The following events occurred in May 1909:
May 1, 1909 (Saturday) Walter Reed Medical Center opened for treatment of Washington, D.C., residents and veterans. Tens of thousands of California residents turned out at San Francisco to greet the visiting Japanese ships IJN Aso and Soya, which had been captured from Russia during the Russo-Japanese War of 1905.
May 2, 1909 (Sunday) Mark Twain began work on the "Ashcroft-Lyon" manuscript, never published, three weeks after firing his secretary, Isabel Lyon, who had married Ralph Ashcroft.Karen Lystra, Dangerous Intimacy: The Untold Story of Mark Twain's Final Years (University of California Press, 2004), p218 Manuel Amador Guerrero, the first President of Panama and founder of the nation, died a few months after the expiration of his term of office. Fort Amador, which defends the Pacific side of the canal along with Fort Grant, was named in his honor.Miles P. DuVal, Jr., And The Mountains Will Move (Stanford University Press, 1947), p304
May 3, 1909 (Monday) Jesús Malverde, "El Rey de Sinaloa", was killed in Mexico and made his way into local folklore. Ensign Chester Nimitz began a career in submarine warfare, taking command of the USS Plunger. The Preakness Stakes, second jewel of the Triple Crown of American horseracing, returned to Maryland and the Pimlico racetrack, after having been run since 1890 in New York.
May 4, 1909 (Tuesday) Tony Malfeti's body was found; he had been kidnapped on March 14. In New Knoxville, Ohio, 29-year-old butcher Martin Engel, the grandfather of future astronaut Neil Armstrong, died of tuberculosis. His wife and his nearly two-year-old daughter, Viola Louise Engel, Neil Armstrong's future mother, were at his bedside. In Las Cruces, New Mexico, Wayne Brazel was acquitted of the February 29, 1908, murder of Pat Garrett. The trial had begun on April 19, and the jury took 15 minutes to reach the verdict that Brazel, who fired his shot while Garrett was urinating, had acted in self-defense.
May 5, 1909 (Wednesday) A change in the electoral law of the German free state of Saxony took effect, providing for four different classes of voters. All taxpaying men, 25 or older, had one vote, and men with higher incomes had two, three or four votes. Men received an additional vote upon turning 50.W.F. Dodd, "Constitutional Developments in Foreign Countries During 1908 and 1908", The American Political Science Review (August 1910) pp339–340 Jackson County, Colorado, was created from the western section of Larimer County.Joseph Nathan Kane, The American Counties (4th Ed.), (The Scarecrow Press, 1983), p480
May 6, 1909 (Thursday) The U.S. Senate ratified a treaty that had been signed in December 1904, between the United States and Russia, providing legal recognition by each nation of the corporations of the other. Prior to the signing of the agreement, American business corporations had had no legal standing in the Russian Empire."Agreement with Russia", New York Times, May 7, 1909, p1 Born: Loyd Sigmon, inventor of the "Sig Alert", in Stigler, Oklahoma (d. 2004)
May 7, 1909 (Friday) The Pontifical Biblical Institute was founded in Rome by Pope Pius X.Edmond Hugues de Ragnau, The Vatican: The Center of Government of the Catholic World (D. Appleton and company, 1913), p357 Albert Einstein was invited by the University of Zurich to accept the newly created chair in Theoretical Physics. He accepted, giving up his job at the patent office in Bern.Djordje Krstić and Janez Mayer, Mileva & Albert Einstein: Their Love and Scientific Collaboration (Didakta d.o.o. Radovljica, 2004), p238 Born: Edwin H. Land, American inventor of Polaroid instant camera, in Bridgeport; (d. 1991) Died: Alexis Toth, 56, leader of the Russian Orthodox in the United States
May 8, 1909 (Saturday) The comedy film cliché of "a pie in the face" was introduced with the release of Broncho Billy Anderson's 4-minute silent movie Mr. Flip, and the title character, played by Ben Turpin, being the first recipient for harassing a waitress.Michael Glover Smith, Flickering Empire: How Chicago Invented the U.S. Film Industry (Columbia University Press, 2015) p. 91"Mr. Flip", Progressive Silent Film List, by Carl Bennett (Silent Era Company, 1999) The act would be perfected in longer films on May 1, 1913, with Mack Sennett's That Ragtime Band,The Moving Picture World, May 3, 1913"A Muddy Romance" with comedienne Mabel Normand being "pied" or throwing a pie."A Very Brief History of Slapstick", ArtShtick.com Herbert Lang and James P. Chapin set off on the ship SS Zeeland on the first project to catalog the plant and animal species of Central Africa. The Congo Expedition of the American Museum of Natural History would yield thousands of specimens. The town of Concrete, Washington, was incorporated as a merger of the communities of Baker (which had the Superior Portland Cement Company) and Cement City (which Washington Portland Cement Company). The town was featured in the 1993 Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio film This Boy's Life. The Bhawal case began when the Bhawal Sanyasi, kumar (prince) of the Bhawal Estate in Bengal, reportedly died at about at the "Step aside" building in Darjeeling, where he had traveled for medical treatment. A body was cremated, and the controversy over whether the prince had actually died began. Ultimately, there would be three long court cases and, ultimately the Privy Council in London upheld the theory that the kumar Ramendranath Roy had not actually died, but had been in a coma and had ultimately been revived.
May 9, 1909 (Sunday) Japanese sugar plantation workers in Hawaii walked out on strike, after five months of trying to get wages comparable to those paid to Portuguese and Puerto Rican laborers for the same work. By June, 7,000 had walked off the job. After five months, the plantation owners relented and brought the Asian workers' pay up to par."1909 Plantation Strike", Japanese American History: An A-to-Z Reference from 1868 to the Present (Verlag für die Deutsche Wirtschaft AG, 1993), pp256–57
May 10, 1909 (Monday) The American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI) was founded by fifteen physicians who gathered at the New Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., to identify and honor outstanding physicians engaged in biomedical research.D. Howell, "A history of the American Society for Clinical Investigation" Born: Maybelle Carter, American country musician, in Scott County, Virginia (d. 1978) Died: Futabatei Shimei, 45, Japanese novelist (The Drifting Cloud)
May 11, 1909 (Tuesday) U.S. Design Patent No. 39,984 was awarded to Harrison D. McFaddin for the "banker's lamp"The lamps of H.G. McFaddin & Co. Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office, 1909
May 12, 1909 (Wednesday) Leopold Stokowski made his debut as a conductor, for the Colonne Orchestra in Paris. In South Bethlehem, New York, at least twenty employees of the Callanan Road Improvement Company (including the company's vice-president) were killed by the premature explosion of of dynamite as they were preparing to shoot inside a quarry.
May 13, 1909 (Thursday) The first Giro d'Italia, Italy's premiere bicycle race, began at 2:53 in the morning in Milan with 127 starters. On May 30, Luigi Ganna was the first of the 49 remaining riders to return to Milan for the win.William Fotheringham, A Century of Cycling: The Classic Races and Legendary Champions (MBI Publishing Company, 2003), p104 The British platinum producer Lonmin was incorporated as the London and Rhodesian Mining and Land Co., Ltd.Melvin E. Page, ed., Colonialism: An International, Social, Cultural, and Political Encyclopedia (ABC-CLIO, 2003) pp350–351
May 14, 1909 (Friday) The "Milwaukee Road" railroad (C M & S) became the sixth transcontinental railroad in the United States, with the completion of $60,000,000 five-year Pacific Extension project to take the line to Seattle. With the driving of the final spike near Garrison, Montana, the official name of the Milwaukee Road became the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad.
May 15, 1909 (Saturday) Saint Paulinus of Nola (354–431 AD) returned to his home in Nola, in Southern Italy, after nearly a millennium. His body had been at the Tiber Island in Rome since the 11th century. Paulinus was reinterred at the cathedral that had been dedicated there a week earlier.Dennis E. Trout, Paulinus of Nola: Life, Letters, and Poems (University of California Press, 1999), p267 Born: James Mason, English-born film actor, in Huddersfield (d. 1984)
May 16, 1909 (Sunday) Harper B. Lee, the first gringo (American-born) bullfighter, made his first appearance in Mexico City's Plaza el Toreo. A hailstorm in Uvalde County, Texas, caused major damage, but not as seriously as reported in some papers. The hailstones, some weighing as much as , were heavy enough to kill several cows. A San Antonio paper reported that "Damage in the amount of at least $10,000 was done in Uvalde and five or six head of stock were killed," and added "The report that several Mexicans had been killed by hail stones is not correct." Dispatches from Galveston greatly exaggerated the damage in the rest of the nation. The New York Times reported that the hailstones "are said to have measured nearly a foot and a half in circumference and ranged in weight from seven to ten pounds", and that "eight lives are reported lost, while the number of live stock killed is reported anywhere from 500 to 2,000 dead ... loss to crops and farm property will aggregate between $200,000 and $300,000. The hailstones piled up in some places four feet high." The New York Herald said that the hailstones killed rancher James Carpenter "and seven Mexican hired men".
May 17, 1909 (Monday) First Lady Nellie Taft, wife of U.S. President William Taft, suffered a stroke while at the White House, impairing her speech abilities. She recovered after one year.Miller Center of Public Affairs The United States Supreme Court ruled in the case of Welch v. Swasey, 214 U.S. 191 (1909), that it upheld the right of governments to set limits on the height of buildings.Jeffrey Stein, "Bringing Architecture to Light: The Pioneering Work of William Atkinson" Born: Julius Sumner Miller, pioneer of the television science program, in Billerica, Massachusetts (d. 1987)
May 18, 1909 (Tuesday) In Germany, patent No. 226,239 was awarded to Heinrich Hoerlein of the Bayer company for a sulfanilamide, the first synthesized sulfonamide. It was not until 1935 that the antibiotic properties of sulfonamides were realized, and the first sulfa drugs created.Satyavan Sharma and Nitya Anand, Approaches to Design and Synthesis of Antiparasitic Drugs (Elsevier, 1997), pp439–440 Menelik II, Emperor of Ethiopia, resolved the question of who would succeed him, selecting his 14-year-old grandson Lij Iyasu as the heir apparent. Iyasu V reigned from 1913 to 1916, but was deposed in favor of Menelik's daughter Zauditu.David H. Shinn and Thomas P. Ofcansky, Historical Dictionary of Ethiopia (Scarecrow Press, 2004), p279 Born: Fred Perry, English tennis player (No. 1 ranked 1934–38), in Stockport (d. 1995) Died: Isaac Albéniz, 48, Spanish composer
May 19, 1909 (Wednesday) With 55 dancers, including Vaslav Nijinsky, the Ballets Russes opened a new era in ballet dancing, bringing the Russian ballet to the Western world. Produced by Sergei Diaghilev, the tour opened at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris.Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000), pp25–26