Media History Project
mediahst@umn.edu

1890-1899

  • 1890: Herman Hollerith counts the U.S. population with punch cards.
  • 1890: A.B. Dick markets the mimeograph.
  • 1890: William James’ Principles of Psychology moves the field toward science.
  • 1890: Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov complete Borodin’s opera, Prince Igor.
  • 1890: Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is serialized in Lippincott’s Magazine.
  • 1890: Typewriters are in common use in offices.
  • 1890: The $1 Brownie camera; film is 15 cents a roll.
  • 1890: In Germany, Ferdinand Braun invents the cathode ray tube.
  • 1890: James Frazer’s The Golden Bough draws parallels between myth and Christianity.
  • 1890: First juke box: coin-operated cylinder phonograph with 4 listening tubes.
  • 1890: In England, Friese-Greene builds the kinematograph camera and projector.
  • 1890: In France, Branly’s coherer conducts radio waves.
  • 1890: How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis alerts public to life in city slums.
  • 1890: Tchaikovsky’s ballet, Sleeping Beauty.
  • 1890: Emily Dickinson’s first book of Poems.
  • 1890: Pietro Mascagni’s opera Cavalleria rusticana.
  • 1890: In Paris, Theatrophone subscribers can hear live performances by phone.
  • 1891: Diazotype put photographs onto fabric.
  • 1891: Large press prints and folds 90,000 4-page papers an hour.
  • 1891: Telephoto lens is attached to the camera.
  • 1891: Guy de Maupassant goes insane after writing novels, plays, 300 short stories.
  • 1891: An international agreement on copyright.
  • 1891: J. Walter Thompson, first advertising account executive.
  • 1891: Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
  • 1891: A mortician, Almon Strowger, develops automatic phone switching exchange.
  • 1891: Edvard Grieg writes two suites for Ibsen’s play, Peer Gynt.
  • 1891: Photographers can load camera film in daylight, not just in a darkroom.
  • 1891: Impressionist Claude Monet, Haystacks.
  • 1891: Herman Melville writes the tragic novel Billy Budd, unpublished until 1924.
  • 1891: Ibsen’s play, Hedda Gabler.
  • 1891: American Express issues travelers cheques.
  • 1891: The first international phone call via submarine cable, London - Paris.
  • 1891: Founding of precursor to the Outdoor Advertising Association of America.
  • 1892: Sears mails 8,000 postcards with imitation handwriting; gets 2,000 orders.
  • 1892: Edison and Dickson construct the peep-show Kinetoscope, 46 frames per second.
  • 1892: Parker Pen Company begins business, based on patent for a new fountain pen.
  • 1892: 4-color rotary press.
  • 1892: Frederick Ives invents natural color photographic system.
  • 1892: Artist Mary Cassatt, The Bath.
  • 1892: Wilde’s play, Lady Windermere’s Fan, is a success.
  • 1892: Portable typewriters.
  • 1892: Paul Cézanne paints The Card Players.
  • 1892: Invented in Iowa, the Addressograph enters the office.
  • 1892: Tchaikovsky’s ballet, The Nutcracker.
  • 1892: Ruggiero Leoncavallo’s opera Pagliacci.
  • 1892: Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads are published.
  • 1892: Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories published as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
  • 1892: Automatic telephone switchboard comes into service.
  • 1892: Chicago editor’s “Who or what? How? When? Where?” advice is 5W start.
  • 1892: The Ladies’ Home Journal decides to refuse ads for patent medicine.
  • 1893: Dickson builds a motion picture studio in New Jersey.
  • 1893: In Budapest, Telefon Hirmondo, pre-broadcast news and entertainment.
  • 1893: Finnish composer Jean Sibelius writes The Swan of Tuonela.
  • 1893: From France, first color photo of a living person.
  • 1893: Jacob Riis’ Children of the Poor shakes complacent New Yorkers.
  • 1893: Coca Cola is registered as a trademark by a pharmacist in Atlanta.
  • 1893: Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, The Scream.
  • 1893: Magazine circulation war creates mass national readership in the U.S.
  • 1893: Dickson’s Kinetograph camera uses perforated film to sync with shutter.
  • 1893: Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel, David Balfour.
  • 1893: Dvorak’s final Symphony No. 9, From the New World.
  • 1893: On a Paris stage, the striptease.
  • 1893: Brazilian priest Landell de Moura allegedly invents voiced radio.
  • 1893: Englebert Humperdinck’s opera, Hansel and Gretel.
  • 1893: Tchaikovsky conducts premiere of Sixth Symphony (Pathetique).
  • 1893: Antonin Dvorák’s Fifth Symphony in E Minor (The New World).
  • 1894: Emile Berliner sells 1,000 gramophones, 25,000 records.
  • 1894: Kipling’s The Jungle Book.
  • 1894: In New York City, Edison opens a Kinetoscope movie parlor.
  • 1894: Wilde succeeds again with another play, The Importance of Being Earnest.
  • 1894: The word “spaceship” appears in print.
  • 1894: English satirist Max Beerbohm writes letters in the style of Oscar Wilde.
  • 1894: George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man.
  • 1894: Claude Debussy’s Prelude to Afternoon of a Fawn.
  • 1895: E.A. Wallace Budge translates Egyptian Book of the Dead, Papyrus of Ani.
  • 1895: Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage.
  • 1895: Single-lens reflex cameras are popular, but expensive.
  • 1895: Frederic Remington’s sculpture, Bronco Buster.
  • 1895: France’s Lumière brothers’ portable movie camera can also print, project films.
  • 1895: In Italy, teenager Guglielmo Marconi sends a radio signal more than a mile.
  • 1895: Richard Strauss, Til Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, Thus Spake Zarathustra.
  • 1895: In Berlin, Max and Emil Skladanowsky show a 15-minute motion picture.
  • 1895: In a Paris cellar, a paying audience sees Lumière’s motion pictures projected.
  • 1895: In Louisville, Ben Harney introduces ragtime music.
  • 1895: Vitascope adds intermittent motion loop to movie projector.
  • 1895: Artist Francis Barraud paints His Master’s Voice, with Nipper listening.
  • 1895: Hearst takes over the New York Morning Journal.
  • 1895: In England, Friese-Greene invents phototypesetting.
  • 1895: William Butler Yeats, lyrical Irish poet, publishes The Lake Isle of Innisfree.
  • 1895: Gustav Mahler’s Second Symphony.
  • 1895: Thomas Hardy’s novel, Jude the Obscure.
  • 1895: Dial telephones go into Milwaukee’s city hall.
  • 1896: Adolph Ochs buys dying New York Times, begins path to greatness.
  • 1896: To date, 450,000 typewriters have been manufactured.
  • 1896: Underwood model permits typists to see what they are typing.
  • 1896: John Philip Sousa pens Stars and Stripes Forever.
  • 1896: The Monotype sets type by machine in single characters.
  • 1896: In London, the Daily Mail begins publishing.
  • 1896: Hilaire Belloc’s The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts.
  • 1896: Giacomo Puccini’s opera, La Bohème.
  • 1896: Edison short film, The Kiss, called immoral by critics.
  • 1896: Maryland enacts first shield law for journalists.
  • 1896: Alfred Nobel creates the Nobel Prize.
  • 1896: The film company Gaumont is founded.
  • 1896: Electric power is used to run a paper mill.
  • 1896: Edison Vitascope, designed by Thomas Armat, brings film projection to U.S.
  • 1896: Edison’s Kinetoscope comes to Japan.
  • 1896: The first comic strip, The Yellow Kid, in the New York American.
  • 1896: In Britain, the motion picture projector is manufactured.
  • 1896: Trading stamps.
  • 1896: Hollerith founds the Tabulating Machine Co. It will become IBM in 1924.
  • 1896: X-ray photography.
  • 1896: Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking School Cookbook.
  • 1896: An estimated 150,000 typewriters are in use in the U.S.
  • 1896: Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull barely survives disastrous opening night.
  • 1896: Rural free delivery (RFD) is inaugurated in the United States.
  • 1896: Hard resinous shellac phonograph disks replace hard rubber.
  • 1896: Nikola Tesla invents a spark radio transmitter.
  • 1896: Theodor Herzl, Der Judenstaat, begins Zionist movement.
  • 1896: English poet A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad.
  • 1896: Turned down by Italy, Guglielmo Marconi takes radio gear to England.
  • 1897: Newspaper comic strips are collected and sold, precursor to comic books.
  • 1897: The term “public relations” is used in book, Year Book of Railway Literature.
  • 1897: In England the Marconi Company is set up for wireless telegraphy business.
  • 1897: In Germany, Braun improves the Crookes’ tube with fluorescence.
  • 1897: Eldridge Johnson patents an improved, inexpensive disk gramophone.
  • 1897: Music record sales grow; mostly classical and Tin Pan Alley songs.
  • 1897: In England, postmen deliver mail to every home.
  • 1897: Edison patents a movie projector.
  • 1897: The Katzenjammer Kids begin cartoon antics.
  • 1897: Bram Stoker’s horror novel, Dracula.
  • 1897: Fire kills 125 people watching a motion picture in a Paris theater.
  • 1897: Cyrano de Bergerac, a play by Edmond Rostand.
  • 1897: A new book publishing firm starts, Doubleday.
  • 1897: General Electric creates a publicity department.
  • 1897: Kipling’s Captains Courageous.
  • 1897: Paul Gaugin in Tahiti paints Nevermore.
  • 1897: World’s first cinema, just for films, is built in Paris.
  • 1898: Lumière boasts a catalogue of more than one thousand short films.
  • 1898: Newspapers, led by Hearst and Pulitzer, help push U.S. into war with Spain.
  • 1898: Émile Zola’s article “J’Accuse” shakes France.
  • 1898: H.G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds brings the Martians.
  • 1898: Rodin sculpts The Kiss.
  • 1898: Peking University is founded.
  • 1898: Henry James’ short novel, The Turn of the Screw.
  • 1898: Photographs taken by artificial light.
  • 1898: A loudspeaker is invented.
  • 1898: Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible urges suffragist cause.
  • 1898: New York State passes a law against misleading advertising.
  • 1898: Oscar Wilde, out of prison, writes The Ballad of Reading Gaol.
  • 1898: Sound is recorded magnetically on wire by Valdemar Poulsen of Denmark.
  • 1898: Notre Dame professor sends a wireless telegraph message for one mile.
  • 1898: World total of working telegraph wire: almost three million miles.
  • 1899: California passes law to regulate political cartoons.
  • 1899: Magnetic sound recording.
  • 1899: Western Union boasts nearly one million miles of wire, 22,285 offices.
  • 1899: Marconi radio gear installed in British warships, signals across English Channel.
  • 1899: Economist Thorsten Veblen coins the term “conspicuous consumption.”
  • 1899: American Marconi Company incorporated; forerunner of RCA.
  • 1899: Nathan Stubblefield claims to transmit voice by radio, but he will die in poverty.
  • 1899: Edward Elgar composes The Enigma Variations.
  • 1899: Telephone company reorganizes; AT&T takes over parent American Bell.
  • 1899: Debussy composes Nocturnes.
  • 1899: Scott Joplin popularizes ragtime music; starts the first dance craze.
  • 1899: Cakewalk dance is popular, grows out of black slave ridicule of white dancing.
  • 1899: The first Japanese-made film.