Also in April 1905…
30th: Albert Einstein completes his doctoral thesis A New Determination of
Molecular Dimensions, the second of five documents that will later lead to 1905 being widely regarded as his ‘miracle year’. In it, Einstein uses his knowledge of fluids to set out an innovative method of measuring the dimensions of molecules with a degree of accuracy not previously achievable.
2nd: A service is conducted by Swiss and Italian bishops to bless the spot at which workers on the two sides of the Simplon railway tunnel have recently met in the middle. Running for 12 miles under the Swiss Alps, the tunnel will be used for the first time in January 1906, eight years after its construction began.
14th: Richard Strauss conducts the first performance of Humperdinck’s Die Heirat wider Willen (The Forced Marriage) in Berlin. Based on Dumas’s play Les demoiselles de Saint Cyr, the opera tells a comic tale of two men, Robert Graf von Montfort and Emil Duval, who have to agree to marriage to secure their release from prison. Soprano Emmy Destinn plays Hedwig, Montfort’s rejected wife.
18th: In a letter to zoologist Adam Sedgwick, Cambridge University biologist William Bateson makes the first suggestion of the word ‘genetics’ to describe the study of inheritance and the science of variation.
He will introduce the term publicly at the
Third International Conference on Plant Hybridisation in London the following year. 30th: Tsar Nicholas II of Russia issues an
Edict of Toleration, granting legal status to those who are not Orthodox Christians. As well as providing protection from religious persecution, the edict allows mixed marriages between different religions and allows Orthodox Christians to adopt children from other religions.