The World in 1895 the year doctors first saw through skin
2¢Letter stamp (US)
5¢Coca-Cola at the fountain (US)
~$100A new safety bicycle (US)
~$10A week's factory pay (US)
44States in the Union (US)
2Codes of rugby now (UK)
31M krLeft by Nobel for his prizes
~400MPeople living in China
~4MPeople counted in Argentina
A bicycle cost about a hundred dollars when a factory hand earned ten dollars a week. That is close to three months of pay, so shops let buyers settle it weekly.
Life back then
The bicycle became a craze. The safety bicycle had two equal wheels, a chain and air filled tyres, so almost anyone could ride one, and on Sundays club runs filled the roads outside town. Women rode too, which meant looser skirts or bloomers and a long public argument about both. Preachers in some towns blamed the wheel for empty pews.
The year in 8 events
- 🎭Feb 14 Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest opens in London. Within four months he is in prison with hard labour.
- ⚔️Feb 24 Cubans rise against Spanish rule again, starting a war that Spain never wins.
- 📜Apr 17 China signs the Treaty of Shimonoseki, handing Taiwan to Japan and paying a huge sum in silver.
- 🎓Sep 18 Booker T. Washington tells a mixed crowd in Atlanta that black southerners should seek work and schooling before political rights. The speech splits opinion for years.
- 🔬Nov 8 Wilhelm Rontgen sees a screen glow in his dark laboratory and finds a ray that shows the bones inside a hand.
- 🚗Nov 28 America's first car race runs from Chicago to Evanston and back through snow. Frank Duryea wins at about 7 miles an hour.
- 🎬Dec 28 The Lumiere brothers charge admission for a film show in a Paris basement.
- 🐎Dec 29 Armed riders led by Leander Jameson cross into the Transvaal to topple its Boer government. The raid collapses in days.
pageType:year friendlyName:1895 onDate:in 1895