The screw-top bottle is patented by Dan Rylands of Hope Glass Works, Yorkshire, England.
   A dock strike cripples the city of London.
  The punch-card information storage system is developed by H. Hollerith.
  Fruit-peddler William Kemmler axes his lover Matilda Ziegler to death in Buffalo, NY., and is the first person sentenced to die in the newly designed electric chair. In the culmination of a viscious PR war between competing electricity delivery systems Direct Current championed by Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse's stronger and more lethal Alternating Current as to who would actually provide the killing voltages, Westinghouse loses and it is his AC that rips through Kemmler's body when he is "Westinghoused" the following year.
  Danish inventor Vlademar Poulson invents magnetic wire recording.
  Charles Spencer Chaplin is born in London, England to two music hall performers.
  George Eastman markets the first flexible picture film roll.
  Vincent Van Gogh voluntarily admits himself into an insane asylum at Saint-Remy in France. He paints his "Garden at the Hospital", "Self-Portrait with a Bandaged Ear", and "Wheat Fields and Cyprus Trees" during this period. The next year he kills himself with a revolver shot to the chest.
  The Paris Exposition opens, with the recently completed Eiffel tower as a centerpiece..
  The Moulin Rouge opens.
  Mary Sawyer Tyler dies. She was born in Sterling, Massachusetts, and at 10 received a pet lamb called Nethaniel which would follow her to the Red Stone schoolhouse occasionally. Visitor to the school John Roulstone was endeared by this and composed the famous poem "Mary Had a Little Lamb", which was later expanded on by Sarah J. Hale.
  May day, or Worker's Day, is first observed.
  Johannes Brahms' performance of "Hungarian Dance" is recorded on an Edison Phonograph cylinder.
   While in Turin, Italy, German philospher Frederich Nietzsche suffers a complete mental breakdown upon witnessing the cruel flogging of a horse by its owner. He remains an invalid until his death in 1900.
  Dishwashing machines are first sold, in Chicago.
  During a Berlin stop of the Euopean tour of "Buffalo" Bill Cody's Wild West Show, crack shot Annie Oakley jokingly asks the crowd for a volunteer in a bit where she shoots the ashes off a cigarette held in someone's mouth. She is dismayed when a someone actually steps up: the young leader of Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II. Lamenting the night of whiskey drinking the night before, Annie nervously performs the stunt, executing it perfectly. Some years later, at the advent of WWI, Oakely reportedly writes the Kaiser requesting a second shot.
  "The Sneeze", a groundbreaking film experiment by Thomas Edison, is screened. It features sound effects from a syncronized phonograph player.
  "Customers' Afternoon Letter", called a "flimsie" by its creators Charles Henry Dow, Edward Davis Jones and Charles Milford Bergstresser, and delivered by messenger to subscribers in the Wall Street area of New York City, morphs into a newspaper labelled "The Wall Street Journal". It consists of four pages, selling for 2 cents and charging 20 cents a line for advertising.
  The first Bell Telephone logo is introduced.
  50,000 white settlers pour into Oklahoma during the land rush, with all 1.9 million acres available claimed by sundown.
  Two white men in Missouri, newspaper editorial writer Chris L. Rutt and miller Charles G. Uncerwood, invent the first self-rising pancake mix.  After seeing a show at the local vaudeville house with two comedians in blackface, Rutt take the name of the show stopping song sung by one as a household "mammy" for the trademark name of his creation, "Aunt Jemima".
  The Savoy hotel opens in London, England.
   In Pennsylvania, on the afternoon of May 31, 20 million gallons of water rush from the burst South Fork Dam, an embankment dam created from rock, earth and clay in order to create Lake Conemaugh, a recreational playground for the weathy members of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting club. The 40 foot wave, cruising at a speed of 40 miles an hour, slams into the prospering city of Johnstown Pennsylvania, killing 2,209 people and virtually wiping out the town. The collapse of the dam is attributed to a poorly maintained spillway, aggrivated by a heavy rainfall.
   Recording technology reaches marketable acceptance.
   On Monday, June 24, four men enter Telluride, Colorado. After surveying the town, they proceed to enter and rob the local bank, reportedly absconding with 10-30 thousand dollars. Not only is it the first major bank robbery in Colorado history, it is the first foray into such activity by the group, including two men: Robert Leroy Parker and Harry Longabaugh, also known respectively as Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. Longabaugh had received his nickname due to his release from Sundance prision in Wyoming earlier in the year.
   The centennial of George Washington's inauguration becomes the first observed U.S. national holiday.
  Igor Sikorsky is born, who eventually founds the Sikorsky Aero Engineering Company and realizes the first sucessful helicopter flight in the 3-blade, 75 horsepower Vought-Sikorsky 300, in 1940.
  William Gray from Hartford, CT obtains the patent for the first coin-operated telephone.
  George Eastman's Kodak box camera, the mechanical adding machine, the death of Coca-Cola inventor Dr. John S. Pemberton, the National Geographic Society, Adolf Hitler, the hamburger, and the Jack the Ripper killings are all one year old.