10 things that happened in 1883

Awesome! February 28th. B.F Keith opened the first one. He was an interesting fella. He joined a circus in his early 20's. He eventually joined the P.T. Barnum Circus. He went on to own and operate many vaudeville theaters in the USA and put his own original spin on them.

May 24th. The Brooklyn Bridge opens to traffic. A German immigrant John Roebling designed the original proposal for the bridge. He died and his 32 yr old son Washington took over. His mother, John Roeblings wife, also assists in the new designs of the bridge. I love seeing women in the late 1900s being recognized for their contributions.

6 days later there is a stampede on the bridge because people are afraid it's going to fall apart. 12 people are crushed in the stampede.

I guess there was once thousands of different time zones. This condensed it to 5.The zones were: Intercolonial, Eastern, Central, Mountain and Pacific. All major cities adopted the time change except for .... DETROIT! lol. Of course we didn't adopt it. They changed in 1900 to central and then in 1915 to Eastern. Crazy. I want to know more about this story.

It is the third of the three big societies at Yale. The first Skull and Bones was founded in 1832 after a dispute over Phi Beta Kappa awards. Scroll and Key was established in 1841 after disputes over Skull and Bone selections. Wolf's Head was established by 300 Yale Alumni, Students and Yale Law Faculty because they believed the other two societies had too much involvement in undergraduate affairs.

Bernard was 23 and the 5th of 10 children to German Immigrants. He took his savings $372 which equals about $10,00 in 2020 (my guess is 15k in 2022) and invested in a grocery store in downtown Cincinatti.

His motto was "Be Particular. Never Sell Anything You Would Not Want Yourself." I love this especially after seeing the The Food That Built America Documentary on Hulu. Food in the late 1880's was nasty.

I kind of only want to buy food from Kroger now. I also want to see a documentary about Bernard!

He was a cartoonist. His named Rube Goldberg appeared in the Random House Dictionary of the English Language. It meant "having a fantastically complicated improvised appearance" or "deviously complex and impractical". I would love to do more research on this but I have 10 kids waking up in 15-20 minutes.

It was independently published for the first 53 years until 1936. It was created by John Ames Mitchell and Andrew Miller. It was originally more like The New Yorker than what LIFE magazine became. John Ames Mitchell was educated at Harvard as an Architect. Andrew Miller graduated from Harvard where he was classmates with Theodore Roosevelt. The two men died within a year of each other. I would also like to see this movie.

It was originally published as a serial in an Italian Children's Weekly Magazine. It is the world's 3rd most translated book. The phrase "burst into laughter" became popular from the book.

Some entertainers visited a hall in Sunderland, England. At the end of the performance the entertainers told the children they would be given free toys. 1,100 children 3-14 years old surged to the area that the free toys were being distributed. There was not enough room and 183 children were crushed to death due to compressive asphyxia.

Push bar emergency exit doors were invented because of the disaster. There is also a requirement that there must be a certain number of outward opening exit doors in indoor establishments.

This makes me think of the most recent disaster in Itaewon, South Korea. Only 5 years ago I spent almost every other weekend in Itaewon. I know those alley ways and I know Korean culture. The country is going to be healing from that for a long time.

In 1903 it was the first magazine to reach 1 million subscribers. Louisa Knapp Curtis was the editor. She was the wife of the publisher. She met her husband while singing in a concert to celebrate the end of the civil war. Her husband was the original editor and he had just taken articles from other magazines and surrounded it with advertisements directed towards ladies. She wrote original content directed towards ladies and it was a huge hit.

Louisa convinced her husband she could do a better job. It was originally a supplement to a Tribune and Farmer Weekly Newspaper. It was so popular they ended up turning it into a 32 page magazine with a cover.