The South Fork Dam collapses in western…

Three cities in Washington have "great fires" in the summer of 1889.

The Great Seattle Fire destroys the entire central business district of Seattle on June 6.

The Great Ellensburg Fire of July 4 and 5 results in the city's bid to become the state capital ending in failure.

The Great Spokane Fire of August 4 destroys the city's downtown commercial district

Other fires this summer in the U.S. include the Great Bakersfield Fire of 1889, which destroys most of town (later reincorporated as a city) on July 7, and the Santiago Canyon Fire, which burns large parts of Orange County, Riverside County, and San Diego County during the last week of September.

The Capilano Suspension Bridge (the longest suspension foot-bridge in the world) is opened in British Columbia in 1889.

Built in by George Grant Mackay, a Scottish civil engineer and park commissioner for Vancouver, it is made of hemp ropes with a deck of cedar planks, and will be replaced with a wire cable bridge in 1903.

Rugby union teams from different continents rarely meet in this time before air travel.

The first two notable tours had both taken place in 1888—the British Isles team touring New Zealand and Australia followed by the New Zealand team touring Europe.

The most prestigious tours will be the Southern Hemisphere countries of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa making a tour of a Northern Hemisphere, and the return tours made by a joint British and Irish team.

Tours last for months, due to long traveling times and the number of games undertaken; the 1888 New Zealand team had begun their tour in Hawkes Bay in June and do not complete their schedule until August 1889, having played one hundred and seven rugby matches.

Touring international sides will play Test matches against international opponents, including national, club and county sides in the case of Northern Hemisphere rugby, or provincial/state sides in the case of Southern Hemisphere rugby.

The Australian wine industry, based on vines first planted by English settlers, grows rapidly in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Vine cuttings from the Cape of Good Hope had been brought to the penal colony of New South Wales by Governor Phillip on the First Fleet (1788).

An attempt at wine making from these first vines had failed, but with perseverance, other settlers had managed to successfully cultivate vines for winemaking, and Australian made wine was available for sale domestically by the 1820s.

Gregory Blaxland had become the first person to export Australian wine in 1822, and the first winemaker to win an overseas award.

Vineyards had been established in the Hunter Valley in 1830.

James Busby had returned from France and Spain in 1833 with a serious selection of grape varieties, including most classic French grapes and a good selection of grapes for fortified wine production.

Wine from the Adelaide Hills had been sent to Queen Victoria in 1844, but there is no evidence that she placed an order as a result.

The production and quality of Australian wine had been much improved by the arrival of free settlers from various parts of Europe, who have used their skills and knowledge to establish some of Australia's premier wine regions.

For example, emigrants from Prussia in the mid 1850s were important in establishing South Australia's Barossa Valley as a winemaking region.

Early Australian winemakers had faced many difficulties, particularly due to the unfamiliar Australian climate.

However, they eventually achieve considerable success.

"At the 1873 Vienna Exhibition the French judges, tasting blind, praised some wines from Victoria, but withdrew in protest when the provenance of the wine was revealed, on the grounds that wines of that quality must clearly be French." (Phillips, Roderick (2000). A short history of wine. London: Allen Lane. p.265.)

Australian wines continue to win high honors in French competitions.

A Victorian Syrah (also called Shiraz) competing in the 1878 Paris Exhibition had been likened to Château Margaux and "its taste completed its trinity of perfection." (Phlllips. p. 265.)

One Australian wine had won a gold medal "first class" at the 1882 Bordeaux International Exhibition and another wins a gold medal "against the world" at the 1889 Paris International Exhibition.

This is all before the destructive effects on the industry of the phylloxera epidemic, which will eventually find its way to Australia.

Charles-Marie David de Mayréna, the French monarch of the Kindgom of Sedang, a micronation that he had founded in 1888, subsequently offers to cede his kingdom to the French Third Republic in exchange for monopoly trade rights and hints that the Prussians are interested if the French were not.

When the French government fails to respond positively, Mayréna approaches the British in Hong Kong.

When he is rebuffed there he travels to Belgium, where in 1889 a financier named Somsy offers to provide him with arms and money in exchange for the kingdom's mineral rights.

Mayréna's return to Sedang is thwarted by the French Navy, who blockade Vietnamese ports, and by the seizure of his arms as contraband at Singapore.

During his travels to Southeast Asia and Europe, Mayréna awards dozens of titles of nobility, orders of knighthood and assorted medals and paraphernalia to his supporters.

He also creates a series of postage stamps that are the main tangible legacy of his kingdom.

The Guangxu Emperor had been old enough in 1887 to begin to rule in his own right, but the previous year, several courtiers, including Prince Chun and Weng Tonghe, had petitioned Empress Dowager Cixi to postpone her retirement from the regency.

Despite Cixi's agreement to remain as regent, by 1886 the Guangxu Emperor had begun to write comments on memorials to the throne.

In the spring of 1887, he had taken part in his first field-plowing ceremony, and by the end of the year he had begun to rule under Cixi's supervision.

Eventually, in February 1889, in preparation for Cixi's retirement, the Guangxu Emperor is married.

Much to the emperor's dislike, Cixi selects her niece, Jingfen, to be empress.

She becomes known as Empress Longyu.

She also selects a pair of sisters, who become Consorts Jin and Zhen, to be the emperor's concubines.

The following week, with the Guangxu Emperor married, Cixi retires from the regency.

W. T. Odhner uses pin-wheels for the next generation of mechanical calculating machines.

Odhner had studied at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm from 1864 to 1867 but left before graduating.

At age twenty-three, in 1868, he had moved to Saint Petersburg, Russia, even though he spoke no Russian.

As soon as he arrived, he went to the Swedish consulate, which found him a job in a local mechanical workshop.

A few months later he joined the Nobel's mechanical factory owned by a Swede named Ludvig Nobel (1831–1888), brother of Alfred Nobel of Nobel Prize fame, where he worked until 1877.

In 1878 he joined the Expedition, a large paper mill and printing house, and worked there until 1892.

While working at the Expedition, Odhner had started his own workshop in 1885, building high quality production machines for local manufacturing businesses.

One of his biggest project was the manufacturing of printing presses, he also made cigarette-making machines and all kind of scientific instruments.

Odhner will officially start the production of his arithmometer in this workshop in 1890.

Early on, Mr. F. N. Hill, a British citizen, will become his associate but will leave the company around 1897, making Odhner the sole proprietor until his death in 1905.

After Odhner's death, his sons Alexander and Georg and son-in-law Karl Siewert will continue  the production and about twenty-three thousand calculators will be made before the factory is forced to close down in 1918.

Independent clone makers from all over the world, including Russia, will carry the design from 1893 well into the 1970s.

Ahad Ha'am's solution is cultural Zionism: the establishment in Palestine of small settlements aimed at reviving the Jewish spirit and culture in the modern world.

In the cultural Zionist vision, a small number of Jewish cadres well versed in Jewish culture and speaking Hebrew will settle in Palestine.

Ahad Ha'am believes that by settling in that ancient land, religious Jews will replace their metaphysical attachment to the Holy Land with a Hebrew cultural renaissance.

Palestine and the Hebrew language are important not because of their religious significance but because they have been an integral part of the Jewish people's history and cultural heritage.

Ahad Ha'am, after joining the central committee of Hibbat Zion, publishes his first essay, Lo ze ha-derekh ("This is not the Way"), which emphasizes the spiritual basis of Zionism.

His views on Zionism are rooted in the changing nature of Jewish communal life in Eastern Europe.

Ahad Ha'am realizes that a new meaning to Jewish life will have to be found for the younger generation of East European Jews who are revolting against traditional Jewish practice.

Whereas Jews in the West can participate in and benefit from a secular culture, Jews in the East are oppressed.

While Herzl will later focus on the plight of Jews alone, Ahad Ha'am is also interested in the plight of Judaism, which can no longer be contained within the limits of traditional religion.

Wassily Kandinsky, sent by the University of Moscow on an ethnographic mission to the province of Vologda, in the forested north, in 1889,  returns with a lasting interest in the often garish, nonrealistic styles of Russian folk painting.

During that same year,  the twenty-three-year-old painter discovers the Rembrandts in the Hermitage at St. Petersburg, and he furthers his visual education with a trip to Paris.

Kandinsky, whose mother is a Muscovite, one of his great-grandmothers a Mongolian princess, and his father a native of Kyakhta, a Siberian town near the Chinese border, had grown up with a cultural heritage that is partly European and partly Asian.

His family is genteel, affluent, and fond of travel; while still a child Kandinsky had become familiar with Venice, Rome, Florence, the Caucasus, and the Crimean Peninsula.

At Odessa, where his parents settled in 1871, he completed his secondary schooling and became an amateur performer on the piano and the cello.

He also became an amateur painter (he will later recall, as a sort of first impulse toward abstraction, an adolescent conviction that each color had a mysterious life of its own).

In 1886 he had began to study law and economics at the University of Moscow, but he continues to have unusual feelings about color as he contemplates the city's vivid architecture and its collections of icons (in the latter, he will later say, can be found the roots of his own art).