The British Antarctic Expedition, led by Robert Falcon Scott, departed from New Zealand on the Terra Nova while Roald Amundsen, on board the Fram was also en route to the Antarctic and the Japanese Antarctic Expedition, led by Nobu Shirase, departed Tokyo on the ship Kainan Maru.
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Francisco I. Madero crossed into Mexico from Texas somewhere between Laredo and Eagle Pass at 6:00 p.m. with ten men and 100 rifles in order to start an armed insurrection against the sitting Mexican government.
Upon crossing, he found only ten additional men, and then returned to Texas to regroup.
It was, nonetheless, the beginning of the Mexican Revolution and it is celebrated today as Revolution Day in Mexico.
We have said elsewhere:
Leo Tolstoy, age 82, died.
Riots in Puebla Mexico resulted in the death of more than 100 people, including Aquiles Serdán, a politician and a supporter of Madero, who was killed defending his home in hopes of a general local insurrection.
A huge British Suffrage march turned violent, resulting in what was termed Black Friday.
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President Taft was in Panama City inspecting the Panama Canal, where he assured Panamanians that the US wasn't going to grab the canal "so long as Panama performed her part under the treaty."
And there's this
Eugene B. Ely took off in an airplane from the USS Birmingham in the first shipboard takeoff.
He landed in Hampton Roads.
He'd follow that up by being the first person to land an airplane on a ship on January 18, 1911.
Not too surprisingly, he died in an aviation accident on October 19, 1911. He received a posthumous Distinguished Flying Cross on February 16, 1933.
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The Republican Party lost control of the House of Representatives. The 62nd Congress would have 230 Democrats, 162 Republicans, one Progressive Republican, now an extinct species, and the first Socialist ever elected to Congress, incoming U.S. Representative Victor L. Berger of Milwaukee.
Overall, politics were swinging leftward, with the Democrats, which had been the conservative party, beginning their slow migration to the left.
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The first commercial airplane flight took place when Wright Company pilot Philip Parmalee transported two bolts of silk (worth $1,000) from Dayton, Ohio, to Columbus, for delivery to the Morehouse-Martens Department Store in Columbus.
Predictably, Parmalee died two years later in an airplane crash.
The HMCS Rainbow arrived at Esquimault, British Columbia, to begin her service patrolling the Pacific coast. She was the Royal Canadian Navy's second ship.
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Twenty-year-old ranch hand Antonio Rodriguez was lynched by being burned alive by a mob in Rocksprings Texas after having been accused of murdering a "white woman". His murder in Texas sparked a reaction in Mexico, which was on the verge of revolution as it was, leading to boycotts on U.S. businesses and partially leading to the Plan of San Diego.
President Taft denied that the US was considering annexting Panama.
Interesting, isn't it? The U.S. was in its high colonial era, having just beaten Span in the Spanish American War, and yet it didn't annext Cuba and it wasn't threatening to annex Panama, where it had constructed the canal. Oh for the days when Republican Presidents weren't threatening to annex everything in site.
Of course, McKinley, Roosevelt and Taft weren't demented narcissists.
Former Democratic Mayor of New York City, the city's second Roman Catholic mayor, died at age 55.
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Czar Nicholas II expanded the Pale of Settlement, that area within the Russian Empire in which Jews could reside.
