100 Years Ago

The Big News Of 100 Years Ago 12/31/2006 - As easy as it is to recount the top news events of the past year, we cannot measure their historical significance. We are too close to the mirror to have any perspective. What we believe to be of great significance to us today — the Democrats’ ascendancy in Washington and Albany, for example — may not even be noticed by historians a century hence. And, undoubtedly, events that went unnoticed and unremarked this year will be highlighted in future years as having great historic importance. Still, on this last day of 2006 we perhaps can understand a bit of how historical perspective will affect the way the big news of this year will be viewed by looking back to the year that was closing exactly 100 years ago today. And so, consider that in 1906: ¯ Finland became the first country in Europe to give its women the right to vote. Within a year, women would be elected to the Finnish Parliament. ¯ American suffragist Susan B. Anthony died. In America at the time of her death, four states — Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah — had granted women the right to vote. ¯ SOS was adopted as a universally recognized warning signal by the first conference ever to be held on wireless telegraphy. ¯ Reginald A. Fessenden became first to broadcast music — he played a violin — over radio. ¯ Theodore Roosevelt was president. ¯ Czar Nicholas was in the midst of a ruthless, brutal campaign to suppress dissent across Russia. ¯ Leonid Brezhnev was born. He would take over the top leadership of the Soviet Union in the mid-1960s and, as such, would be a central figure of the Cold War for the next 18 years. ¯ Esther Damon, the last widow pensioner of the War of the Revolution, died in Vermont at age 92. ¯ The British launched the battleship Dreadnought. It was the first of an entirely new class of warships equipped with all-turbine engines. ¯ Earthquakes occurred in California, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Arizona and New Mexico in the United States and in Nicaragua, Colombia, Formosa, Chile and Puerto Rico. The devastation included San Francisco, where a thousand people were killed and half a million left homeless. Here at home, the largest mortgage ever recorded in Mayville was received at $12 million for the Buffalo and Lake Erie Traction Co. to acquire the line between Buffalo and Erie from New York Trust Co. as trustee. An editorial writer at the time was prompted to comment that in Chautauqua County, ‘‘The past year was eventful in many respects and will furnish much material for the historian. It was a year of high prosperity... and the crops were bountiful ...’’ This same writer had commented at the beginning of the year that 1906 might be the year the North Pole would, at last, be reached. ‘‘Undismayed by the fate of S. Andree, who sought the north pole in a balloon and was never heard of afterward, Walter Wellman, the well-known newspaper correspondent, and Santos Dupont, the aeronaut, propose to reach it in an airship,’’ local news accounts reported at the beginning of 1906. ‘‘If their calculations are realized, they will get there long ahead of Peary and other explorers who are painfully crawling northward over the ice. The fact that an airship can be guided to some extent gives it an immense advantage over a balloon, which is at the mercy of every wind.’’ Neither Wellman’s party nor, for that matter, Peary’s made it that year, but the attempt sparked imaginations and prompted the judgment from the editorial writer that ‘‘We appear to be on the eve of aerial navigation.’’ Whatever difference a century of progress and historical perspective make in judging the significance of events, the year’s concluding thoughts of that long-ago editor sum up ours as well: ‘‘Mankind,’’ he wrote, ‘‘is struggling upward and each year records fresh steps.’’ For more information on Chautauqua Lake Real Estate & Living visit: www.chautauqualakehomes.com