Word: 1860s
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...late 1860s, two things were sure to make San Franciscans sit up and take notice. One was easy gold, the other an acid writing man named Ambrose Bierce. The easy gold was usually illusory, but Bierce went on tapping a virgin lode of venom that lasted 40-odd years...
...running in the 1880's. Radio waves were discovered by Hertz in 1887, and the first paid radiogram was sent from the Isle of Wight in 1898. The first public telephone exchange was opened in New Haven, Conn, in 1878. The "germ theory" of disease dates from the 1860s. It is hard to find an important technological element in modern life that did not have its roots in the age of pre-Planckian innocence...
Dandified John Taylor was musing over the fashion findings turned up in the current issue of his magazine Tailor & Cutter. The sprightliest of all British trade papers, outspoken Tailor & Cutter (circ. 16,000) has been scolding the sloppy dressers of the world since the 1860s when it found that the "beauty and symmetry" of American frock coats were being "nullified through advancing the scye [i.e., armhole] beyond a point absolutely required by the form and size of the figure." In recent years it has turned its batteries of disapproval on the baggy pants of some of Britain...
...British-Bolivian relations have not always struck so resonant a note. In the 1860s, the Bolivian dictator Mariano Melgarejo tied the British minister on to a burro, face tailward, rode him three times around La Paz's principal plaza because he had slighted the dictator's mistress. Queen Victoria, on being told that British naval guns could never reach landlocked Bolivia, seized a pen, crossed the country off the map, saying: "Bolivia no longer exists...
...music and his personality had a sprightliness that led his admirers to call him "the Italian Mozart." Few musicians passed through Paris in the 1860s without paying their respects to the great Rossini. When Richard Wagner called, and tried to explain his newfangled ideas, Rossini told him grandly: "What you are saying is the funeral oration of melody...