1871 | Everyday Life
Everyday Life
Poker is introduced to Queen Victoria at a royal party in Somerset by U.S. ambassador to Great Britain Robert Cumming Schenck, 62, who shows the queen how to play and at her request writes down the rules, the first written codification of the game (see 1821). Phrases such as ace in the hole, bluff, call a bluff, stand pat, four-flush, and pass the buck will be derived from poker.
Paris couturier Charles Frederick Worth reopens the atelier at 7, rue de la Paix that he started in 1858 (it served as a military hospital during the war with Prussia). His financial partner Otto Bobergh retires, Worth soon has 1,200 workers on his payroll, his customers are now mostly Americans, Britons, Italians, Russians, and Swedes, and by the 1880s he will be the authority not only in fashion but in all questions of taste, producing 6,000 to 7,000 gowns and 4,000 outer garments each year, paying as much attention to the quality and detail on the inside of a garment as to the outside, using the finest fabrics he can find, and sometimes buying a Lyons silk mill's output for an entire year. The Maison Worth will soon be supplying gowns to every royal court in Europe (including that of Queen Victoria), and selling to the nouveau riche not only of Europe and Britain but also of the United States (Astors, Carnegies, Rockefellers, and Vanderbilts will find its prices far lower than those charged in New York) (see 1895).
Bentwood furniture pioneer Michael Thonet dies at Vienna March 3 at age 74, having gained renown for his solid bentwood rocking chairs, hat stands, and settees (see 1851). His sons carry on the 18-year-old firm Gebrüder Thonet, which last year produced some 400,000 low-priced, utilitarian pieces, and will open new factories (see café chair, 1876).
The National Rifle Association founded at New York November 24 by former Union Army officers to encourage marksmanship and gun safety will become a potent political lobby of "sportsmen" with their own interpretations of the Constitution's Second Amendment. Civil War soldiers were often poorly trained and barely able to use their weapons; many returned home with their weapons, making America the most heavily armed nation in the world.