The Year 1881 Trivia Quiz

Answer: Grover Cleveland

The year started with Rutherford B. Hayes, and James Garfield was inaugurated in March (following the election of 1880.) Garfield was assassinated in September of the same year, and was replaced by his vice president, Chester Alan Arthur. Grover Cleveland succeeded Arthur in 1885.

Garfield was in office for 6 months and 15 days, which was the second shortest term in the first 43 presidents. The shortest was William Henry Harrison with 31 days in 1841. Garfield was also the first left-handed president.

Answer: William Gladstone

Britain's political leadership was more stable than that of the US at this time ... Gladstone served as PM from 1868-1874, from 1880-1885, part of 1886, and 1892-1894. Disraeli and the Marquis of Salisbury filled in the gaps. The Marquis of Salisbury was Prime Minister in 1901, the year of Queen Victoria's death. Disraeli actually died in 1881.

The year 1886 saw the office of Prime Minister change hands twice, but unlike the US Presidency in 1881 only 2 men held the position: Salisbury, Gladstone and Salisbury again.

Answer: Alexander II

Alexander II was assassinated by anarchists. He was a liberal reformer and freed the Russian serfs... unfortunately, the left hated him for not doing enough and the right hated him for doing anything at all. Ivan IV (the Terrible) ruled in the 1500's, Catherine in the 1700's, and Nicholas II, of course, was killed by the Bolsheviks in 1918.

Answer: Perforated toilet paper on a roll

Perforated toilet paper was patented in 1871. The Virtual Toilet Paper Museum (do a Google search) has a picture of medicated and perforated toilet paper from the mid-1880s. It was manufactured by the Albany Perforated Wrapping Paper Co., from Albany, NY, claimed to cure and prevent hemmorhoids, and sold for 50 cents a roll-- quite a princely sum in those days!

Sliced bread was first sold in the US in 1928, with the use of a machine invented by Otto Frederick Rohwedder. He had been working on the machine since 1912. Battle Creek, Michigan and Chillicothe, Missouri both claim to be the first place where sliced bread was sold.

Answer: A photograph of the village of Edgefield, South Carolina, which had been 2/3 destroyed by fire the night before

The paper contains no photographs-- I know of no papers of the 1880s that do, including the larger ones such as the New York Times or The Times (London). The destruction of the village gets a paragraph in the "Current News" column.

The ad for buttons is part of a large ad for Shoneman Brothers in Philadelphia. You can also get 3-button kid gloves for 50 cents-- the same price as that roll of medicated toilet paper! About 1/2 the space on the front page is taken up by ads, which again is typical of papers from the period.

The poem is a dreadful piece of doggerel entitled "Coltish Days," reprinted from the St. Louis Post Dispatch. The young man mourns parting from his sweetheart for 3 days, and on the fourth finds another girl. There is also a column titled "A little bit of everything" that has bad jokes, good advice, and the item on the "drummers" from Boston that are calling for gospel cars on trains so that Christian travelers can have "accommodation for prayer meetings and religious discourse." "Drummers" was a name for travelling salesmen of the time... remember the first scene of "The Music Man?" Picture all of those blokes having a religious debate... no wonder they wanted their own rail car!

Newspapers were very different things in 1881! Not a celebrity story in sight, and much less news and opinion than we are accustomed to today.

Answer: The Vatican

The secret Vatican archives, containing (it is thought) about 150,000 items, were first opened on a limited basis to scholars in 1881 by Pope Leo XIII. The archives are still open today, on a limited basis. If you want access, you have to apply and prove your qualifications (undergraduates need not apply) and must request the specific document that you want. There is no browsing, and since the collection is not fully cataloged, there are still documents that are effectively not accessible. Oh, and switch off your mobile phone in the study rooms, use only graphite pencils for making notes, and generally behave yourself or your library card will be unceremoniously revoked! (The rules are on the Vatican website.)

The other organizations named, to my knowledge, do not have secret archives.

Answer: Dostoyevski and Mussorgsky

Dostoyevski's best known works include "Crime and Punishment" and "The Brothers Karamazov." "Night on Bald Mountain" was popularized in the Disney movie "Fantasia." Mussorgsky's better known works include "Boris Godunov" and "Pictures at an Exhibition."

Dostoyevsky was 59 at his death, and Mussorgsky was only 42.

Answer: Gas light

Electric lights were not yet in general use, though they were soon to become popular. Candles of course were still around but in a city a family with the means would have used oil lamps (in America) because they were more efficient and effective or (especially in much of Europe), gas lights.

Gas lighting was also in use at the time, and seems to have been more prevalent in Great Britain than in the United States.

Answer: All of them

The seeds of the 20th century: Bartok was one of the most important composers of the early 20th century, Picasso was the pioneer of cubism and was equally important in the visual arts, and Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, the first antibiotic to be discovered, in 1928-- oddly the same year that sliced bread was first sold-- thus greatly enhancing humanity's capability of dealing with disease.

P.G. Wodehouse, creator of the Jeeves and Wooster stories, Kemal Ataturk, father of modern Turkey, and the legendary ballerina Anna Pavlova were also born in 1881.

Answer: Smallpox

The smallpox vaccine was developed in 1798, and was in fact the original vaccine... the word vaccine comes from "vacca," Latin for cow, referring to the use of cowpox to confer immunity against smallpox. Prior to the development of vaccination, a technique known as variolation was used, which involved injecting the patient with live smallpox virus in hopes that they would get a mild case of the disease and become immune. Needless to say, it didn't always work as intended.

Vaccines for tuberculosis and yellow fever were developed in the first half of the 20th century. TB is making a comeback in the beginning of the 21st century, primarily because of drug-resistant bacteria and decline in vaccination among certain segments of the population. There is as yet no vaccine for malaria, although there is promising current research.

Thanks for taking my quiz, I hope you enjoyed it!