1874 - Everyday Life

Everyday Life

The Siamese twins Chang and Eng die at Mount Airy, North Carolina, the night of January 16 at age 62, having sired 19 children between them.

Jennie Jerome is married April 15 at the British Embassy in Paris to Lord Randolph Henry Churchill, 24, third son of the 7th duke of Marlborough and newly elected member of Parliament. Wall Street speculator Leonard Jerome is the father of the beautiful, 20-year-old, dark-eyed bride, and although he has suffered financial reverses he provides the couple with an income of £3,000 per year; the duke (who does not attend the ceremony) has had to sell off family treasures but pays Lord Randolph's debts of £2,000 and raises his allowance to £1,100 per year, Lord Randolph makes his maiden speech in the House of Commons May 22, and Jennie gives birth November 30 to a son, Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (see 1895).

New York's Madison Square Garden opens in April under the name Barnum's Hippodrome at the north end of the city's 38-year-old Madison Square Park on Fifth Avenue. Showman P. T. Barnum has taken over a shed used until 1871 as a freight depot for the New York and Harlem Railroad. He has spent $35,000 to remodel the roofless structure and will sell his lease in the winter to Patrick S. Gilmore. who will rename it Gilmore's Garden and will use it for flower shows, policemen's balls, America's first beauty contest, religious and temperance meetings, and the first Westminster Kennel Club Show, while Barnum will pitch his circus tent at Gilmore's Garden each spring (see 1879; Gilmore, 1863; Barnum, 1871; Westminster, 1877).

U.S. inventor William Baldwin improves the steam radiator by screwing short lengths of one-inch pipe into a cast-iron base, but mass production of cast-iron radiators will not come for another 20 years and central heating of U.S. homes and offices not until the turn of the century.