1880s

The 1880s (pronounced "eighteen-eighties") was a decade of the Gregorian calendar that began on January 1, 1880, and ended on December 31, 1889.

The period was characterized in general by economic growth and prosperity in many parts of the world, especially Europe and the Americas, with the emergence of modern cities signified by the foundation of many long-lived corporations, franchises, and brands and the introduction of the skyscraper. The decade was a part of the Gilded Age (1874–1907) in the United States and the Victorian Era in the British Empire. It also occurred at the height of the Second Industrial Revolution and saw numerous developments in science and a sudden proliferation of electrical technologies, particularly in mass transit and telecommunications.

Politics and wars

Wars

* Aceh War (1873–1904)
* War of the Pacific (1879–1884)
* First Boer War (1880–1881)
* Mahdist War (1881–1899)
* 1882 Anglo-Egyptian War (1882)
** 13 September 1882 — British troops occupy Cairo, and Egypt becomes a British protectorate.
* Sino-French War (1884–1885)
* Serbo-Bulgarian War (1885)

Internal conflicts

* American Indian Wars (Intermittently from 1622 to 1918)
** 20 July 1881 — Sioux chief Sitting Bull leads the last of his fugitive people in surrender to United States troops at Fort Buford in Montana.
* Frequent lynchings of African Americans in Southern United States during the years 1880–1890

Colonization

* France colonizes Indochina (1883)
* German colonization (1887)
* Increasing colonial interest and conquest in Africa leads representatives from Britain, France, Portugal, Germany, Belgium, Italy and Spain to divide Africa into regions of colonial influence at the Berlin Conference. This would be followed over the next few decades by conquest of almost the entirety of the remaining uncolonised parts of the continent, broadly along the lines determined. (1889)

Prominent political events

* 3 August 1881: The Pretoria Convention peace treaty is signed, officially ending the war between the Boers and Britain.
* 3 May 1882: The Chinese Exclusion Act was signed into law by President Chester A. Arthur.
* 1884: International Meridian Conference in Washington D.C., held to determine the Prime Meridian of the world.
* 1884–1885: Berlin Conference, when the western powers divided Africa.
* The United States had five Presidents during the decade, the most since the 1840s. They were Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, Chester A. Arthur, Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison.

Disasters

* May to August, 1883: Krakatoa, a volcano in Indonesia, erupted cataclysmically; 36,000 people were killed, the majority being killed by the resulting tsunami.
*September 1887: The Yellow river flooded and killed about 900,000 people.

Assassinations and attempts

Prominent assassinations, targeted killings, and assassination attempts include:

* 13 March 1881 – Assassination of the Tsar of the Russian Empire Alexander II of Russia.
* 19 September 1881 – James A. Garfield, 20th President of the United States (See also James A. Garfield assassination)
* 2 March 1882 – Roderick Maclean fails to assassinate Queen Victoria.
* 3 April 1882 – Bob Ford assassinates Jesse James, legendary outlaw.
* 6 May 1882 – Lord Frederick Cavendish, Chief Secretary for Ireland, assassinated in the Phoenix Park by the Invincibles.

Science and technology

Technology

*1880: Oliver Heaviside of Camden Town, London, England receives a patent for the coaxial cable. In 1887, Heaviside introduced the concept of loading coils. In the 1890s, Mihajlo Idvorski Pupin would both create the loading coils and receive a patent of them, failing to credit Heaviside's work.
* 1880–1882: Development and commercial production of electric lighting was underway. Thomas Edison of Milan, Ohio, established Edison Illuminating Company on December 17, 1880. Based at New York City, it was the pioneer company of the electrical power industry. Edison's system was based on creating a central power plant equipped with electrical generators. Copper electrical wires would then connect the station with other buildings, allowing for electric power distribution. Pearl Street Station was the first central power plant in the United States. It was located at 255–257 Pearl Street in Manhattan on a site measuring 50 by 100 feet,"Edison" by Matthew Josephson. McGraw Hill, New York, 1959, pg. 255. , just south of Fulton Street. It began with one direct current generator, and it started generating electricity on September 4, 1882, serving an initial load of 400 lamps at 85 customers. By 1884, Pearl Street Station was serving 508 customers with 10,164 lamps.
*1880–1886: Charles F. Brush of Euclid, Ohio, and Brush Electric Light Company installed carbon arc lights along Broadway, New York City. A small generating station was established at Manhattan's 25th Street. The electric arc lights went into regular service on December 20, 1880. The new Brooklyn Bridge of 1883 had seventy arc lamps installed in it. By 1886, there was a reported number of 1,500 arc lights installed in Manhattan.
*1880–1883: James Wimshurst of Poplar, London, England invents the Wimshurst Machine.
*1881–1885: Stefan Drzewiecki of Podolia, Russian Empire finishes his submarine-building project (which had begun in 1879). The crafts were constructed at Nevskiy Shipbuilding and Machinery works at Saint Petersburg. Altogether, 50 units were delivered to the Ministry of War. They were reportedly deployed as part of the defense of Kronstadt and Sevastopol. In 1885, the submarines were transferred to the Imperial Russian Navy. They were soon declared "ineffective" and discarded. By 1887, Drzewiecki was designing submarines for the French Third Republic.
*1881–1883: John Philip Holland of Liscannor, County Clare, Ireland builds the Fenian Ram submarine for the Fenian Brotherhood. During extensive trials, Holland made numerous dives and test-fired the gun using dummy projectiles. However, due to funding disputes within the Irish Republican Brotherhood and disagreement over payments from the IRB to Holland, the IRB stole '' Fenian Ram'' and the ''Holland III'' prototype in November 1883.Davies, R. ''Nautilus: The Story of Man Under the Sea''. Naval Institute Press. 1995. .
*1882: William Edward Ayrton of London, England and John Perry of Garvagh, County Londonderry, Ireland build an electric tricycle. It reportedly had a range of 10 to 25 miles, powered by a lead acid battery. A significant innovation of the vehicle was its use of electric lights, here playing the role of headlamps.
*1882: James Atkinson of Hampstead, London, England invented the Atkinson cycle engine. By use of variable engine strokes from a complex crankshaft, Atkinson was able to increase the efficiency of his engine, at the cost of some power, over traditional Otto-cycle engines.
*1882: Schuyler Wheeler of Massachusetts invented the two-blade electric fan. Henry W. Seely of New York invented the electric safety iron. Both were arguably among the earliest small domestic electrical appliances to appear.
*1882–1883: John Hopkinson of Manchester, England patents the three-phase electric power system in 1882. In 1883 Hopkinson showed mathematically that it was possible to connect two alternating current dynamos in parallel — a problem that had long bedeviled electrical engineers.
*1883: Charles Fritts, an American inventor, creates the first working solar cell. The energy conversion efficiency of these early devices was less than 1%. Denounced as a fraud in the US for "generating power without consuming matter, thus violating the laws of physics".
*1883–1885: Josiah H. L. Tuck, an American inventor, works in his own submarine designs. His 1883 model was created in Delameter Iron Works. It was 30-feet long, "all-electric and had vertical and horizontal propellers clutched to the same shaft, with a 20-feet breathing pipe and an airlock for a diver." His 1885 model, called the "Peacemaker", was larger. It used "a caustic soda patent boiler to power a 14-HP Westinghouse steam engine". She managed a number of short trips within the New York Harbor area. The Peacemaker had a submerged endurance of 5 hours. Tuck did not benefit from his achievement. His family feared that the inventor was squandering his fortune on the Peacemaker. They had him committed to an insane asylum by the end of the decade.
*1883–1886: John Joseph Montgomery of Yuba City, California, starts his attempts at early flight. In 1884, using a glider designed and built in 1883, Montgomery made the "first heavier-than-air human-carrying aircraft to achieve controlled piloted flight" in the Western Hemisphere. This glider had a curved parabolic wing surface. He reportedly made a glide of "considerable length" from Otay Mesa, San Diego, California, his first successful flight and arguably the first successful one in the United States. In 1884–1885, Montgomery tested a second monoplane glider with flat wings. The innovation in design was " hinged surfaces at the rear of the wings to maintain lateral balance". These were early forms of Aileron. After experimentation with a water tank and smoke chamber to understand the nature of flow over surfaces, in 1886, Montgomery designed a third glider with fully rotating wings as pitcherons. He then turned to theoretic research towards the development of a manuscript "Soaring Flight" in 1896.
*1884–1885: On August 9, 1884, '' La France'', a French Army airship, makes its maiden flight. Launched by Charles Renard and Arthur Constantin Krebs. Krebs piloted the first fully controlled free-flight with the ''La France''. The long, airship, electric-powered with a 435 kg battery completed a flight that covered in 23 minutes. It was the first full round trip flight with a landing on the starting point. On its seven flights in 1884 and 1885 the ''La France'' dirigible returned five times to its starting point. "La France was the first airship that could return to its starting point in a light wind. It was 165 feet (50.3 meters) long, its maximum diameter was 27 feet (8.2 meters), and it had a capacity of 66,000 cubic feet (1,869 cubic meters)." Its battery-powered motor "produced 7.5 horsepower (5.6 kilowatts). This motor was later replaced with one that produced 8.5 horsepower (6.3 kilowatts)."
*1884: Paul Gottlieb Nipkow of Lębork, Kingdom of Prussia, German Empire invents the Nipkow disk, an image scanning device. It was the basis of his patent method of translating visual images to electronic impulses, transmit said impulses to another device and successfully reassemble the impulses to visual images. Nipkow used a selenium photoelectric cell. Nipkow proposed and patented the first "near-practicable" electromechanical television system in 1884. Although he never built a working model of the system, Nipkow's spinning disk design became a common television image rasterizer used up to 1939.
*1884: Alexander Mozhaysky of Kotka, Grand Duchy of Finland, Russian Empire makes the second known "powered, assisted take off of a heavier-than-air craft carrying an operator". His steam-powered monoplane took off at Krasnoye Selo, near Saint Petersburg, making a hop and "covering between 65 and 100 feet". The monoplane had a failed landing, with one of its wings destroyed and serious damages. It was never rebuilt. Later Soviet propaganda would overstate Mozhaysky's accomplishment while downplaying the failed landing. The Grand Soviet Encyclopedia called this "the first true flight of a heavier-than-air machine in history".
*1884–1885: Ganz Company engineers Károly Zipernowsky, Ottó Bláthy and Miksa Déri had determined that open-core devices were impracticable, as they were incapable of reliably regulating voltage. In their joint patent application for the "Z.B.D." transformers, they described the design of two with no poles: the "closed-core" and the "shell-core" transformers. In the closed-core type, the primary and secondary windings were wound around a closed iron ring; in the shell type, the windings were passed ''through'' the iron core. In both designs, the magnetic flux linking the primary and secondary windings traveled almost entirely within the iron core, with no intentional path through air. When employed in electric distribution systems, this revolutionary design concept would finally make it technically and economically feasible to provide electric power for lighting in homes, businesses and public spaces.''Bláthy, Ottó Titusz (1860 – 1939)''
, Hungarian Patent Office, January 29, 2004. Bláthy had suggested the use of closed-cores, Zipernowsky the use of shunt connections, and Déri had performed the experiments.Smil, Vaclav, ''Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867—1914 and Their Lasting Impact''
Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 71. Electrical and electronic systems the world over continue to rely on the principles of the original Z.B.D. transformers. The inventors also popularized the word "transformer" to describe a device for altering the EMF of an electric current, although the term had already been in use by 1882.
*1884–1885: John Philip Holland and Edmund Zalinski, having formed the "Nautilus Submarine Boat Company", start working on a new submarine. The so-called "Zalinsky boat" was constructed in Hendrick's Reef (former Fort Lafayette), Bay Ridge in (ray) or (rayacus the 3rd) New York City borough of Brooklyn. "The new, cigar-shaped submarine was 50 feet long with a maximum beam of eight feet. To save money, the hull was largely of wood, framed with iron hoops, and again, a Brayton-cycle engine provided motive power." The project was plagued by a "shoestring budget" and Zalinski mostly rejecting Holland's ideas on improvements. The submarine was ready for launching in September, 1885. "During the launching itself, a section of the ways collapsed under the weight of the boat, dashing the hull against some pilings and staving in the bottom. Although the submarine was repaired and eventually carried out several trial runs in lower New York Harbor, by the end of 1886 the Nautilus Submarine Boat Company was no more, and the salvageable remnants of the Zalinski Boat were sold to reimburse the disappointed investors." Holland would not create another submarine to 1893.
*1885: Galileo Ferraris of Livorno Piemonte, Kingdom of Italy reaches the concept of a rotating magnetic field. He applied it to a new motor. "Ferraris devised a motor using electromagnets at right angles and powered by alternating currents that were 90° out of phase, thus producing a revolving magnetic field. The motor, the direction of which could be reversed by reversing its polarity, proved the solution to the last remaining problem in alternating-current motors. The principle made possible the development of the asynchronous, self-starting electric motor that is still used today. Believing that the scientific and intellectual values of new developments far outstripped material values, Ferraris deliberately did not patent his invention; on the contrary, he demonstrated it freely in his own laboratory to all comers." He published his findings in 1888. By then, Nikola Tesla