1880
Pasteur's Chicken Cholera Vaccine
In his Paris laboratory, Louis Pasteur discovered, half by accident, that an attenuated culture of chicken cholera could be used to immunize birds against the full-strength disease. It was the foundation of vaccination as a general scientific technique, to be extended in the following years to anthrax, rabies, and much more.
Battle of Maiwand
In the dust of southern Afghanistan, Ayub Khan's forces annihilated a British-Indian brigade that had advanced too far. Nine hundred and seventy men died, including most of the 66th Regiment around their colours. A mullah's daughter named Malalai waved her veil as a flag and became a national heroine. The British would take vengeance at Kandahar a month later.
First Boer War Prelude
Afrikaner farmers in the Transvaal, annexed by the British three years before, began refusing to pay taxes. By December they would declare a republic and defeat a British force at Bronkhorstspruit. The war would be short and humiliating; Gladstone would agree to Transvaal independence the next year. Britain would try again in 1899.
Los Angeles Gets a Railroad
The Southern Pacific completed a line to Los Angeles, ending the city's isolation and triggering a land boom that doubled the population in five years. Citrus groves replaced cattle ranches. The peculiar American engine - railroads, real-estate speculation, and reinvented geography - was about to produce the twentieth century's strangest metropolis.