1897
First Zionist Congress
Two hundred delegates met in the Basel casino under Herzl's presidency and adopted the Basel Program: to establish a home for the Jewish people in Palestine secured by public law. "At Basel," Herzl wrote in his diary, "I founded the Jewish state." It would take fifty-one years, and most of the Jews of Europe would not see it.
Ross Links Mosquito and Malaria
In a Secunderabad laboratory, army surgeon Ronald Ross dissected a mosquito that had fed on a malaria patient and found the parasite's oocysts in its gut wall. He had identified the vector of the world's deadliest disease. The tropics had just become, in principle, conquerable - and a Nobel Prize was on the way.
Klondike Gold Rush
The steamer Excelsior docked in San Francisco with gold miners carrying sacks of yellow dust from the Klondike. Within weeks, a hundred thousand people would be clambering toward the Yukon over the Chilkoot Pass. Most would find nothing. Jack London would find the material for his career. The last great gold rush of the century had begun.
J.J. Thomson's Electron
At the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, J. J. Thomson demonstrated that cathode rays were streams of particles a thousand times lighter than hydrogen atoms - the first subatomic particle. The atom, supposedly indivisible, had an inside. Physics had just taken the first step into the strange country of the twentieth century.
Victoria's Diamond Jubilee
Sixty years on the throne were marked by a procession through London attended by troops from every British colony - Sikh cavalry, Australian mounted infantry, Canadian Mounties, Jamaican West Indians, Hausa from Nigeria. Kipling wrote "Recessional" to temper the triumphalism. It was the imperial century's high-water moment, visible even to itself.
Dracula Published
Bram Stoker's Gothic novel about a Transylvanian count who preys on London matrons appeared to mixed reviews. It drew on Eastern European folklore, Victorian anxieties about sex and blood, and the new technologies of telegraphs and phonographs. The novel would outlive its century and the count, curiously enough, would outlive the novel.