CATHERINE TOZER COOMBES, born (d:1914) One day in 1897, a little old man, penniless and disheveled, walked into an English police station and begged for admission to a country poorhouse. “I am a woman,” the man said, thus opening the strange case of Kate Tozer. To escape a brutal husband, she said, she had dressed in male attire and lived as “Charlie Wilson,” a house painter, for almost half a century, fearing all those years that her husband might find her if she were not so disguised. The novelist Charles Reade, fascinated by the story, investigated it on his own and discovered that it was only true in part.

What had really occurred was this: Kate Tozer had indeed married Tom Coombes, but he had not mistreated her. Having inherited ten pounds from an aunt, she appeared dressed as a man before her husband one day and announced “I am no longer Kate. My name is Fred.” They continued to live together as Tom and Fred, both working as house painters. Then one day, “Fred” fell in love with Nelly Smith and they eloped, together with Tom. When the police, spurred on by Nelly’s parents, broke down the Coombes’ door, they found Tom smoking his pipe and reading a newspaper, while “Fred” and Nelly went at it on the sofa. It’s only after “Fred” got out of jail that she became “Charlie Wilson” and eventually settled down and found herself a nice bride named Anne Ridgeway, about whom, alas, he tells us nothing. One would like to hear her story.

STANDARD TIME established on this date. Until 1883 United States railroads each chose their own time standards. The Pennsylvania Railroad used the system of "Allegheny Time" system that was an astronomical time keeping service developed by Samuel Langley at the Western University of Pennsylvania's Allegheny Observatory in Pittsburgh. Instituted in 1869, the Allegheny Observatory's service is believed to have been the first regular and systematic system of time distribution to railroads and cities as well as the origin of the modern standard time system.

By 1870, the Allegheny Time service extended over 2,500 miles with 300 telegraph offices receiving time signals. However, almost all railroads out of New York ran on New York time, and railroads west from Chicago mostly used Chicago time, but between Chicago and Pittsburgh/Buffalo the norm was Columbus time, even on railroads that didn't run through Columbus. The Santa Fe used Jefferson City (Missouri) time all the way to its west end at Deming, New Mexico, as did the east-west lines across Texas; Central Pacific and Southern Pacific used San Francisco time all the way to El Paso. The Northern Pacific had seven time zones between St Paul and the 1883 west end of the railroad at Wallula Jct, but Union Pacific had two between Omaha and Ogden.

In 1870 Charles F. Dowd had proposed four time zones based on the meridian through Washington D.C. for North American railroads. In 1872, he recommended the Greenwich meridian. Sandford Fleming, a Canadian, proposed worldwide Standard Time at a meeting of the Royal Canadian Institute on February 8, 1879. Cleveland Abbe advocated standard time to better coordinate international weather observations and resultant weather forecasts, which had been coordinated using local solar time. He recommended four time zones across the contiguous United States, based on Greenwich Mean Time, in 1879. The General Time Convention (renamed the American Railway Association in 1891), an organization of American railroads aimed at coordinating schedules and operating standards, became increasingly concerned that if the United States government adopted a standard time scheme it would work to the disadvantage of its member railroads. William F. Allen, the secretary of the General Time Convention, argued that North American railroads should adopt a five zone standard, similar to the one in use today, to avoid government action. On October 11, 1883, the heads of the major railroads met in Chicago at the former Grand Pacific Hotel and agreed to adopt Allen's proposed system.

The members agreed that on Sunday, November 18, 1883, all United States and Canadian railroads would readjust their clocks and watches to reflect the new five zone system on a telegraph signal sent from the Allegheny Observatory in Pittsburgh at exactly noon on the 90th meridian. Although most railroads adopted the new system as scheduled, some did so early on October 7 and others late on December 2. The Intercolonial Railway serving the Canadian maritime provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia just east of Maine decided not to adopt Intercolonial Time based on the 60th meridian west of Greenwich, instead adopting Eastern Time, so only four time zones were actually adopted by U.S./Canadian railroads in 1883. Major American observatories, including the Allegheny Observatory, the United States Naval Observatory, the Harvard College Observatory, and the Yale University Observatory, agreed to provided telegraphic time signals at noon Eastern Time.

Standard time was not enacted into law until the 1918 Standard Time Act established standard time in time zones in U.S. law as well as daylight saving time (DST). The daylight savings time law was repealed in 1919 over a presidential veto, but reestablished nationally during World War II.

On this date Mexico City police raided an affluent drag ball, arresting 42 cross-dressed men. But one was released, supposedly a close relative to President Porfirio Díaz. The resulting scandal, known as the DANCE OF THE 41 MARICONES, received massive press coverage. The press was keen to report the incident, in spite of the government's efforts to hush it up, since the participants belonged to the upper echelons of society. The list of the detainees was never published.

On Sunday night, at a house on the fourth block of Calle la Paz, the police burst into a dance attended by 41 unaccompanied men wearing women's clothes. Among those individuals were some of the dandies seen every day on Calle Plateros. They were wearing elegant ladies' dresses, wigs, false breasts, earrings, embroidered slippers, and their faces were painted with highlighted eyes and rosy cheeks. When the news reached the street, all forms of comments were made and the behavior of those individuals was subjected to censure. We refrain from giving our readers further details because they are exceedingly disgusting.  —Contemporary press report.

A rumor, neither confirmed nor denied, soon emerged, claiming that there were in reality 42 participants, with the forty-second being Ignacio de la Torre, Porfirio Díaz's son-in-law, who was allowed to escape. Although the raid was illegal and completely arbitrary, the 41 were convicted and conscripted into the army and sent to Yucatán where the Caste War was still being fought:

The derelicts, petty thieves, and cross-dressers sent to Yucatán are not in the battalions of the Army fighting against the Maya Indians, but have been assigned to public works in the towns retaken from the common enemy of civilization.  —El Popular, 25 November 1901

In 1901 there was a similar raid on a group of Lesbians in Santa María, but that incident received far less attention.

As a result of the scandal, the numbers 41 and 42 were adopted by Mexican popular parlance to refer to homosexuality, with 42 reserved for passive homosexuals. The incident and the numbers were spread through press reports, but also through engravings, satires, plays, literature, and paintings; in recent years, they have even appeared on television, in the historical telenovela El vuelo del águila, first broadcast by Televisa in 1994. In 1906 Eduardo A. Castrejón published a book titled Los cuarenta y uno. Novela crítico-social. José Guadalupe Posada's engravings alluding to the affair are famous, and were frequently published alongside satirical verses.

Such was the impact of the affair that the number 41 became taboo, as described by the essayist Francisco L. Urquizo:

“In Mexico, the number 41 has no validity and is offensive... The influence of this tradition is so strong that even officialdom ignores the number 41. No division, regiment, or battalion of the army is given the number 41. From 40 they progress directly to 42. No payroll has a number 41. Municipal records show no houses with the number 41; if this cannot be avoided, 40 bis is used. No hotel or hospital has a room 41. Nobody celebrates their 41st birthday, going straight from 40 to 42. No vehicle is assigned a number plate with 41, and no police officer will accept a badge with that number.”  —Francisco L. Urquizo