Mundus 1a

Mundus1 Part 2

"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." - Mahatma Gandhi (ગાંધી)

" Who would imagine that this simple law [constancy of the velocity of light] has plunged the conscientiously thoughtful physicist into the greatest intellectual difficulties? "The Special and General Theory - Albert Einstein

Contents

1905-1906/ca.1322-1323AH A global perspective.
The visual arts
Foxes, then and now

Selected events of 1905 AD/1322-1333AH from around the world

January 2 - Russo-Japanese War:The surrender of the Russian Army at Port Arthur, China, which shocked the entire world.
January 26 -The Cullinan Diamond,the largest diamond in the world, weighing 3,106 carats (621g), was discovered near Pretoria, in South Africa. It was bought by the Transvaal Government and presented to King Edward VII. In Amsterdam, it was cut into three parts, to yield several large and small stones. The largest of these polished gems was the Cullinan I, the Great Star of Africa. It was the largest polished diamond in the whole world, at 530 carats, until eclipsed by the discovery, at the same mine, of the Golden Jubilee Diamond in 1985. The Great Star of Africa adorns the royal Sceptre with the Cross, while another part, of the original discovery, Cullinan II, or the Lesser Star of Africa, at 317 carats, is part of the Imperial State Crown, and is the second largest polished diamond in the world. Both are on view among the British Crown Jewels exhibited at the Tower of London.

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Regalia by Beaton R. Koch A. Einstein Cullinan diamond

Koch lecturing on Tuberculosis at St James's Hall,Piccadilly, demolished in 1905.

Regalia by Beaton	R. Koch	A. Einstein	Cullinan diamond
	Koch lecturing on Tuberculosis at St James's Hall,Piccadilly, demolished in 1905.

February 23 - Foundation of Rotary International
March 17- Marriage of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his distant cousin Eleanor Roosevelt
March 31 -German emperorWilliam II visited Morocco, triggering the Tangier (or First Moroccan) Crisis.Tangier's geographical location made it a centre for European diplomatic and commercial activity in Morocco in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. German Kaiser William II pronouncement in favour of Morocco's continued independence triggered an international crisis in 1905. In theSecond Moroccan Crisis, however, a few years later, he gave France a free hand in Morocco, in return for territories held by France in central Africa.
April 4 - In India, an earthquake near Kangra, killed 20,000.
April 18 -Enoch Sontonga(32), composer of Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika("God Bless Africa" in the Xhosa language), and of the Tanzanian National Anthem, 'Mungu Ibariki Africa', died.(To hear the anthem use the National Anthem link). He was a teacher at a Methodist mission school in Johannesburg, South Africa. Composed in 1897, it became the anthem of tthe ANC in 1925, and part of South Africa's national anthem in 1994. It was also the anthem of Zimbabwe and Namibia.
June 7 -The Norwegian Parliament declared the union with Sweden dissolved, and Norway achieved its independence
June 30 - Albert Einstein (for more details see below) published the article "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" .
August 20 -Lord Curzon,(of Kedleston-an Irish title), resigned as viceroy of India and returned to England after a difference of opinion with the British military commander-in-chief in India,Lord Kitchener.

Pictured to the right : Lord Curzon and the Maharajah (મહારાજē) of Baroda, with shot tigers, in 1901

Reappointed governor-general in August 1904, he presided over the partition of Bengal ((July 1905) for administrative purposes which gave the Muslims a majority in that state It was bitterly opposed by the people of the province and was later revoked (1912).Curzon also supervised the restoration of the Taj Mahal. In 1895 he married Mary Victoria Leiter (d. 1906), the beautiful daughter of Levi Zeigler Leiter, a Chicago millionaire of German Lutheran origin and a cofounder of the department store Field & Leiter (now known as Marshall Field), but had no male heir to take up his titles. However, they had three daughters: Mary Irene (who inherited her father's Barony of Ravensdale and was created a life peer in her own right), Cynthia (first wife of Sir Oswald Mosley, notorious as leader of the fascist group which became known as the Blackshirts), and Alexandra Naldera (wife of the best friend of Edward VIII, who later became a mistress of her brother-in-law, Oswald Mosley, as did her stepmother, Grace!).
September 5 - Russo-Japanese War(see above).In the Treaty of Portsmouth mediated by US President Theodore Roosevelt at New Hampshire, the defeated party, Russia, ceded the island of Sakhalin, and port, and rail rights in Manchuria to Japan. Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the Russo-Japanese War.
Sept 1905 -Al bert Einstein submitted a series of papers to the "Annalen der Physik", commonly referred to as the "Annus Mirabilis Papers". The first paper, named "On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light", ("Über einen die Erzeugung und Verwandlung des Lichtes betreffenden heuristischen Gesichtspunkt") proposed that "energy quanta" (which are essentially what we now call photons) were real, and showed how they could be used to explain such phenomena as the photoelectric effect. His second article in 1905, named "On the Motion Required by the Molecular Kinetic Theory of Heat of Small Particles Suspended in a Stationary Liquid", ("Über die von der molekularkinetischen Theorie der Wärme geforderte Bewegung von in ruhenden Flüsskeiten suspendierten Teilchen") covered his study of Brownian motion, and provided empirical evidence for the existence of atoms. The third paper "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" ("Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper"), was published in September 1905. This paper introduced the special theory of relativity, a theory of time, distance, mass and energy which was consistent with electromagnetism, but omitted the force of gravity. A fourth paper, "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?", ("Ist die Träutgheit eines Körpers von seinem Energieinhalt abhängig?") published late in 1905, showed one further deduction from relativity's axioms, the famous equation that the energy of a body at rest (E) equals its mass (m) times the speed of light (c) squared: E = mc?. The year 2005 was designated as the "World Year of Physics" by UNESCO for its coincidence with the centennial of the "Annus Mirabilis" papers, celebrated at the Einstein Symposium. Einstein's own popular translation of his theory that informs our "truths" of space and time can be found at Relativity: The Special and General Theory,
The 1905 Wright Flyer III, built by Wilbur (1867-1912) and Orville (1871-1948) Wright, was the world's first airplane capable of sustained, manouevrable flight. After several shorter attempts, on October 5, 1905, Wilbur flew until his fuel was exhausted.This time, it remained sky-borne for approximately 39 minutes, and over 24 miles, a distance longer than all his earlier 109 flights put together.
On December 30, 1905, the home of Frank Steunenberg was bombed and Steunenberg, the governor of Idaho at the time, was killed in the blast. A labour radical was later arrested and convicted for the crime and was sentenced to life. 1905 also saw an attempted assassination of the Sultan of Turkey, Abdul Hamid(عبد الحميد), when a carriage loaded with dynamite was placed outside the mosque while he was attending Friday prayers.
November 28 -The AngloIrish leader Arthur Griffith founded the Nationalist movement known as 'Sinn Féin'.
December 1905 -Collapse of the Conservative Government in Britain which led to a Liberal Government in office, after the shock elections of January 1906, when the Liberals gained 273 seats. Smuts met Botha in London soon after to obtain self govenment for the Transvaaal. Mahatma Gandhi(મોહનદાસ કરમચંદ ગાંધી), who had been decorated after theBoer War, was agitating the authorities over the deteriorating situation of Indians in South Africa. The political issue of Asian labourers was used by Smuts and Botha in representations to the Prime Minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, a mild but shrewd Scot, and with him, the cabinet and Parliament, to grant self-government. In 1906, the Transvaal government promulgated a new Act compelling registration of the colony's Indian population, which was to inaugurate Gandhi's satyagraha , the movement that was to inspire many people but which was also destined to be the target of criticism by others.
December 1905 -Robert Koch won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for his investigations and discoveries in relation to tuberculosis". In the same year, Koch and Dutton demonstrated transmission of tick-borne relapsing fever, and Ehrlich showed sarcomatous development of carcinoma transplanted into healthy rats.

Pictured on the right: X Ray of the chest showing tuberculosis
In 1905, The German Röntgen Society was founded in Berlin and the Institute of Ophthalmic Opticians in London.
Inspired by Zionist ideology, two major influxes of Jews from Eastern Europe arrived in Palestine throughout 1905, determined to restore their lost homeland by tilling the soil, reclaiming barren fields,and creating new settlements.
Queensland, Australia, adopted female suffrage in 1905. The first territory to do so in that country was Southern Australia in 1894. In 2005, its population was 4 million, of which, Non-Christian, was 2.3% (Buddhism: 1.1%, Islam: 0.4, Hinduism: 0.3%, Judaism: 0.1%, Other: 0.4%), No Religion: 14.8%, Not Stated: 12.0%).

The visual arts

The first decade of the new century was of great moment in the visual arts, and the founders of modern international art had their works exhibited in these early years. Of particular relevance to 1905 was the artshow at the Salon d'Automne in Paris of a small group of artists who had called themselves the 'Les Fauves'. The French word, meaning 'wild beasts', was not meant to apply to the personalities of the artists involved. Rather, it signified the extraordinary departure from the 'civilised' norms of salon art which had been the diet of Parisians at the end of the century, and brought in a vivid display of colour applied with fresh, apparently untutored brushstrokes and brilliant, contrasting color. Three of them stood out especially; Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck. Below are two examples of paintings executed in 1905, clearly showing their radical approach, which looks for inspiration partly to the raw intensity of Van Gogh's paintings. Van Gogh had died having sold only one painting in his entire life,but his work was just coming into view in Paris at that time. Matisse went on to become one of the greatest painters of the century. Vlaminck regressed into classicism later on. Derain was to achieve fame from a series of paintings depicting views of London, in which he followed Monet, but marked them with his own, individual stamp.

Picture on the left: Portrait of Henri Matisse by André Derain
During a holiday at the fishing port of Collioure in the south of France in 1905, they painted portraits of each other. It is possible that this painting was among those Derain showed later that year in Paris in the Salon d'Automne. Matisse came late to art, having started life as a lawyer. He first met Derain in 1898 when they studied together at the Académie Carrière in Paris.

Picture on the far left: Portrait of André Derain by Henri Matisse

Matisse also knew Picasso well. Around 1905, however, Picasso, poverty stricken and penniless, had gone back to Barcelona. In that period, the so-called 'Blue' ( followed by 'Pink') period, he painted a lot of pictures containing images drawn from the circus.
Picture on the left: Cheval avec jeune homme en bleu is one example, done in watercolour and gouache,on paper.

Foxes, then and now

A contemporary poem by John Masefield which is notable for its accomplished metre is reproduced below. As for the subject matter, a hundred years later, since 2005, most forms of fox huntinghave been banned by an act of parliament in the UK, the majority of members of that august body finally, after 700 years, considering it to be too blood thirsty a sport to stomach.


		A   Fellow  Mortal
		--------------------------
	I found a fox, caught by the leg
	In a toothed gin, torn from its peg,
	And dragged, God knows how far, in pain.

	Such torment could not plead in vain,
	He looked at me, I looked at him.
	With iron-jaw teeth in his limb.

	'Come, little son,' I said, 'Let be. . .
	Don't bite me,  while I set you free.'
	But much I feared that in the pang
	Of helping, I should feel a fang
	In hand or face. . .
		but must is must. . . .
	And he had given me his trust.
	
	So down I knelt there in the mud
	And loosed those jaws all mud and blood.
	And he, exhausted, crept, set free,
	Into the shade, away from me;

	The leg not broken . . .
		Then, beyond,
	That gin went plonk into the pond.

Photo of a fox from Countryside Alliance.

For more poems by John Masefield click here: John Masefield

John Masefield (1878-1967)Prepared for the internet from 'The Oxford Anthology of Great English Poetry Vol. II'.

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