By Barry Boyce, CyclingRevealed
Historian

• 2nd Tour de France - “The Tour is finished… a victim of its own popularity,” wrote the race director Henri Desgranges after the 1904 Tour became a contest of cheating and sabotage.

• Panama Canal - 1904, construction on the Panama Canal began. Mariners had long wanted to find a way to connect the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. In the 1800’s a group of Frenchman started digging the Canal but ran out of money. Under the direction of Teddy Roosevelt, the new Republic of Panama accepted the right of way for the Ocean-to-Ocean Canal. When Roosevelt visited the Canal in 1906, he became the first sitting President of the USA to travel beyond the borders of the country.

• Trans-Siberian Railway - Before the turn of the century, the Czar of Russia started a huge public works project, to build a rail line across the vast land of Siberia. The project was completed in 1904.

• Russian / Japanese War - 1904, the war began on February 8, 1904 with the Japanese attack on Port Arthur in Manchuria and ended on September 5, 1905 with the signing of the Treaty of Portsmouth. The Japanese defeat of the Great Russian Empire signaled a shift in the balance of World power.

• Louis Cartier - Creation of the first wristwatch for aviator Santos-Dumont.

• New York City - Following London in 1863, Boston in 1897, and Pairs in 1900, Manhattan opened its first subway. The fare was a nickel.

Notable Deaths -
Henry Morton Stanley, 1841-1904, a reporter for the New York Herald, Stanley was sent to Africa to search for a missing Scottish explorer. His journey ended in what is now Tanzania with “Dr. Livingstone I presume?”

1903

1905

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