From Cave Paintings to the Internet A Chronological and Thematic Database on the History of Information and Media 1875 to 1900 Timeline

Frank S. Baldwin (United States) and W. T. Odhner (Russia) invent calculators using a true variable-toothed gear, the first real advance in mechanical calculating technology since Gottfried Leibniz's stepped drum (1673). These calculators are called "pinwheel calculators."

The greater ease of use of this technology, its general reliability, and the compact size of the equipment incorporating it caused an explosion of sales in the calculator industry.

J.G.A. Eickhoff builds a four-cylinder perfecting press, capable of printing two sides of paper simultaneously.

The earliest international exposition exclusively of scientific instruments is held at the South Kensington Museum, London.

A small section of the exposition was devoted to arithmetic and calculating instruments.

Martin Wiberg uses his difference engine to produce Tables de Logarithms Calculées et Imprimées au Moyen de la Machine à Calculer du M. Wiberg. This set of tables of seven-place logarithms from 1 to 100,000 is the first logarithmic table produced by a calculating machine.

Thomas Edison invents the Electric Pen, the forerunner of the mimeograph.

Thomas Edison received US patent 180,857 for "Autographic Printing" on August 8, 1876. The patent covered the electric pen, used for making the stencil, and the flatbed duplicating press. In 1880 Edison obtained a further patent, US 224,665: "Method of Preparing Autographic Stencils for Printing", which covered the making of stencils using a file plate, a grooved metal plate on which the stencil was placed which perforated the stencil when written on with a blunt metal stylus.

The New York Tribune publishes a series of 36 relief blocks on its front page showing the targets at an International Rifle Match in Dublin, Ireland.

The blocks were produced in New York from target coordinates transmitted over the Atlantic telegraph. These were the first significant series of illustrations published in a daily newspaper.

Melvil Dewey publishes the Dewey Decimal Classification in his anonymous Classification and Subject Index for Cataloguing and Arranging the Books and Pamphlets of a Library.

British naturalist, explorer, and evolutionist Alfred Russel Wallace publishes The Geographical Distribution of Animals.

Wallace studied the fauna of the Malay peninsula and was struck both with its resemblances to and differences from that of South America. His research expanded into this world-wide study—the first comprehensive world-wide study of zoogeography, illustrated with numerous thematic maps.

Charles Ammi Cutter publishes Rules for a Printed Dictionary Catalogue, the last library cataloguing code written by one person.

"In his prefatory note, Cutter claimed to be the first investigator of the 'first principles of cataloguing' and the first to 'set forth the rules in a systematic way.' One of the principles he expostulated was that 'the convenience of the user should be preferred to the ease of the cataloguer.' Cutter urged catalogers to do such things as select the customary use of the names of subjects and the best known form of the author's name so that this goal might be fulfilled. The code's introduction lists objectives and means to bring about this convenience. These objectives and means have been studied for years by students of cataloging code history. Exactly how the 'convenience of the user' would be determined Cutter did not specify; he himself, it would seem, relied upon his own experience rather than any systematic study of user needs or behavior. No one else did such a study during these years either: such things as survey research and transaction log analysis were twentieth century phenomena" (Huford, The Pragmatic Basis of Catalog Codes: Has the User Been Ignored? [2007] 29]

Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone, and applies for the patent. In his invention of the telephone Bell was preceded by Philip Reis, who perfected his device in 1861, and numerous other inventors played lesser or greater roles. However, Bell was the first to create a telephone that could reproduce intelligible speech at the receiving end, and was also the first to patent the telephone. Because of the numerous other inventors involved there was unusually extensive and historic litigation over the telephone patents, culminating in Bell's victory. Among the controversies was the question of the priority of Elisha Gray in the invention.

As the well-known story goes, on March 10, 1876 Bell spoke the first words through the instrument to his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, in the next room. Bell said, "Mr. Watson— come here— I want to see you." (See Reading 5.3

Bell presented his first report on the telephone to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on May 10, 1876. His report, "Researches in telephony," was published in Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, new series 4 (whole series 12) (1877) 1-10.  Bell's telephone did not become commercially viable until 1878.

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science & Medicine (1991) no. 164.

The American Library Association (ALA) is founded in Philadelphia.

Construction of the first regular telephone line is completed. It runs from Boston to Somerville, Massachusetts.

It takes three hundred clerks working at The Prudential six months to review its 2,500,000 policies with the assistance of twenty-four Thomas de Colmar arithmometers.

The first telephone switchboard is set up in Boston.

German zoologist and environmentalist Karl August Möbius publishes Die Auster und de Austernwirschaft.

In this study of oyster culture precipitated by the impoverishment of natural oyster beds, Mobius provided the earliest description of a marine animal community maintained in a state of equilibrium by limitations of resources.  He was the

"first to describe in detail the interactions between the different organisms in the ecosystem of the oyster bank, coining the term 'biocenose'. This remains a key term in synecology (community ecology)" (Wikipedia article on Karl Möbius, accessed 01-13-2009).

J. Norman (ed.) Morton's Medical Bibliography, 5th ed. (1991) No. 145.61.

The American Library Association, urged on by Melvil Dewey, standardizes the size of library catalogue cards.

At this time most libraries had their main catalogue in book form.

Emile Berliner invents the microphone.

It was used as a telephone speech transmitter.

Thomas Alva Edison invents the phonograph.

In the first test of the machine Edison recited the nursery rhyme, "Mary had a little lamb."

Edison's phonograph recorded on a metal cylinder wrapped with metal foil. He applied for the patent on December 24.

An aspect of this invention that has been observed is that before Edison invented the phonograph few people ever imagined a need for such a device.

David Edward Hughes invents the loose-contact carbon microphone.

Hughes's microphone was vital to telephony and later to broadcasting and sound recording.

The Remington Model 2 typewriter introduces a shift key, allowing the typing of both upper and lower case letters.

Bruno Abdank-Abakanowicz, a mathematician, inventor and electrical engineer, invents the integraph, a form of integrator.

"The integraph is an elaboration and extension of the planimeter, an earlier, simpler instrument used to measure area. It is a mechanical instrument capable of deriving the integral curve corresponding to a given curve. Hence, it is capable of solving graphically a simple differential equation.

"Sets of partial differential equations are commonly encountered in mathematical physics. Most branches of physics such as aerodynamics, electricity, acoustics, plasma physics, electron-physics and nuclear energy involve complex flows, motions and rates of change which may be described mathematically by partial differential equations. A well-established example from electromagnetics is the set of partial differential equations known as Maxwell's equations.

"In practice, differential equations can be difficult to integrate, that is to solve. The integraph is capable of solving only simple differential equations. The need to handle sets of more complex non-linear differential equations, led Vannevar Bush to develop the Differential Analyzer at MIT in the early 1930s. In turn, limitations in speed, capacity and accuracy of the Bush Differential Analyzer provided the impetus for the development of the ENIAC during World War II.

"Abdank-Abakanowicz’s instrument could produce solutions to a commonly encountered class of simple differential equations of the form dy/dx = F(x) so that y = ò F(x)dx. The basic approach was to draw a graph of the function F and then use the pointer on the device to trace the contour of the function. The value of the integral could then be read from the dials. The concept of the instrument was taken up and soon put into production by such well known instrument makers as the Swiss firm of Coradi in Zurich." From Gordon Bell's website, accessed 09-01-2010.

The first regular telephone exchange is set up in New Haven, Connecticut.

"The switchboard was built from "carriage bolts, handles from teapot lids and bustle wire" and could handle two simultaneous conversations" (Wikipedia article on telephone exchange, accessed 04-22-2009).

In an article published in the North American Review Thomas Edison describes future uses for his phonograph:

1. Letter writing and all kinds of dictation without the aid of a stenographer.
2. Phonographic books, which will speak to blind people without effort on their part.
3. The teaching of elocution.
4. Reproduction of music.
5. The "Family Record"--a registry of sayings, reminiscences, etc., by members of a family in their own voices, and of the last words of dying persons.
6. Music-boxes and toys.
7. Clocks that should announce in articulate speech the time for going home, going to meals, etc.
8. The preservation of languages by exact reproduction of the manner of pronouncing.
9. Educational purposes; such as preserving the explanations made by a teacher, so that the pupil can refer to them at any moment, and spelling or other lessons placed upon the phonograph for convenience in committing to memory.
10. Connection with the telephone, so as to make that instrument an auxiliary in the transmission of permanent and invaluable records, instead of being the recipient of momentary and fleeting communication."

Eleven months after its foundation, The Connecticut District Telephone Company issues the world's first telephone book.

The telephone directory contains the names and addresses of 391 subscribers who paid $22 per year for service. There are no phone numbers, but there are advertisements and listings of businesses in the back of the book—the first, embryonic "yellow pages." The advertisers include physicians and carriage companies. Customers are limited to three minutes per call and no more than two calls an hour without permission from the central office.

"Besides rules, the embryonic phone book also featured pages of tips on placing calls — pick up the receiver and tell the operator whom you want — and how to talk on this gadget. Having a real conversation, for example, required rapidly transferring the telephone between mouth and ear.“When you are not speaking, you should be listening,” it says at one point. You should begin by saying, “Hulloa,” and when done talking, the book says, you should say, “That is all.” The other person should respond, “O.K.” Because anybody could be on the line at any time, customers should not pick up the telephone unless they want to make a call, and they should be careful about what others might hear. “Any person using profane or otherwise improper language should be reported at this office immediately.”

James and John Ritty patent a cash register. It has a large display to record money received and a locked drawer to hold cash receipts.

Thomas Alva Edison produces the first incandescent light bulb capable of burning for a substantial period of time.

Alphonse Bertillon first publishes a description of his method of anthropometry.

He developed this system, which used five measurements-- head length, head breadth, length of middle finger, length of left foot, and length of forearm from elbow to extremeity of middle finger  — as a means for identifying people. It was the first scientific method for the identification of criminals. Until this time, criminals could only be identified based on eyewitness accounts, which were known to be unreliable. Bertillon first employed his method, which was eventually called "Bertillonage" in the successful identification of a criminal in 1883. It became the first extensively used scientific method of criminal identification.

Under the direction of John Shaw Billings, the Library of the Surgeon General's Office (to be redesignated in 1956 the National Library of Medicine) begins publication of the Index Medicus -- an effort to index all of medical periodical literature.

Index Medicus finally ceased publication in print in 2004.

Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege publishes in Halle, Germany his Begriffsschrift, eine der arithmetischen nachgebildete Formelsprache des reinen Denkens.

“. . . although a mere booklet of eighty-eight pages, it is perhaps the most important single work ever written in logic. Its fundamental contributions, among lesser points, are the truth-functional propositional calculus, the analysis of the proposition into function and argument(s) instead of subject and predicate, the theory of quantification, a system of logic in which derivations are carried out exclusively according to the form of the expressions, and a logical definition of the notion of mathematical sequence. Any single one of these achievements would suffice to secure the book a permanent place in the logician’s library” (Van Heijenoort, From Frege to Gödel (1967) 1).

“In his attempt to give a satisfactory definition of number and a rigorous foundation to arithmetic, Frege found ordinary language insufficient. To overcome the difficulties involved, he devised his Begriffschrift as a tool for analyzing and representing mathematical proofs completely and adequately. This tool has gradually developed into modern mathematical logic, of which Frege may justly be considered the creator“ (Dictionary of Scientific Biography article on Frege).

George R. Carey proposes one of the earliest systems of television transmission. (See Reading 5.5.)

John Shaw Billings begins publication of the The Index-Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General’s Office.

This became a landmark in the history of efforts to organize information and to make it searchable, and a primary general reference for the history of medicine and science. The fifith and final series was issued in 1961. The finished set of printed books contained "over 4.5 million. . . references to over 3.7 million bibliographic items.  2.5 million items are primarily journal articles; 250,000 items are monographs (books, pamphlets, and reports); approximately 300,000 items are dissertations (theses); and 16,000 are journal titles. Series 1 and Series 2 include portraits as separate citations but Series 3, 4, and 5 indicate portraits in descriptive notes for monographs and dissertations."

Adriano de Paiva, a professor of chemistry and physics at the Polytechnic Academy at Porto (Portugal) issues the first separate publication on television: La telescopie électrique basée sur l'emploi du selenium, a 48-page pamphlet published in Porto.

Paiva's paper represents the first theoretical formulation of the possibility of using selenium to transmit images at a distance. Paiva became interseted in the possibility of transmitting images by wire after the demonstration of Alexander Graham Bell's telephone in Lisbon in November 1877.

Lawyer, Swedenborgian, poet, agent for Canadian emmigration, economist, and amateur petrologist in Reutlingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany Otto Hahn publishes Die Meteorite (Chondrite) und ihre Organismen with 32 plates containing 144 images of photomicrographs of cross-sections of meteorites.

Hahn claimed that the mysterious structures shown in his photographs were  evidence of fossilized plants and simple animals, carried within meteorites from extra-terrestrial origins.

Though other scientists realized that Hahn had confused mineral structures with organic structures, it was claimed, without concrete substantiation, that Darwin enthusiastically endorsed Hahn's interpretation, even making an uncharacteristic reference to God in the context. See The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online at this link (accessed 05-28-2009). Darwin did own copies of Hahn's works and may also have visited with Hahn at Down House.

My thanks to Jörn Koblitz of MetBase for this reference.

Alexander Graham Bell and his then-assistant Charles Summer Tainter transmit the first wireless telephone message 213 meters on a beam of light between the roof of the Franklin School and the window of Bell's Washington, D. C. laboratory using the photophone. 

"The photophone used crystalline selenium cells at the focal point of its parabolic receiver. This material's electrical resistance varies inversely with the illumination falling upon it, i.e., its resistance is higher when it is in the dark, and lower when it is exposed to light. The idea of the photophone was thus to modulate a light beam: the resulting varying illumination of the receiver would induce a corresponding varying resistance in the selenium cells, which were then used by a telephone to regenerate the sounds captured at the receiver. The modulation of the transmitted light beam was done by a mirror made to vibrate by a person's voice: the thin mirror would alternate between concave and convex forms, thus focusing or dispersing the light from the light source. The photophone functioned similarly to the telephone, except the photophone used light as a means of projecting information, while the telephone relied on a modulated electrical signal carried over a conductive wire circuit" (Wikipedia article on Photophone, accessed 03-27-2010).

Bell's and Tainter's invention, for which Bell received the master patent (U.S. Patent 235,199) in December 1880, was the forerunner of wireless telecommunications and the far-advanced forerunner of fiber-optic telecommunications.

According to Long & Groth, Bibliography of Early Optical (Audio) Communications (2005) Bell's first paper on the photophone, "Prof. A. G. Bell on Selenium and the Photophone," was first published in The Electrician No 5, 18 September 1880, 220-221 and 2 October 1880, 237. The complete paper also was published in Nature (London) Vol 22, 23 September 1880, 500 - 503. Thus the first complete publication appears to be the version published in Nature.

Bell's longer paper "On the Production and Reproduction of Sound by Light: the Photophone" was first published in American Assocation  for the Advancement of Science, Proceedings, Vol 29., October 1880, 115-136. This paper was widely reprinted in other journals. "In these papers, Bell accords the credit for the first demonstrations of the transmission of speech by light to a Mr A C Brown of London 'in September or October 1878' (Wikipedia article on Photophone, accessed 03-27-2010).

In a letter published in the journal Nature, Henry Faulds, a physician and missionary working in Japan, is the first to propose the use of fingerprints as a system of identification, including the scientific identification of criminals: "On the Skin-Furrows of the Hand."

Faulds wrote: 

"I am sanguine that the careful study of these patterns may be useful in several ways.

1. We may perhaps be able to extend to other animals the analogies found by me to exist in the monkeys.

2. These analogies may admit of further analysis, and may assist, when better understood, in ethnological classifications.

3. It so, those which are found in ancient pottery may become of immense historical importance.

4. The fingers of mummies, by special preparation, may yield results for comparison. I am very doubtful, however, of this.

5. When bloody finger-marks or impressions of clay, glass, &c., exist, they may lead to the scientific identification of criminals " (http://www.clpex.com/Articles/History/Faulds1880.htm, accessed 03-27-2010).

At the U.S. Census Bureau John Shaw Billings, founder and librarian of the Surgeons General's Library (now the National Library of Medicine), suggests to Herman Hollerith that there ought to be a machine for doing the purely mechanical work of tabulating population and similar statistics. 

Hollerith credited Billings for inspiring him to develop electric punched card tabulating for the census of 1890.

James Murray, working in a corrugated out-building called "The Scriptorium,"  lined with book shelves and 1,029 pigeon-holes for quotation slips, is receiving 1000 quotation slips each day from contributors to the A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles.

By this year Murray had accumulated 3,500,000 quotations sent in by contributors, each on an individual slip of paper.

Charles Ammi Cutter, Librarian of the Boston Atheneum, and author of Cutter Expansive Classification, publishes The Buffalo Public Library in 1983. In it he predicts how a library will operate one hundred years into the future.

English clergyman and headmaster Edwin A. Abbott publishes a work of scientific fantasy entitled Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. With illustrations by the Author, A SQUARE.

"It is a charming, slightly pedestrian tale of imaginary beings; polygons who live in a two-dimensional universe of the Euclidean plane. Just below the surface, though, it is a biting satire on Victorian values--especially as regards women and social status-- and an accomplished and original piece of scientific popularization about the fourth dimension. And, perhaps, an allegory of a spiritual journey" (Ian Stewart, editor, The Annotated Flatland [2002] ix).

♦ In 2008 Ladd Ehlinger Jr. issued an excellent computer-animated film of Flatland, which he characterizes as a tale of "math, physics, dimensionality, philosophy, religion and war." You can view clips from the film on Ehlinger's website and also order autographed copies of the DVD directly from the site.

Thomas Edison, who had invented in the electric pen in 1876, agrees to sell his patents for this device to Albert Blake Dick, who had invented the mimeograph stencil.

Edison also agreed to help Dick market the mimeograph under the name, Edison Mimeograph. Marketed by the AB Dick company, the mimeograph became the first widely used electric office duplicating machine.

John H. Patterson and his associates acquire the Ritty patents and establish the National Cash Register Company (NCR).

The American Historical Association is founded "for the promotion of historical studies, the collection and preservation of historical documents and artifacts, and the dissemination of historical research."

Austrian physician Sigmund Freud publishes "Ueber Coca," Centralblatt für die gesamte Therapie 2 (1884) 289-314.

This essay provided the best comprehensive review of the subject that had yet appeared, describing the early history of the coca plant and its use by South American native populations, the first European accounts of the plant in the sixteenth century, and the isolation of the alkaloid cocaine in 1859. Freud also presented his observations (with himself as subject) on the effects of the drug, describing its abolition of hunger and fatigue, the exhilaration and lasting euphoria it produced, and its supposed non-addictiveness— a misapprehension he would later bitterly regret, as misuse of the drug contributed to the death of his dear friend Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow.

Freud recognized cocain's anesthetic qualities and suggested its use as a topical or local anesthetic; unfortunately, Leopold Königstein, the colleague to whom he suggested its trial, procrastinated, and the crucial experiments were performed by Carl Koller, who subsequently achieved worldwide recognition as the discoverer of local anesthesia. Freud's suggestion that the drug might act by abolishing the effect of agencies that depress bodily feeling has since been confirmed.

Freud published a revised separate edition of Über coca in 1885.

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) nos. F7 and F8.

Press manufacturer and book collector, Robert Hoe, and eight of his book collector friends found The Grolier Club in New York. It became the leading society of bibliophiles in the United States, and a leading venue for exhibitions relating to book history.

The library of The Grolier Club became a leading research center for book history, for the history of libraries, the history of book collecting and the book trade.

Twenty-three years after the project began, the first fascicule of  A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles; Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by The Philological Society is published, under the editorship of James Murray. 

The 352-page volume, covering words from A to Ant, cost 12s.6d or U.S.$3.25. The total sales of this fascicule were 4000 copies. The dictionary was complete in 125 fascicules, the last of which was published on April 19, 1928. The name Oxford English Dictionary was first used for the work in 1895.

Gottlieb Daimler invents the internal combustion engine and Karl Benz builds a single-cylinder engine for an automobile.

Melvyl Dewey publishes the second edition of his Dewey Decimal Classification under his own name. The Dewey Decimal Classification became the world's most widely used library classification system.

German engine designer and automobile engineer Karl Benz  designs the Benz Patent Motorwagon, the first automobile designed to generate its own power, not simply a motorized stage coach or horse carriage.

"The Benz Patent Motorwagen was a three-wheeled automobile with a rear-mounted engine. The vehicle contained many new inventions. It was constructed of steel tubing with woodwork panels. The steel-spoked wheels and solid rubber tires were Benz's own design. Steering was by way of a toothed rack that pivoted the unsprung front wheel. Fully-elliptic springs were used at the back along with a live axle and chain drive on both sides. A simple belt system served as a single-speed transmission, varying torque between an open disc and drive disc.

"The first Motorwagen used the Benz 954 cc single-cylinder four-stroke engine. This new engine produced ⅔ hp (½ kW) at 250 rpm in the Patent Motorwagen, although later tests by the University of Mannheim showed it to be capable of .9 hp (0.7 kW) at 400 rpm. It was an extremely light engine for the time, weighing about 100 kg (220 lb). Although its open crankcase and drip oiling system would be alien to a modern mechanic, its use of a pushrod-operated poppet valve for exhaust would be quite familiar. A large horizontal flywheel stabilized the single-cylinder engine's power output. An evaporative carburettor was controlled by a sleeve valve to regulate power and engine speed" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benz_Patent_Motorwagen, accessed 06-01-2009).

The Motorwagen was patented on January 29, 1886 as DRP-37435: "automobile fueled by gas."

"The 1885 version was difficult to control, leading to a collision with a wall during a public demonstration. The first successful tests on public roads were carried out in the early summer of 1886. The next year Benz created the Motorwagen Model 2 which had several modifications, and in 1887, the definitive Model 3 with wooden wheels was introduced, showing at the Paris Expo the same year" (Wikipedia article on Karl Benz, accessed 06-01-2009).

American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (A T & T) is established to run the United States long-distance telephone network.

Mergenthaler Linotype is used by the New York Tribune newspaper.

In 1887 the New York Tribune published the first book typeset by lintotype, The Tribune Book of Open-Air Sports.

Bookseller and publisher, A. Roux, in textile center Lyon, France, issues Livre de Prières tissé d'après les enluminures des manuscrits du XIVe au XVI siecle. It consists of monochrome sheets of woven silk, designed by Father J. Herver after pages from manuscript books of hours from the 14th to 16th century.

The pages include elaborate borders, decorative initials, and three miniatures of the Virgin and Child, Crucifixion and Nativity produced on the Jacquard loom by J. A. Henry, the designs having been punched into thousands of Jacquard cards. The work was issued with the approval of the Archbishop of Lyon. The technical virtuosity, and degree of finesse achieved in this production represented a high point in the application of the Jacquard loom to the weaver's art. The original designs for the whole work are held by the Musée Historique des Tissus in Lyon.

P. Arizzoli-Clementel, La Musée des Tissus de Lyon (1990) 100.

Forest and Stream magazine editor George Bird Grinnell, appalled by the negligent mass slaughter of birds that he saw taking place, urges the formation of the National Audubon Society for the protection of wild birds and their eggs.  "The public response to Grinnell's call for the protection of fowl was said to be instant and impressive: Within a year of its foundation, the early Audubon Society claimed 39,000 members, each of whom signed a pledge to 'not molest birds.' Prominent members included jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., abolitionist minister Henry Ward Beecher, and poet John Greenleaf Whittier" (Wikipedia article on National Audubon Society, accessed 01-18-2009).

The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, an international agreement governing copyright, is ratified in Berne, Switzerland.

"The Berne Convention was developed at the instigation of Victor Hugo of the Association Littéraire et Artistique Internationale. Thus it was influenced by the French "right of the author" (droit d'auteur), which contrasts with the Anglo-Saxon concept of "copyright" which only dealt with economic concerns. Under the Convention, copyrights for creative works are automatically in force upon their creation without being asserted or declared. An author need not "register" or "apply for" a copyright in countries adhering to the Convention. As soon as a work is "fixed", that is, written or recorded on some physical medium, its author is automatically entitled to all copyrights in the work and to any derivative works, unless and until the author explicitly disclaims them or until the copyright expires. Foreign authors are given the same rights and privileges to copyrighted material as domestic authors in any country that signed the Convention."

Tolbert Lanston demonstrates his prototype of the Monotype machine, which casts letters in the form of individual pieces of lead type.

Lanston's machine read punched paper tape like a player piano.

Emile Berliner invents the flat disc Gramophone. This eventually replaced the Edison wax cylinder as a recording and playback device, and enabled the birth of the recording industry.

Heinrich Hertz proves the existence of electromagnetic waves, the theoretical basis for wireless communication.

Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography is published. It contains biographical information about thousands of people (some famous, some more obscure) in American history.

"But thirty years after the Cyclopedia's initial publication, questions began to be raised about its reliability. . . . To date over 200 suspicious entries have been flagged. But due to the enormity of the work it's doubtful that all of the false information it contains will ever be identified" (Museumofhoaxes.com, accessed 11-21-2008).

• Barnhart, John Hendley. "Some Fictitious Botanists." Journal of the New York Botanical Garden 20 (September 1919): 171-81.
• O'Brien, Frank M. "The Wayward Encyclopedias", New Yorker, XII (May 2, 1936), pp. 71-74.
• Schindler, Margaret Castle. "Fictitious Biography." American Historical Review 42 (1937), pp. 680-90.
• Dobson, John Blythe. "The Spurious Articles in Appleton's Cyclopaedia of American Biography—Some New Discoveries and Considerations." Biography 16(4) 1993: 388-408.

In his utopian novel Looking Backward,  Edward Bellamy uses the term credit card eleven times—the first description of the use of a card for purchases.

The first Chief of the Illinois Natural History Survey, and founder of aquatic ecosystem science, Stephen Alfred Forbes publishes "The Lake as a Microcosm" in the Bulletin of the Scientific Association of Peoria, Illinois.

Forbes was the first to apply ecological principles to limnology. He emphasized population regulation and the dynamic nature of the community.

John Robert Gregg publishes Light-Line Phonography in Liverpool, England, describing the Gregg shorthand, a phonetic writing system. 

Gregg shorthand was adapted to many languages, but was most popular in its Spanish adaptation. The final edition of Gregg shorthand, known as the Centennial edition, was published in 1988.

George Eastman uses Cellulose Nitrate as a base for photographic roll film. Cellulose nitrate was used for photographic and professional 35mm motion picture film until the 1950s, eventually creating one of the most dramatic problems in the preservation of media.

"It is highly inflammable and also decomposes to a dangerous condition with age. When new, nitrate film could be ignited with the heat of a cigarette; partially decomposed, it can ignite spontaneously at temperatures as low as 120 F (49C). Nitrate film burns rapidly, fuelled by its own oxygen, and releases toxic fumes.

"Decomposition: There are five stages in the decomposition of nitrate film:

"(i) Amber discolouration with fading of picture.
"(ii) The emulsion becomes adhesive and films stick together; film becomes brittle.
"(iii) The film contains gas bubbles and gives off a noxious odour
"(iv) The film is soft, welded to adjacent film and frequently covered with a viscous froth
"(v) The film mass degenerates into a brownish acrid powder.

"Film in the first and second stages can be copied, as may parts of films at the third stage of decomposition. Film at the fourth or fifth stages is useless and should be immediately destroyed by your local fire brigade because of the dangers of spontaneous combustion and chemical attack on other films. Contact your local environmental health officer about this.

"It has been estimated that the majority of nitrate film will have decomposed to an uncopiable state by the year 2000, though archives are now deep-freezing film."

Charles Babbage’s son Henry Prevost Babbage completes and publishes his father’s unfinished edition of writings on the Difference Engine No. 1 and the Analytical Engine, together with a listing of his father’s unpublished plans and notebooks. These appear under the title of Babbage’s Calculating Engines.

About 77 windmill factories scattered across the United States employ about 1,100 workers. They sell water-pumping windmills to railroads, who need water for their steam locomotives, and to farmers, to pump water for their animals.

Otto Lilienthal publishes Der Vogelflug als Grundlage der Fliegekunst. 

Lilienthal's study of the method and aerodynamics of bird flight was the first textbook of mechanical flight. Lilienthal applied the the results of his bird-flight studies to the problem of human flight, constructing one-man gliders based on the shape of a bird's wing; the experiments he conducted with these from 1891 until his tragic death in 1896 demonstrated the practical application of his theories of flight and inspired others to build upon his initial investigations.

On 9 August 1896 Lilienthal fell from a height of 17 m (56 ft), breaking his spine. He died the next day, saying, "Kleine Opfer müssen gebracht werden!" ("Small sacrifices must be made!") and was buried at Lankwitz public cemetery in Berlin.

"Lilienthal's book [became] one of the chief bibles for the aeronautical world after he demonstrated that his theories could be put into practice. . . . It was the basis on which the Wrights first started building their aerodynamic work, and they were always high in praise of its pioneering value, even when they were led to modify Lilienthal's findings" (Gibbs-Smith, The Invention of the Aeroplane [1799-1909] 23, and 23-25).

Lilienthal's work was translated into English as Birdflight as the Basis of Aviation and published in London in 1911.

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 1353.

Herman Hollerith patents an electromechanical machine for tabulating information stored on punched cards.

Hollerith's electric punched card tabulator was used in the 1890 United States census — the first major data-processing project to use electrical machinery. It reduced data-processing time by 80 percent over manual methods. (See Reading 4.3.)

William S. Burroughs begins commercial production of his dependable key-driven printing adding machine.

Dorr E. Felt introduces the Comptometer, a non-printing key-driven calculating machine whose chief advantages are speed, versatility, and ease of use.

The logarithmic and trigonometric tables of Gaspard Riche de Prony, compiled in 19 volumes of manuscript, mostly by hairdressers unemployed after the French Revolution, are finally published in an abbreviated form in one volume. They are the most monumental work of calculation ever carried out by human computers.

French engineer and applied mathematician Philbert Maurice d'Ocagne publishes Nomographie, les calculs usuels effectués au moyen des abaques. In this work on nomograms or nomographs he

"presented the first outline of a rationally ordered discipline embracing all the individual procedures of nomographical calulation then known. Pursuing this subject, he succeeded in defining and classifying the most general modes of representation applicable to equations with an arbitrary number of variables. The results of all these investigations, along with a considerable number of applications . . .  [he] set forth in Traité de nomographie (1899), which was followed by other more or less developed expositions. This material appeared in fifty-nine partial or entire translations in fourteen languages" (Dictionary of Science Biography X [1974] 170). 

The AT&T long-distance telephone network extends from New York to Chicago.

Heinrich Hertz publishes his collected papers on electromagnetic waves.

In this form Guglielmo Marconi learned about Hertz’s work and began work on the development of radio.

Francis Galton publishes a detailed statistical model of fingerprint analysis and identification, and encourages their use in forensic science in his book, Finger Prints.

Vladimir Ivanovich Stepanov, dancer at the Imperial Ballet in Saint Petersburg. publishes l'Alphabet des Mouvements du Corps Humain.

This system of dance notation

"encodes dance movements with musical notes and not with pictographs or newly invented abstract symbols. Stepanov breaks complex movements down to elementary moves which single parts of the body can make. These basic moves are then enciphered as musical signs" (Wikipedia article on Vladimir Ivanovich Stepanov, accessed 04-05-2009).

The Stepanov method of dance or choreographic notation archive is preserved in the Sergeyev Collection at the Harvard University Library Theatre Collection.

John Muir and a group of professors from the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University found the Sierra Club in San Francisco. It is the oldest and largest grassroots environmental organization in the United States.

"The Club's first goals included establishing Glacier and Mount Rainier national parks, convincing the California legislature to give Yosemite Valley to the US Federal government, and saving California's coastal redwoods. Muir escorted President Theodore Roosevelt through Yosemite in 1903, and two years later the California legislature ceded Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove to the Federal government. The Sierra Club won its first lobbying victory with the creation of the country's second national park, after Yellowstone in 1872. In the first decade of the 1900s, the Sierra Club became embroiled in the famous Hetch Hetchy controversy that divided preservationists from "resource management" conservationists. For years the city of San Francisco had been having problems with a privately-owned water company that provided poor service at high prices. Mayor James D. Phelan’s reform administration wanted to set up a municipally-owned water utility and revived an earlier proposal to dam the Hetch Hetchy valley. The final straw was the water company's failure to provide adequate water to fight the fires that destroyed much of the city following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Gifford Pinchot, a progressive supporter of public utilities and head of the US Forest Service, which then had jurisdiction over the national parks, supported the creation Hetch Hetchy dam. Muir appealed to his friend US President Roosevelt, who would not commit himself against the dam, given its popularity with the people of San Francisco (a referendum in 1908 confirmed a seven-to-one majority in favor of the dam and municipal water). Muir and attorney William Colby began a national campaign against the dam, attracting the support of many eastern conservationists. With the 1912 election of US President Woodrow Wilson, who carried San Francisco, supporters of the dam had a friend in the White House. The bill to dam Hetch Hetchy passed Congress in 1913, and so the Sierra Club lost its first major battle. In retaliation, the Club supported creation of the National Park Service in 1916, to remove the parks from Forest Service oversight. Stephen Mather, a Club member from Chicago and an opponent of Hetch Hetchy dam, became the first National Park Service director" (Wikipedia article on Sierra Club)

Charles-Émile Reynaud, inventor of the praxinoscope, an animation system using loops of 12 pictures,  creates the first animated film.

"On October 28, 1892 at Musée Grévin in Paris, France he exhibited animations consisting of loops of about 500 frames, using his Théâtre Optique system - similar in principle to a modern film projector" (Wikipedia article on History of Animation, accessed 05-24-2009).

"The show, billed as Pantomimes Lumineuses, included three cartoons, Pauvre Pierrot, Un bon bock, and Le Clown et ses chiens, each consisting of 500 to 600 individually painted images and lasting about 15 minutes. Reynaud acted as the projectionist and the show was accompanied by a piano player. Although the films shown by the Lumière Brothers in 1895 eclipsed it, the show stayed at the Musée Grévin until 1900 by which time over 500,000 people had seen it" (Wikipedia article on Théâtre Optique, accessed 05-24-2009).

The "Millionaire" mechanical calculator is introduced in Switzerland.

The "Millionaire" allowed direct multiplication by any digit and was used by government agencies and scientists — especially astronomers — well into the twentieth century.

Karl Benz creates the Victoria, a two-passenger, 4-wheeled automobile with a 3-hp engine, which could reach the top speed of 11 mph and had a pivotal front axle operated by a roller-chained tiller for steering. The model was successful with 85 units sold in 1893.

"In 1894 Benz improved this design in his new Velo model. This was produced on such a remarkably large scale for the era—1,200 total from 1894 to 1901— that it may be considered the first production automobile. The Benz Velo also participated in the first automobile race, the 1894 Paris to Rouen Rally" (Wikipedia article on Karl Benz, accessed 06-01-2009).

By the end of the nineteenth century Benz was the largest automobile company in the world with 572 units produced in 1899.

The recently established Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung holds an exhibition in Munich of Mathematical and Mathematical-Physical Models, Apparatus, and Instruments.

This was the first international exhibition limited to mathematical devices, including calculating instruments; it reflected the huge growth in the field since the London exposition of 1876. The exhibition had been planned for the previous year but was canceled because of an outbreak of cholera in northern Germany.

Charles Duryea and Frank Duryea demonstrate the one-cylinder "Ladies Phaeton" at Chicopee, Massachusetts. This was the first successful gas-engine automobile built in the United States.

In 1894 the brothers built a second automobile. This car, driven by Frank, won the Chicago Times Herald race in Chicago on a snowy Thanksgiving day in 1895. Frank Duryea travelled 54 miles (87 km) at an average 7.5 mph (12 km/h), marking the first U.S. auto race in which any entrants finished. That same year, the brothers founded the Duryea Motor Wagon Company, and began commercial production, selling thirteen cars by the end of 1896.

Philbert Maurice d'Ocagne publishes Le Calcul simplifiée par procèdes mécaniques et graphiques. This contains the first systematic classification of calculating machines.

Thomas Edison introduces the Kinetograph, "the first practical moving picture camera, and the Kinetoscope, a hand-cranked, single-viewer, lighted box to display the resulting films. Kinetescope parlors were supplied with fifty-foot film snippets shot by Edison employee W.K. Dickson, the device's chief inventor, in their 'Black Maria' studio. The invention was a widely imitated, international success."

There is much dispute as to the identity of the cinématographe, a film camera which also serves as a film projector and developer. "Some argue that the device was first invented and patented as "Cinématographe Léon Bouly" by French inventor Léon Bouly in February 12, 1892. It is said that, due to a lack of fee, Bouly was not able to pay the rent for his patent the following year, and Auguste and Louis Lumière's engineers bought the license.

"Popular thought, however, dictates that Louis Lumière was the first to conceptualise the idea, and both Lumière brothers shared the patent. They made their first film, Sortie de l'usine Lumière de Lyon, in 1894" (Wikipedia article on Cinematograph, accessed 04-22-2009).

"The date of the recording of their first film is in dispute. In an interview with Georges Sadoul given in 1948, Louis Lumière tells that he shot the film in August 1894. This is questioned by historians (Sadoul, Pinel, Chardère) who consider that a functional Lumière camera didn't exist before the end of 1894, and that their first film was recorded March 19th 1895, and then publicly projected March 22nd at the Société d'encouragement pour l'industrie nationale in Paris" (Wikipedia article on Auguste and Louis Lumiere, accessed 04-22-2009).

Seventeen meters long, when cranked through the cinématograph Sortie de l'usine Lumière de Lyon ran for approximately 50 seconds.

American railroad engineer Octave Chanute publishes his book, Progress in Flying Machines, at the press of the American Engineer and Railroad Journal. 

This book was the first organized and published collection of aviation research, and a work which profoundly influenced the Wright Brothers. Chanute first became interested in aviation in 1875, and after his retirement in 1890 devoted all of his time to promoting this new science. He began collecting data from flight researchers all over the world, which he published in a series of articles in The Railroad and Engineering Journal between 1891 and 1893, and collected a year later for publication in book form.

In collaboration with other researchers, Chanute also conducted several experiments with various types of gliders, concluding from these investigations that the best way to achieve extra lift without a prohibitive increase in weight was to stack several wings one above the other. This led him to design the unmotorized Chanute biplane, upon which the Wright brothers based their first glider. Chanute and the Wright brothers became acquainted in 1900, when Wilbur Wright wrote to Chanute after reading Progress in Flying Machines. Chanute visited Kitty Hawk several times and helped to publicize the Wrights' work.

Guglielmo Marconi invents wireless telegraphy (radio). (See Reading 5.4.)

Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine found the Institut International de Bibliographie. "In 1895, Otlet and La Fontaine also began the creation of a a collection of index cards, meant to catalog facts, that came to be known as the "Repertoire Bibliographique Universel" (RBU), or the 'Universal Bibliographic Repertory'. By the end of 1895 it had grown to 400,000 entries; later it would reach a height of over 15 million.

"In 1896, Otlet set up a fee-based service to answer questions by mail, by sending the requesters copies of the relevant index cards for each query; scholar Alex Wright has referred to the service as an 'analog search engine'. By 1912, this service responded to over 1,500 queries a year. Users of this service were even warned if their query was likely to produce more than 50 results per search.

"Otlet envisioned a copy of the RBU in each major city around the world, with Brussels holding the master copy. At various times between 1900 and 1914, attempts were made to send full copies of the RBU to cities such as Paris, Washington, D.C. and Rio de Janeiro; however, difficulties in copying and transportation meant that no city received more than a few hundred thousand cards" (Wikipedia article on Paul Otlet, accessed 03-02-2009).

In 1931 the Institut International de Bibliographie was renamed the Institut International de Documentation, IID (International Federation for Information and Documentation.)

The first mainline railway is electrified.

About 240,000 telephones are in use in the United States.

Austrian physicians Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud publish Studien über Hysterie.

This work, which provided the first detailed account of the free-association method, is customarily regarded as the starting-point of psychoanalysis.  Joseph Breuer had discovered the "cathartic" method of curing hysteria in the early 1880s while treating the patient who would later be immortalized as "Anna O."; this patient, who exhibited a myriad of severe hysterical symptoms, found that the symptoms would disappear when she told Breuer the details of their onset. (Freud's biographer, the pioneering psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, gives "Anna O.," whose real name was Bertha Pappenheim, a large share of the credit for inventing what she called the "talking cure.")

Freud learned of this interesting case from Breuer shortly after its termination in June 1882. The case made a strong impression on him, and a few years later he began using a combination of hypnosis and the cathartic method in his own neurological practice. From this Freud gradually developed the method of free association, in which the patient was encouraged to say whatever came into his/her mind however "nonsensical" or "irrelevant," since Freud believed that the patient's statements provided clues about the network of associations already established in the mind, and would thus lead the therapist to the source of the patient's neurosis. "It was through devising the new method that Freud was enabled to penetrate into the previously unknown realm of the unconscious proper and to make the profound discoveries with which his name is imperishably associated" (Jones, Sigmund Freud I, 265).  

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) F26.

Louis Jean and Auguste Marie Louis Nicholas Lumière patent the cinématographe, a three-in-one motion picture camera, developer and projector.

Prior to inventing the cinématographe the Lumière brothers invented sprocket holes in the film strip as a means of getting the film through the camera and projector.

The first private screening of a motion picture  "took place in Paris, at the "Society for the Development of the National Industry", in front of an audience of 200 people - among which Léon Gaumont, then director of the Comptoir de la photographie. The main focus of this conference by Louis Lumière were the recent developments in the photograph industry, mainly the research on polychromy (color photography). It was much to Lumière's surprise that the moving black-and-white images retained more attention than the colored stills photographs" (Wikipedia article on Auguste and Louis Lumiere, accessed 04-22-2009).

The first moving picture ever made, La sortie des usines Lumière. . . , is first publically screened at L'Eden, the world's first and oldest cinéma, located in La Ciotat in southeastern France.

Because Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen had his lab notes burned after his death there are conflicting accounts of the discovery, but this is a likely reconstruction: while investigating cathode rays with a fluorescent screen painted with barium platinocyanide and a Crookes tube, which he had wrapped in black cardboard so the visible light from the tube wouldn't interfere, the physics professor noticed a faint green glow from the screen, about one meter away. The invisible rays coming from the tube to make the screen glow were passing through the cardboard. He found they could also pass through books and papers on his desk.

Upon investigation Röntgen found that the fluorescence was caused by unknown rays, originating from the spot where cathode rays hit the glass wall of the vacuum tube. These unknown rays he temporarily designated X-rays.

Röntgen discovered the medical use of X-rays when he saw a picture of his wife's hand on a photographic plate formed due to X-rays on December 22, 1895. This inadvertent photograph of his wife's hand was the first X-ray photograph of a part of the human body.

In his initial report on the discovery Röntgen described the rays' photographic properties and their amazing ability to penetrate all substances, even living flesh. Although he was unable to determine the true physical nature of the rays, Röntgen was certain that he had discovered something entirely new.  He published his initial report, "Eine neue Art von Strahlen," in the relatively obscure Sitzungs-Bericht der physiikalisch-medicinischen Gesellschaft zu Würburg at the end of December 1895. The advantage of publishing in this obscure journal was that Röntgen obtained extremely rapid publication. The publishers of the journal issued offprints of the paper for commercial sale. These offprints went through several printings, reflecting unusually wide interest in the discovery from the international scientific and medical community. X-rays were among the most rapidly adopted and exploited scientific discoveries. Within a year roughly 1000 publications appeared on the subject.

For this discovery Röntgen received the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901.

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 1841.

August and Louis Lumière hold their first public screening of films at which admission is charged at Paris's Salon Indien du Grand Café.

"This history-making presentation featured ten short films, including their first film, Sortie des Usines Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory). Each film is 17 meters long, which, when hand cranked through a projector, runs approximately 50 seconds" (Wikipedia article on August and Louis Lumiere, accessed 04-22-2009).

Herman Hollerith founds the Tabulating Machine Company.

This eventually evolved into IBM.

Lord Northcliffe founds the Daily Mail.

It soon achieved a daily circulation of 1,000,000.

Solomon Schechter, reader in Talmudic Studies at Cambridge, hears of discoveries of important early Hebrew manuscripts, and travels to Egypt where, with the financial assistance of Charles Taylor, he purchases what he considers the most significant portion of the contents of the genizah, a store room in the loft of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat, presently Old Cairo.

Schechter sent back to Cambridge about 140,000 manuscripts from the genizah. These became the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Collection at Cambridge University.

When Schechter assumed the presidency of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York in 1902 he brought an additional collection of manuscripts from the genizah to that library. Currently the Jewish Theological Seminary holds about 40,000 manuscripts or fragments from the Cairo genizah. An additional 11,000 fragments are at the John Rylands University Library at the University of Manchester, purchased from the estate of Dr. Moses Gaster in 1954. Smaller portions are preserved in universities around the world.

"The Cairo Genizah, mostly discovered late in the nineteenth century but still resurfacing in our own day, is a collection of over 200,000 fragmentary Jewish texts (which may well equal three times that number of folios). Many of these were stored in the loft of the ancient Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat medieval Cairo, to the south-west of the modern city) between the 11th and 19th centuries. A genizah is a storage room where copies of respected texts with scribal errors or physical damaged, or unusable documents, are kept until they can be ritually buried. The dark, sealed, room in the arid Egyptian climate contributed to the preservation of the documents, the earliest of which may go back to the eighth and ninth centuries.

"These manuscripts outline a 1,000-year continuum of Middle-Eastern history and comprise the largest and most diverse collection of medieval manuscripts in the world. The Genizah can be described as one of the greatest Jewish treasures ever found.

"Early visitors to the Genizah were wary of examining its contents because of the local superstition that foretold disaster for anyone who might remove any of its contents. This, too, contributed to the preservation of the documents.

"In the second half of the 19th century some texts were sold by synagogue officials to dealers, scholars and visitors. Famous libraries in St. Petersburg, Paris, London, Oxford, Cambridge and Philadelphia acquired major collections.

"In the early 1890's Rabbi Shlomo Aharon Wertheimer, a Torah scholar, collector and researcher, living in Jerusalem, began publishing manuscripts that he had purchased from the Cairo Genizah with his identifications and explanations – among them rare and important texts. He also sold some of these manuscripts to collectors in order to finance the purchase of additional ones. To some extent, he was one of the first to recognize the treasure trove that was the Cairo Genizah."

These quotations are from the website of the Friedberg Genizah Project, an effort underway in Jerusalem to digitize and preserve all surviving portions of the Cairo Genizah from around the world.

Swedish physical chemist Svante Arrhenius publishes "Ueber den Einfluss der atmosphärischen Kohlensäregehalts auf die Temperatur der Erdoberfläche" Bihan til kungliga vetenskapaskademiens handlingar 22, no. 1 (1896) 102ff.  Excerpts of this paper were translated as "On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground," Philosophical Magazine 41 (1896) 237-276.

This paper was "the first to quantify the impact of carbon dioxide on the Earth's greenhouse effect and to suggest that its variations have been an important influence on previous long-term changes in climate. His crude estimate that a doubling of carbon dioxide would result in a ~5 °C warming is larger but not greatly different from the 1.5-4.5 °C now estimated for such a doubling (IPCC 2001)" (http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:Arrhenius_pdf, accessed 04-26-2009).

Karl Ferdinand Braun builds the first cathode ray tube (CRT).

Before he is appointed Librarian of Congress, Herbert Putnam, with the assistance of Charles Ammi Cutter, develops the Library of Congress Classification (LCC). This and the Dewey Decimal Classification become the most widely used systems of library classification.

In his annual report for this year Librarian of Congress John Russell Young comments on the "questionable quality of the paper upon which so much of the Library material is printed." Referring to the wood pulp paper that is inferior to paper previously made from linen rags, Young warns that many of the works coming into the Library "threaten in a few years to crumble into a waste heap, with no value as record."

Urban planner Ebenezer Howard publishes To-Morrow: A peaceful path to real reform. This book is the origin of the garden city movement, which sought to remedy the evils caused by uncontrolled urban growth and rural depopulation by building planned communities of limited size combining the best features of both city and country, whose construction would be motivated not by private interest but by the best interests of the inhabitants. Howard's movement inspired the foundation of numerous garden cities throughout the world, embodying his principles either wholly or in part. It also had important effects on the more general problem of urban development, drawing people's attention to the necessity for controlling the growth of towns and cities-the modern city planning department can be said to owe its existence to Howard.

Howard believed wholly in the rightness of his ideas, and was very successful in inspiring others to do the same. Although he remained poor all his life, his powers of persuasion were such that he was able to obtain financing for the construction of two garden cities in England. Carter & Muir, Printing and the Mind of Man (1967) No. 387.

Archivist Samuel Muller, jurist and historian Johan Adriaan Feith and historian Robert Fruin publish Handleidung voor het Ordenen en Beschriejven van Archieven.

This work, which represented the culmination of European archival development up the time of its publication, attempted to impose standardization on archival practice from records management to the management of archival repositories, from the use of archival terms to the preparation of inventories. It was translated into German in 1905, into Italian in 1908, into French in 1910, and into Bulgarian from the French in 1912.  A summary of its contents appeared in Russian in 1925. The work was translated into English from the second Dutch edition of 1920 by Arthur H. Leavitt of the U.S. National Archives in 1940,  and reissued in 1968. A centential edition with a 105-page introduction by Peter Horsman, Eric Ketelaar, and Theo Thomassen was issued in Dutch in 1998. The most recent edition, reprinting the Leavitt translation, with a condensation of the  Horsman, Ketelaar, and Thomassen introduction and a reprint of  Marjorie Rabe Barritt, "Coming to America: Dutch Archivistiek and American Archival Practice", Archival Issues 18 (1993) was published by the American Society of Archivists in 2003.

Death of the The Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican clergyman, and photographer, best known by his pen name, Lewis Carroll. In addition to his published writings, which included Alice in Wonderland, Dodgson maintained a meticulous ledger recording his incoming and outgoing correspondence over his lifetime. As a reflection of how many letters an individual could exchange in this era before telephone, Dodgson/Carroll wrote or received approximately 98,000 letters.

Halsey William Wilson publishes the first issue of the Cumulative Book Index. 

"As a bookseller, Wilson had to constantly search through publishers' catalogs in order to keep track of currently published books that his customers might want. It was tedious and time-consuming work that prompted him to long for a comprehensive, up-to-date index of published works. He eventually decided to create such an index himself. What made the concept work economically was Wilson's idea to keep the publication current by placing each entry on a printer's "slug," which could then be later sorted with slugs from new entries. It may have been an obvious solution to someone who had experience as a job printer, but it was a revolutionary concept in bibliographical publishing. In February 1898 Wilson first published Cumulative Book Index, a comprehensive alphabetic list of currently published books in English, featuring the key elements of future Wilson indexes: the listing of author, title, and subject. The work sold for $1 to 300 subscribers, who would then receive periodically updated versions."

Matches: An Appeal, an English short subject by Arthur-Melbourne Cooper, developed for the Bryant and May Matchsticks company, may be the earliest surviving example of stop-motion animation. It involved stop-motion animation of wired-together matches writing a patriotic call to action on a blackboard.

Austrian physician and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud issues Die Traumdeutung through the publisher Franz Deuticke in Leipzig and Vienna. This work on The Interpretation of Dreams has been called the last great original work in science or medicine to appear first as a monograph rather than as an article or series of articles published in scientific or medical journals.

The volume is dated 1900 on the title page but Freud's presentation copy to his close friend Wilhelm Fleiss bears the date 24 October 1899 on the title page. "In a letter to Fliess dated 27 October 1899 Freud thanked Fliess for his 'kind words in response to my sending you the dream book,' and noted that 'it has not yet been issued; only our two copies have so far seen the light of day.'

Jones, Sigmund Freud I, 395 states that the book 'actually published on November 4, 1899, but the publisher chose to put the date 1900 on the title page' " (Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine [1991] no. F33).