the Mount Washington Transit Tunnel in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, took place at 5:50 p.m., when the northern and southern tunnels under construction met in the center of Mount Washington. The tunnel would open on November 30, 1904.
• Born:
• * Antonio Cárdenas Rodríguez, Mexican World War II aviator; in General Cepeda, Coahuila, Mexico
• * Renato Cattaneo, Italian footballer and manager; in Alessandria, Italy
• * Ernest Walton, Irish physicist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics; in Dungarvan, County Waterford, Ireland
• Died: Wilson S. Bissell, 55, American politician, United States Postmaster General

  [October 7], 1903 (Wednesday)

• The Aerodrome A, a piloted aircraft designed by Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution Samuel Langley, made its first test flight from a houseboat moored near Widewater, Virginia. The aircraft, piloted by Langley's assistant, Charles M. Manly, fell into the river at a forty-five-degree angle immediately after launch. Langley unrealistically placed sole blame for the failure on the launching device, without taking into account the aircraft's design flaws. Manly would make another unsuccessful test flight on December 8.
• The dispersal of a tropical storm along the Virginia Capes caused heavy rains and flooding along the entire East Coast of the United States for the next several days.
• Born:
• * Edward Chichester, 6th Marquess of Donegall, British journalist
• * Herbert List, German photographer; in Hamburg, Germany
• Died: Rudolf Lipschitz, 71, German mathematician

  [October 8], 1903 (Thursday)

• A Japanese police boat from Taiwan, sent to Botel Tobago island the previous day, returned with two survivors of the Chief Mate's lifeboat from the Benjamin Sewall, a Russian seaman and a Filipino seaman. They reported that the islanders had surrounded the lifeboat, stripped its occupants of their clothes and belongings and overturned the boat, leaving the group clinging to it in the water. Most of the group dropped off one by one and drowned. Some of the survivors swam toward the island, where the Russian and Filipino men were captured and enslaved by the islanders, who forced them to chop and carry wood, still naked. They were rescued by the Japanese police. Three Japanese seamen also reached the island and hid in the mountains; they were found alive on October 14. The other seven occupants of the boat drowned.
• The Irish National Theatre Society presented the world premiere of John Millington Synge's one-act play In the Shadow of the Glen at the Molesworth Hall in Dublin, Ireland.
• The Uruguayan gunboat General Rivera was destroyed and sunk by an internal explosion at Montevideo, Uruguay. Among the sailors killed was the gunboat's commander, who was burned to death.
• In Columbus, Georgia, Superintendent of Public Works Robert L. Johnson and three workers were killed in the cave-in of a deep trench.
• Born:
• * Georgy Geshev, Bulgarian chess master; in Sofia, Principality of Bulgaria, Ottoman Empire
• * Mikro, South African author and poet; in Williston, Northern Cape, South Africa
• * Ferenc Nagy, 40th Prime Minister of Hungary; in Bisse, Austria-Hungary
• * Colette Peignot, French author and poet, also known by the pseudonyms Laure and Claude Araxe; in Meudon, France
• * Elizabeth Wyn Wood, Canadian sculptor; in Orillia, Ontario, Canada
• Died: Joseph Fisher, 60, Union Army soldier, Medal of Honor recipient

  [October 9], 1903 (Friday)

• Irishman Paddy McCarthy and Italian Abelardo Robassio fought the first professional boxing match in Argentina at the rooms of El Gladiador magazine in Buenos Aires. McCarthy won by knockout in the fourth round.
• An editorial in The New York Times, commenting on the failure of the Langley Aerodrome two days earlier, stated, "It might be assumed that the flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians in from one million to ten million years."
• The Wright brothers began assembly of the 1903 Wright Flyer at Kill Devil Hill, North Carolina.
• October 1903 floods:
• * The slow-moving remnants of a tropical storm triggered the 1903 Passaic Flood in North Jersey, which lasted through October 11. of rain fell within 24 hours on Paterson, New Jersey, which received over of rain during the entire event. The Passaic River crested at at Little Falls, New Jersey. Bridges and dams along the Passaic and Ramapo Rivers were destroyed, including a dam at Pompton Lakes, New Jersey. The flood, the most severe in the region since the American Colonial Period, caused $7 million in damage. The Edison Manufacturing Company produced a short documentary film, Flood Scene in Paterson, N.J., shot a few days after the flood.
• * By the evening of October 9, nearly of rain had fallen on New York City in a 30-hour period. Brooklyn was flooded, forcing residents to retreat to the second floors of their buildings and interrupting streetcar service. New York City's Chief Engineer expressed the opinion that "climatic changes are going on which will make a rainfall from 3 to 5 inches an hour a thing of ordinary occurrence".
• The 27-ton gasoline boat Admiral capsized in a squall on San Francisco Bay, drowning an engineer and a passenger.
• J. E. Dolloff, one of two water suppliers in Monroe, Washington, began laying pipe to a new house. S. A. Buck, Dolloff's competitor, to whom the Monroe City Council had granted the water franchise, attached a hose to a fire plug across the street and blasted Dolloff and worker James Frazier out of the trench in which they were working. Dolloff swore out a warrant for Buck's arrest, but Buck doused the work crew two more times before his trial at 2 p.m. The "water war" in Monroe would continue in one form or another until 1923, when the town finally set up its own municipal water system.
• Born:
• * André Mourlon, French Olympic sprinter; in the 11th arrondissement of Paris, France
• * Walter O'Malley, American baseball executive; in The Bronx, New York City
• * Karel Steklý, Czech film director; in Prague, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary
• Died: Camille du Locle, 71, French theater manager and librettist