1885
Berlin Conference Partitions Africa
Fourteen European powers, having spent three months in a Berlin conference hall, signed the General Act dividing Africa among themselves with rulers and colored pencils. No African was present. Borders cut through kingdoms, languages, and peoples with geometric indifference. The scramble for Africa had been made official, tidy, and catastrophic.
Indian National Congress Founded
Seventy-two delegates - lawyers, teachers, merchants, mostly English-educated - met in Bombay to form the Indian National Congress. They intended a loyal consultative body; they would become, under Gandhi forty years later, the most important mass political movement of the twentieth century and the builders of modern India. Their early petitions were polite and ignored, but the organizational framework they laid would prove indispensable when the struggle turned serious.
Benz's Motorwagen
In Mannheim, Karl Benz built a three-wheeled vehicle powered by a small internal-combustion engine of his own design - the first true automobile. His wife Bertha would drive it ninety kilometers to visit her mother two years later, stopping at pharmacies for petrol. Horsepower was on its way to being metaphor.
Riel Rebellion Crushed
After two months of fighting on the Canadian prairie, Metis and Cree forces under Louis Riel were defeated at Batoche. Riel surrendered, was tried in Regina, and hanged in November. He became a martyr in Quebec and among Canadian native peoples, and a crack in Canadian national identity that has never quite closed.
Fall of Khartoum
After a ten-month siege, the Mahdist army broke into Khartoum. Major-General Charles Gordon was killed on the steps of the governor's palace, reportedly while holding a pistol in one hand and a cigarette in the other. A relief column arrived two days too late. Gladstone's government never recovered from the public outrage.
Pasteur's Rabies Vaccine
A nine-year-old Alsatian boy bitten fourteen times by a rabid dog was brought to Pasteur's Paris laboratory. Over ten days Pasteur injected progressively stronger extracts of dried rabbit spinal cord. The boy lived. It was the first successful human vaccination against a viral disease, and the beginning of the Pasteur Institutes.
Canadian Pacific Completed
A last spike was driven at Craigellachie, British Columbia, joining the Canadian Pacific Railway into a single continental line. Canada, stretched thin across four thousand miles, now had an iron thread. It had been John A. Macdonald's condition for bringing British Columbia into the confederation, and he had delivered it.