John Francis Ryan (1895 - 1916)

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

In 1895, in the year that John Francis Ryan was born, on March 15th, in County Tipperary, Ireland, Michael Cleary killed his wife of 8 years, Bridget, and burned her body. His defense was that his "wife" was a changeling that was left in his real wife's place when she was abducted by fairies. He was nonetheless convicted and imprisoned for manslaughter. He spent 15 years in prison.

In 1900, at the age of merely 5 years old, John was alive when the German physicist Max Planck formulated an energy theory, postulating the existence of "quanta," which lays the groundwork for the quantum theory of modern physics. In December, he introduced a paper on the Planck postulate which stated that E=hv - the energy of a photon is proportional to its frequency times a constant. Planck won a Nobel Prize in 1918 for his work in theoretical Physics.

In 1906, he was just 11 years old when the great San Francisco earthquake hit, estimated at 7.8 on the Richter scale. The earthquake caused fires that raged for days and between the earthquake and the fire, about 3,000 people were killed and 80% of the City was destroyed.

In 1916, in the year of John Francis Ryan's passing, suffragette Jeannette Pickering Rankin became the first woman elected to the House of Representatives as a Representative at large from Montana. She was the first woman to hold an elected Federal office. Holding the office for two years, she ran again in 1940 and served another two year term. Montana had granted women unrestricted voting rights in 1914, 6 years before women got the vote nationally.