Cornelius Marion Hutton (1835 - 1922)

Refresh this page to see various historical events that occurred during Cornelius' lifetime.

In 1835, in the year that Cornelius Marion Hutton was born, on June 2nd, P. T. Barnum and his "circus" began their first tour of the U.S. He had paid $1,000 for an elderly slave named Joice Heth, who he claimed was 161 years old and a former nurse for George Washington. Touring the northeast of the U.S., he made more than $1,000 per week. Joice died the next year - at about 80 years old.

In 1849, Cornelius was only 14 years old when on January 23rd, British-born Elizabeth Blackwell became a doctor in the U.S. She earned a medical degree at the Geneva Medical College in New York. Blackwell was the first female doctor with a degree in the U.S.

In 1860, at the age of 25 years old, Cornelius was alive when on April 3rd, the Pony Express began its first delivery from St. Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento, California. The trip took 10 days and the riders carried 49 letters, five telegrams, and newspapers for San Francisco and other cities along the way.

In 1899, he was 64 years old when the meaning of Chinese "oracle bones" was rediscovered. Farmers in China had been turning up the bones in their fields for generations but most often they were ground up and sold as medicine. The chancellor of the Imperial Academy and a friend noticed, before they ground the bones, that they had writing. The bones had been used around the second millennium BC for divination.

In 1922, in the year of Cornelius Marion Hutton's passing, the Reparations Commission assessed German liability for World War 1 at 132 billion gold marks (over $32 billion U.S. dollars at the time). This led to hyperinflation in Germany and created the political and social atmosphere in which Hitler was able to rise to power.