May 1909

The following events occurred in May 1909:

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May 17, 1909: U.S. First Lady Nellie Taft suffers stroke
May 7, 1909: University of Zurich offers patent inspector Albert Einstein full-time job as a professor
May 12, 1909: Leopold Stokowski makes debut as conductor
May 13, 1909: Luigi Ganna wins the first Giro d'Italia

May 1, 1909 (Saturday)
  • Walter Reed Medical Center opened for treatment of Washington, D.C., residents and veterans.[1]
  • Tens of thousands of California residents turned out at San Francisco to greet the visiting Japanese ships IJN Aso and Soya, which had been captured from Russia during the Russo-Japanese War of 1905.[2]

May 2, 1909 (Sunday)

May 3, 1909 (Monday)
  • Jesús Malverde, "El Rey de Sinaloa", was killed in Mexico and made his way into local folklore.
  • Ensign Chester Nimitz began a career in submarine warfare, taking command of the USS Plunger.
  • The Preakness Stakes, second jewel of the Triple Crown of American horseracing, returned to Maryland and the Pimlico racetrack, after having been run since 1890 in New York.[5]

May 4, 1909 (Tuesday)
  • Tony Malfeti's body was found; he had been kidnapped on March 14.
  • In New Knoxville, Ohio, 29-year-old butcher Martin Engel, the grandfather of future astronaut Neil Armstrong, died of tuberculosis. His wife and his nearly two-year-old daughter, Viola Louise Engel, Neil Armstrong's future mother, were at his bedside.[6]
  • In Las Cruces, New Mexico, Wayne Brazel was acquitted of the February 29, 1908, murder of Pat Garrett. The trial had begun on April 19, and the jury took 15 minutes to reach the verdict that Brazel, who fired his shot while Garrett was urinating, had acted in self-defense.[7]

May 5, 1909 (Wednesday)
  • A change in the electoral law of the German free state of Saxony took effect, providing for four different classes of voters. All taxpaying men, 25 or older, had one vote, and men with higher incomes had two, three or four votes. Men received an additional vote upon turning 50.[8]
  • Jackson County, Colorado, was created from the western section of Larimer County.[9]

May 6, 1909 (Thursday)
  • The U.S. Senate ratified a treaty that had been signed in December 1904, between the United States and Russia, providing legal recognition by each nation of the corporations of the other. Prior to the signing of the agreement, American business corporations had had no legal standing in the Russian Empire.[10]
  • Born: Loyd Sigmon, inventor of the "Sig Alert", in Stigler, Oklahoma (d. 2004)

May 7, 1909 (Friday)

May 8, 1909 (Saturday)
  • The comedy film cliché of "a pie in the face" was introduced with the release of Broncho Billy Anderson's 4-minute silent movie Mr. Flip, and the title character, played by Ben Turpin, being the first recipient for harassing a waitress. [13] [14] The act would be perfected in longer films on May 1, 1913, with Mack Sennett's That Ragtime Band,[15][16] with comedienne Mabel Normand being "pied" or throwing a pie. [17]
  • Herbert Lang and James P. Chapin set off on the ship SS Zeeland on the first project to catalog the plant and animal species of Central Africa. The Congo Expedition of the American Museum of Natural History would yield thousands of specimens.[18]
  • The town of Concrete, Washington, was incorporated as a merger of the communities of Baker (which had the Superior Portland Cement Company) and Cement City (which Washington Portland Cement Company).[19] The town was featured in the 1993 Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio film This Boy's Life.
  • The Bhawal case began when the Bhawal Sanyasi, kumar (prince) of the Bhawal Estate in Bengal, reportedly died at about 7 pm at the "Step aside" building in Darjeeling, where he had traveled for medical treatment. A body was cremated, and the controversy over whether the prince had actually died began. Ultimately, there would be three long court cases and, ultimately the Privy Council in London upheld the theory that the kumar Ramendranath Roy had not actually died, but had been in a coma and had ultimately been revived.[20]

May 9, 1909 (Sunday)
  • Japanese sugar plantation workers in Hawaii walked out on strike, after five months of trying to get wages comparable to those paid to Portuguese and Puerto Rican laborers for the same work. By June, 7,000 had walked off the job. After five months, the plantation owners relented and brought the Asian workers' pay up to par.[21]

May 10, 1909 (Monday)

May 11, 1909 (Tuesday)

May 12, 1909 (Wednesday)
  • Leopold Stokowski made his debut as a conductor, for the Colonne Orchestra in Paris.
  • In South Bethlehem, New York, at least twenty employees of the Callanan Road Improvement Company (including the company's vice-president) were killed by the premature explosion of 1,000 pounds (450 kg) of dynamite as they were preparing to shoot inside a quarry.[25]

May 13, 1909 (Thursday)
  • The first Giro d'Italia, Italy's premiere bicycle race, began at 2:53 in the morning in Milan with 127 starters. On May 30, Luigi Ganna was the first of the 49 remaining riders to return to Milan for the win.[26]
  • The British platinum producer Lonmin was incorporated as the London and Rhodesian Mining and Land Co., Ltd.[27]

May 14, 1909 (Friday)

May 15, 1909 (Saturday)
  • Saint Paulinus of Nola (354–431 AD) returned to his home in Nola, in Southern Italy, after nearly a millennium. His body had been at the Tiber Island in Rome since the 11th century. Paulinus was reinterred at the cathedral that had been dedicated there a week earlier.[29]
  • Born: James Mason, English-born film actor, in Huddersfield (d. 1984)

May 16, 1909 (Sunday)
  • Harper B. Lee, the first gringo (American-born) bullfighter, made his first appearance in Mexico City's Plaza el Toreo.[30]
  • A hailstorm in Uvalde County, Texas, caused major damage, but not as seriously as reported in some papers. The hailstones, some weighing as much as 6 pounds (2.7 kg), were heavy enough to kill several cows. A San Antonio paper reported that "Damage in the amount of at least $10,000 was done in Uvalde and five or six head of stock were killed," and added "The report that several Mexicans had been killed by hail stones is not correct."[31] Dispatches from Galveston greatly exaggerated the damage in the rest of the nation. The New York Times reported that the hailstones "are said to have measured nearly a foot and a half in circumference and ranged in weight from seven to ten pounds", and that "eight lives are reported lost, while the number of live stock killed is reported anywhere from 500 to 2,000 dead ... loss to crops and farm property will aggregate between $200,000 and $300,000. The hailstones piled up in some places four feet high."[32] The New York Herald said that the hailstones killed rancher James Carpenter "and seven Mexican hired men".[33]

May 17, 1909 (Monday)

May 18, 1909 (Tuesday)

May 19, 1909 (Wednesday)

May 20, 1909 (Thursday)

May 21, 1909 (Friday)
  • St. Cloud, Florida, created as a community for retired Union veterans of the American Civil War, received its first resident, Albert Hantsch of Chicago.[41] By 2009, the population of St. Cloud passed 25,000.
  • Born: Guy de Rothschild, French billionaire and banker, in Paris (d. 2007)

May 22, 1909 (Saturday)

May 23, 1909 (Sunday)

May 24, 1909 (Monday)

May 25, 1909 (Tuesday)
  • The Indian Councils Act of 1909 (9 Edw. VII, c.4) was given royal assent after passing the British parliament. For the first time, the legislative councils for the various provinces of British India would include members elected by the Indians themselves. Formerly, all members had been appointed by the Crown. Additional seats on the provincial executive councils were created, opening the way for more Indian officeholders. The Reforms of 1909 were the first step toward self-government in India.[46]
  • Died: Israel Greene, 85, who had led the United States Marines in the capture of abolitionist John Brown at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, on October 18, 1859, died at his farm near Mitchell, South Dakota.[47][48]

May 26, 1909 (Wednesday)

May 27, 1909 (Thursday)

May 28, 1909 (Friday)

May 29, 1909 (Saturday)
  • Augusto B. Leguía, the President of Peru, was briefly taken hostage during an attempted coup, but rescued by loyal troops.[53] The uprising had begun four days earlier when an anti-Chinese rally of the Workers' Party degenerated into a riot in Lima. As a concession to the rioters, President Leguia halted Chinese immigration to Peru, admitting only those immigrants who had at least 500 pounds sterling in resources.[54]
  • The first sale of an airplane to a non-military buyer took place when the G.H. Curtiss Manufacturing Co. delivered its Curtiss No. 1, nicknamed the Golden Flyer, to the New York Aeronautical Society to complete a $5,000 purchase.[55]

May 30, 1909 (Sunday)

May 31, 1909 (Monday)
  • The National Negro Conference, chaired by Charles Edward Russell and attended by 300 people, convened in New York City at the United Charities building, then moved for an afternoon session to Cooper Union with 1,500 attending.[58] From the meeting emerged the National Negro Committee, which would be renamed the following year as the NAACP. As one historian would later note, "The events at the conference set the tone for future race relations within the [NAACP] movement for decades to come."[59]
  • Born: Benny Goodman, American musician and 1940s pop star known as "The King of Swing", in Chicago (d. 1986)[60]

References
  1. Swancutt, Woodie (2000). El Curador. iUniverse. p. 246.
  2. "All San Francisco Welcomes Japanese". The New York Times. May 2, 1909. p. 1.
  3. Karen Lystra, Dangerous Intimacy: The Untold Story of Mark Twain's Final Years (University of California Press, 2004), p218
  4. Miles P. DuVal, Jr., And The Mountains Will Move (Stanford University Press, 1947), p304
  5. Rogner, Bud (2002). Tales of Delmarva and Other Places. iUniverse. p. 126.
  6. Hansen, James R. (April 2018). First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks. p. 13. ISBN 978-1-5011-5306-8.
  7. Walker, Dale L. (2006). The Calamity Papers: Western Myths and Cold Cases. Macmillan. pp. 189–191.
  8. W.F. Dodd, "Constitutional Developments in Foreign Countries During 1908 and 1908", The American Political Science Review (August 1910) pp339–340
  9. Joseph Nathan Kane, The American Counties (4th Ed.), (The Scarecrow Press, 1983), p480
  10. "Agreement with Russia", New York Times, May 7, 1909, p1
  11. Edmond Hugues de Ragnau, The Vatican: The Center of Government of the Catholic World (D. Appleton and company, 1913), p357
  12. Djordje Krstić and Janez Mayer, Mileva & Albert Einstein: Their Love and Scientific Collaboration (Didakta d.o.o. Radovljica, 2004), p238
  13. Michael Glover Smith, Flickering Empire: How Chicago Invented the U.S. Film Industry (Columbia University Press, 2015) p. 91
  14. "Mr. Flip", Progressive Silent Film List, by Carl Bennett (Silent Era Company, 1999)
  15. The Moving Picture World, May 3, 1913
  16. "A Muddy Romance"
  17. "A Very Brief History of Slapstick", ArtShtick.com
  18. "The Congo's First Thorough Biological Survey" (PDF). American Museum of Natural History.
  19. "Welcome to Concrete".
  20. Chatterjee, Partha, A Princely Imposter? The Strange And Universal History of the Kumar of Bhawal
  21. "1909 Plantation Strike", Japanese American History: An A-to-Z Reference from 1868 to the Present (Verlag für die Deutsche Wirtschaft AG, 1993), pp256–57
  22. D. Howell, "A history of the American Society for Clinical Investigation"
  23. "Banker%20desk%20lamp - Google Search".
  24. The lamps of H.G. McFaddin & Co. Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office, 1909
  25. "Blast In A Quarry Kills Twenty Men". The New York Times. May 13, 1909. p. 1.
  26. William Fotheringham, A Century of Cycling: The Classic Races and Legendary Champions (MBI Publishing Company, 2003), p104
  27. Melvin E. Page, ed., Colonialism: An International, Social, Cultural, and Political Encyclopedia (ABC-CLIO, 2003) pp350–351
  28. Schwieterman, Joseph P. (2004). When the Railroad Leaves Town: American Communities in the Age of Rail Line Abandonment, Western United States. Kirksville, Missouri: Truman State University Press. pp. 166–167. ISBN 978-1-931112-13-0.
  29. Dennis E. Trout, Paulinus of Nola: Life, Letters, and Poems (University of California Press, 1999), p267
  30. Sherwood, Lyn; Conrad, Barnaby (2008). Yankees in the Afternoon: An Illustrated History of American Bullfighters. McFarland. p. 50.
  31. "Hail Stones at Uvalde Weighed Six Pounds". San Antonio Light. May 18, 1909. p. 1.
  32. "Deadly Texas Hailstones". The New York Times. May 19, 1909. p. 1.
  33. "Texas Hailstones Kill Eight Persons; Fell Like Cannon Balls and Weighed 6 and 7 Pounds". Gettysburg Times. May 20, 1909. p. 3.
  34. Miller Center of Public Affairs Archived 2009-07-30 at the Wayback Machine
  35. Jeffrey Stein, "Bringing Architecture to Light: The Pioneering Work of William Atkinson" Archived 2008-05-09 at the Wayback Machine
  36. Satyavan Sharma and Nitya Anand, Approaches to Design and Synthesis of Antiparasitic Drugs (Elsevier, 1997), pp439–440
  37. David H. Shinn and Thomas P. Ofcansky, Historical Dictionary of Ethiopia (Scarecrow Press, 2004), p279
  38. Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000), pp25–26
  39. John T. Bethell, Harvard Observed: An Illustrated History of the University in the Twentieth Century (Harvard University Press, 1998), pp42–45
  40. "Clement Mary Hofbauer", The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 4 (Encyclopedia Press, 1913), pp44–45
  41. Jim Robison and Robert A. Fisk, Images of America: St. Cloud (Arcadia Publishing, 2002), p62
  42. Gorton Carruth, et al., The Encyclopedia of American Facts and Dates (Thomas Y. Crowell, 1962) p416
  43. Simon Popple and Joe Kember, Early Cinema: From Factory Gate to Dream Factory (Wallflower Press, 2004) p56
  44. Solomon Volkov, St. Petersburg: A Cultural History (translator Antonina W. Bouis) (Simon & Schuster, 1997) p216
  45. "The European Day of Parks", Europarc-nb.org
  46. Courtenay Peregrine Ilbert, The Government of India (1910, reprinted by BiblioBazaar, LLC, 2008), p410
  47. "John Brown's Captor Dead". The New York Times. May 27, 1909. p. 1.
  48. Sumner, Dale Lee (2008). "The Capture of John Brown". The Forgotten Marines. Lulu.com. p. U.
  49. "Minoru Wins Derby; Sir Martin Falls", New York Times, May 27, 1909, p1
  50. "Meteor Drops in Texas", New York Times, May 29, 1909, p1
  51. "The IISc stamp on science research", by B. S. Warrier, The Hindu (Chennai), January 30, 2012
  52. Bill Mallon, with Ian Buchanan, Historical Dictionary of the Olympic Movement (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), pxlii
  53. "Peruvian Rebels Seize President", New York Times, May 30, 1909, p1
  54. Adam McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900–1936 (University of Chicago Press, 2001), p45
  55. F. Robert Van der Linden, Best of the National Air and Space Museum (HarperCollins, 2006), p42
  56. Minor, Robert Neil (1999). The Religious, the Spiritual, and the Secular: Auroville and Secular India. SUNY Press. p. 21.
  57. "Zeppelin Flies Over 24 Hours". The New York Times. May 31, 1909. p. 1.
  58. Miraldi, Robert (2003). The Pen is Mightier: The Muckraking Life of Charles Edward Russell. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 167.
  59. Reed, Christopher Robert (1997). The Chicago NAACP and the Rise of Black Professional Leadership, 1910–1966. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. pp. 17–18. ISBN 9780253333131.
  60. Sweet Home Cook County (PDF). Cook County Clerk. p. 8. Archived from the original (PDF) on 28 May 2016. Retrieved 31 May 2023.
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