1887
Hertz Detects Radio Waves
In a Karlsruhe laboratory, Heinrich Hertz generated and detected the electromagnetic waves Maxwell had predicted on paper a quarter-century before. A spark at one end of his room produced a spark at the other. Asked what use it was, Hertz said: none. A decade later Marconi would find one. Hertz died at thirty-six, never knowing that his discovery would become the foundation of radio, television, and wireless communication.
Dawes Act
The Dawes Severalty Act broke up tribally held American Indian lands and allotted them to individuals, with the 'surplus' sold to white settlers. Over the next forty years it cost the tribes two-thirds of their remaining land. Its authors considered it reform. Its victims remember it, rightly, as theft. The act was not repealed until the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 reversed course under Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.
Reinsurance Treaty
In a last desperate piece of Bismarckian juggling, Germany secretly agreed with Russia that each would stay neutral in most wars the other got into. It was incompatible with the Austro-German alliance and only Bismarck could have signed both treaties at once. His successors, in 1890, let the Reinsurance Treaty lapse - and Russia drifted toward France.
Victoria's Golden Jubilee
The Queen-Empress celebrated fifty years on the throne with a procession through London attended by kings, princes, maharajas, and plenipotentiaries from every corner of her empire. She wore black, as she had since Albert's death in 1861. The empire on which the sun did not set stood, that summer, at its most self-satisfied.