sited Puerto Rico then went on to Panama to see how the construction of the Panama Canal was progressing.
9/10/1906. Death of Joseph Glidden in the USA; he invented barbed wire.
29/6/1906, US Congress passed a Bill creating the Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado.
22/6/1906, US President Roosevelt sued John D Rockerfeller’s Standard Oil Company for operating a monopoly.
24/12/1905. The US industrialist Howard Hughes was born.
19/6/1905. The world’s first all motion picture cinema opened in Pittsburgh. For 10 cents admission there was a film, Poor But Honest, followed by The Baffled Burglar, accompanied by a melody on the harp by Madame Durocher.
23/2/1905, The Rotary Club was founded by Paul Harris and others, in offices in Dearborn, Chicago.
18/2/1905, Jay Cooke, US financier, died (born 10/8/1821).
10/2/1905. The state of Wisconsin passed a tax on bachelors aged over 30.
1904, The US Forestry Service was created, out of the Department of Agriculture, by President Roosevelt.
1/12/1904, The Great World Fair, at St Louis, USA, closed, having had millions of visitors from all over the world.
4/10/1904, Death of French sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, designer of the Statue of Liberty.
1/8/1904. Birth of American jazzman Count Basie.
4/7/1904. Work began on the 40 mile-long Panama Canal. It opened on 15/8/1914.
2/5/1904. Bing Crosby was born in Tacoma, Washington, as Harry Lillis Crosby.
30/4/1904, The St Louis Exhibition opened.
22/4/1904. Robert Oppenheimer, American scientist who developed the US atomic bomb at Los Alamos, was born in New York City.
22/3/1904. In the USA, the Daily Illustrated Mirror carried the world’s first colour picture in a newspaper.
1/3/1904, Glenn Miller, American trombonist, was born in Clarinda, Indiana.
7/2/1904. A major fire destroyed much of the centre of Baltimore, Maryland, USA.
18/11/1903, Panama granted the canal strip to US, by treaty ratified on 26/2/1904.
3/11/1903. Panama revolted and declared itself independent from Colombia. On 6/11/1903 the US recognised Panamanian independence. On 12/8/1903 the Colombian Senate had rejected US plans for a canal at Panama. On 18/11/1903 the US and Panama signed a treaty to build the Canal. See 22/1/1903. On 2/11/1903 the US sent three warships to Panama.
21/9/1903. The first Wild West movie, Kit Carson, opened in the USA. It was 21 minutes long.
12/8/1903, The Colombian Senate rejected US plans for a Canal at Panama, see 3/11/1903.
4/7/1903, President Roosevelt of the USA inaugurated the Pacific Communications Cable with a global message.
21/3/1903, In the US, the grievances that caused the 1902 miners’ strike were resolved with a 10% pay rise and shorter working day, The mine owners, however, refused to recognise the United Mine Workers Union.
14/3/1903. The US Senate ratified construction of the Panama Canal.
3/3/1903. The USA passed a bill to limit immigration and ban ‘undesirables’.
15/2/1903, The first teddy bear was sold from Michtom’s candy store, New York. The origin of teddy bears was that in 1902 on a hunting trip by President Theodore Roosevelt, his assistants tied a bear to a tree so he could shoot it; Roosevelt refused such unsporting conduct and set the bear free instead.
22/1/1903. The USA and Colombia signed a treaty to allow construction of the Panama Canal. See 3/11/1903.
1902, (see also Prisons) Death of John Peter Atgeld (born 1847), who was a prison reformer ahead of his time. A German-born lawyer in Chicago, he was concerned about how the poor found it difficult to access justice. He was elected Governor of Illinois in 1892 and succeeded in passing laws regulating child labour and loosening the monopolies enjoyed by railways and tramways companies. He pardoned three anarchists imprisoned since 1886, and condemned President Cleveland for sending in troops to disrupt a railway strike. However he was then vilified by the press as a ‘Illinois Jacobin’ and was defeated when seeking re-election in 1896.
31/12/1902, In a test of the Monroe doctrine, British and German naval ships seized the Venezuelan navy and shelled a fort in C