The World in 1887 the year the show came to town

Western Union carried roughly 50 million telegrams. That is well over a hundred thousand a day, every one of them tapped out letter by letter by an operator and written down by ear at the other end.

Life back then

Nothing came through a screen, so entertainment travelled by rail and pitched a tent on the edge of town. Circus trains rolled in overnight, put up three rings, paraded elephants down the main street and were gone in two days. Buffalo Bill's Wild West spent the summer in London for the Queen's Jubilee, with riders, shooting and a staged stagecoach chase. Smaller halls ran variety bills of singers, jugglers and comic turns. Minstrel shows, in which white performers blacked their faces and mocked Black Americans, were still among the most popular acts of all.

The year in 8 events

• ⚔️Jan 26 Ethiopian troops destroy an Italian column at Dogali, stopping Italy's push inland from the Red Sea.
• 🐿️Feb 2 Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania holds its first Groundhog Day.
• ✋Mar 3 Anne Sullivan arrives in Alabama to teach Helen Keller, who is deaf and blind.
• 🗳️Apr 4 Susanna Salter is elected mayor of Argonia, Kansas, the first woman to lead a US town.
• 👑Jun 20 Queen Victoria marks 50 years on the throne. Most of the people she rules live in India, and they get two days of celebration too.
• 🌏Oct 17 Vietnam and Cambodia are bound into a single colony called Indochina, run from Saigon.
• ⚽Nov 6 Celtic Football Club is formed in Glasgow, in Scotland, to raise money for poor families in the East End.
• 🎶Nov 8 Emile Berliner patents the gramophone, which plays flat discs instead of cylinders.

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