1882
Koch Finds TB Bacillus
At a meeting of the Berlin Physiological Society, Robert Koch presented his isolation of Mycobacterium tuberculosis - the bacterium responsible for the century's deadliest disease. The audience was stunned; the announcement was one of the great moments in medicine. Germ theory had found the cause of tuberculosis, and the slow search for a cure could begin.
Britain Occupies Egypt
After bombarding Alexandria and defeating Urabi Pasha's nationalist army at Tel el-Kebir, British forces installed themselves as the effective rulers of Egypt behind a fiction of Ottoman sovereignty and a khedive who did what he was told. The "temporary" occupation would last seventy years. The Suez Canal had become a British lake.
Chinese Exclusion Act
Congress, responding to West Coast nativism, suspended Chinese labor immigration for ten years and barred Chinese already in the country from becoming citizens. It was the first American immigration law aimed at a specific nationality. The ban would be extended and tightened and not fully repealed until 1943. The act established the precedent that the federal government could exclude immigrants by race, a principle that shaped policy for decades.
Triple Alliance
Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy signed a secret defensive treaty pledging mutual support if any were attacked by France or Russia. Bismarck's alliance system was snapping into shape. It would hold, with grumbling Italian ambivalence, until 1915 - when Italy switched sides and made the Great War one state messier. The alliance divided Europe into armed camps and made a localized conflict nearly impossible, ensuring that any war would be continental.
Phoenix Park Murders
Two newly arrived British officials - the Chief Secretary for Ireland and his Under-Secretary - were stabbed to death in Dublin's Phoenix Park by a small Irish Republican group called the Invincibles. Gladstone, horrified, abandoned an attempt at Irish conciliation. The murders set back Home Rule by a decade, and made nineteenth-century Ireland feel even more like a wound.