Today -100: February 6, 1910: Of Poles, suffragette militancy, patents, lost money, and medical risks

President Taft has promised to attend the American-Polish national congress in May, and Germany is pissed off. Rather like China complaining about Obama meeting the Dalai Lama. The Conservative Post (Berlin) says this would be a deliberate and unfriendly challenge to Germany, Russia and Austria, the countries which carved up Poland.

British suffragette leader Christabel Pankhurst tells the NYT that the Women’s Social and Political Union will declare a truce in militant tactics as an experiment to see whether the new cabinet and the new Parliament will “yield to peaceful agitation”. She thinks that the loss of Asquith’s majority may make him more amenable to pressure (Spoiler alert: no it won’t).

In 1909, 37,261 patents were issued. Of those, 5,232 went to New Yorkers, the most of any state. 38 went to Nevada.

A messenger boy for the stock exchange company Hornblower & Weeks lost a $10,000 bill. He stopped to show it to his friends and it disappeared.

Dr. William Lawrence Woodruff, the author of Therapeutics of Vibration: The Healing of the Sick, an Exact Science, who believed in “the simple life and Spartan methods of raising children” and “first practiced his theories on his infant children, who thrive on coarse foods and ice baths and the wearing of only a single garment even in the coldest weather,” has died. A fat patient fell on him.