May 17, 1909: U.S. First Lady Nellie Taft suffers strokeMay 7, 1909: University of Zurich offers patent inspector Albert Einstein full-time job as a professorMay 12, 1909: Leopold Stokowski makes debut as conductorMay 13, 1909: Luigi Ganna wins the first Giro d'Italia
Tens of thousands of California residents turned out atSan Francisco to greet the visiting Japanese shipsIJNAso andSoya, which had been captured from Russia during the Russo-Japanese War of 1905.[2]
Mark Twain began work on the "Ashcroft-Lyon" manuscript, never published, three weeks after firing his secretary,Isabel Lyon, who had married Ralph Ashcroft.[3]
ThePreakness 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]
InLas Cruces, New Mexico, Wayne Brazel was acquitted of the February 29, 1908, murder ofPat 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]
A change in the electoral law of theGerman free state ofSaxony 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]
TheU.S. Senate ratified atreaty 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]
Albert Einstein was invited by the University of Zurich to accept the newly created chair in Theoretical Physics. He accepted, giving up his job at the patent office in Bern.[12]
The town ofConcrete, 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 1993Robert De Niro andLeonardo DiCaprio filmThis Boy's Life.
TheBhawal case began when the Bhawal Sanyasi, kumar (prince) of the Bhawal Estate in Bengal, reportedly died at about7 pm at the "Step aside" building inDarjeeling, 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]
Japanesesugar plantation workers inHawaii 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]
TheAmerican Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI) was founded by fifteen physicians who gathered at the New Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., to identify and honor outstanding physicians engaged in biomedical research.[22]
Leopold Stokowski made his debut as a conductor, for the Colonne Orchestra in Paris.
InSouth 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]
The firstGiro 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 Britishplatinum producerLonmin was incorporated as the London and Rhodesian Mining and Land Co., Ltd.[27]
SaintPaulinus of Nola (354–431 AD) returned to his home inNola, in Southern Italy, after nearly a millennium. His body had been at theTiber Island in Rome since the 11th century. Paulinus was reinterred at the cathedral that had been dedicated there a week earlier.[29]
A hailstorm inUvalde 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] TheNew York Herald said that the hailstones killed rancher James Carpenter "and seven Mexican hired men".[33]
First LadyNellie Taft, wife of U.S. President William Taft, suffered a stroke while at theWhite House, impairing her speech abilities. She recovered after one year.[34]
In Germany, patent No. 226,239 was awarded to Heinrich Hoerlein of theBayer company for asulfanilamide, the first synthesizedsulfonamide. It was not until 1935 that the antibiotic properties of sulfonamides were realized, and the firstsulfa drugs created.[36]
Menelik II,Emperor of Ethiopia, resolved the question of who would succeed him, selecting his 14-year-old grandsonLij Iyasu as the heir apparent.Iyasu V reigned from 1913 to 1916, but was deposed in favor of Menelik's daughterZauditu.[37]
Born:Fred Perry, English tennis player (No. 1 ranked 1934–38), inStockport (d. 1995)
A. Lawrence Lowell succeededCharles William Eliot asPresident of Harvard University. In his 24 years, Lowell reformed the degree requirements to introduce the concept of selecting anacademic major as a primary field of study, saying "The best type of liberal education in our complex modern world aims at producing men who know a little of everything and something well."[39]
Born: SirNicholas Winton, British who rescued more than 600 Czechoslovak children in World War II (d. 2015)
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.
Nearly 700,000 acres (roughly 1,100 square miles or 2,800 square kilometers) of federally owned land inWashington,Montana andIdaho were opened for settlement by executive order of U.S. PresidentWilliam Howard Taft.[42]
The Daily Bioscope theatre opened, introducing the British public tonewsreels, the first showing of filmed news stories.[43]
The equestrian statue ofTsar Alexander III astride a horse, sculpted byPaolo Troubetzkoy, was unveiled inSt. Petersburg atZnamenskaya Square. After St. Petersburg was renamedLeningrad in 1924, the unpopular memorial was moved in 1937 to the backyard of the city museum. In 1994, with the city again called St. Petersburg, the statue was again moved, and placed in front of one of theMarble Palace.[44]
TheIndian 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 ofBritish 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]
Augusto B. Leguía, thePresident 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]
TheNational Negro Conference, chaired byCharles Edward Russell and attended by 300 people, convened inNew 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 theNational Negro Committee, which would be renamed the following year as theNAACP. 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", inChicago (d. 1986)[60]
^Chatterjee, Partha,A Princely Imposter? The Strange And Universal History of the Kumar of Bhawal
^"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
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