Year 1894 (MDCCCXCIV) was a common year starting on Monday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar and a common year starting on Saturday of the 12-day slower Julian calendar.
Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a long-lasting, practical electric light bulb. Dubbed "The Wizard of Menlo Park" (now Edison, New Jersey) by a newspaper reporter, he was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production and large-scale teamwork to the process of invention, and because of that, he is often credited with the creation of the first industrial research laboratory.
Edison is the fourth most prolific inventor in history, holding 1,093 US patents in his name, as well as many patents in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. He is credited with numerous inventions that contributed to mass communication and, in particular, telecommunications. These included a stock ticker, a mechanical vote recorder, a battery for an electric car, electrical power, recorded music and motion pictures.
Amy Marcy Cheney Beach (September 5, 1867 – December 27, 1944) was an American composer and pianist. She was the first successful American female composer of large-scale art music. Most of her compositions and performances were under the name Mrs. H.H.A. Beach.
Amy Beach was bern in Henniker, New Hampshire into a distinguished New England family. A child prodigy, she was able to sing forty tunes accurately by age one; by age two she could improvise a countermelody to any melody her mother sang, she taught herself to read at only four years old, and began composing simple waltzes at five years old . She began formal piano lessons with her mother at the age of six, and a year later started giving public recitals, playing works by Handel, Beethoven, Chopin, and her own pieces.
In 1875, Beach's family moved to Boston, where they were advised to enter her into a European conservatory. Her parents opted for local training, hiring Ernst Perabo and later Carl Baermann as piano teachers. At age fourteen, Amy received her only formal training in composition with Junius W. Hill, with whom she studied harmony and counterpoint for a year. Other than this year of training, Amy was self-taught; she often learned by studying classical pieces, such as Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier.
Annie Oakley (August 13, 1860 – November 3, 1926), born Phoebe Ann Moses, was an American sharpshooter and exhibition shooter. Oakley's amazing talent and timely rise to fame led to a starring role in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, which propelled her to become the first American female superstar.
Oakley's most famous trick is perhaps being able to repeatedly split a playing card, edge-on, and put several more holes in it before it could touch the ground, while using a .22 caliber rifle, at 90 feet.
Phoebe Ann (Annie) Moses was born in "a cabin less than two miles northwest of Willowdell in Partentown North Star, Ohio", a rural western border county of Ohio. Her birthplace log cabin site is about five miles eastward of North Star. There is a stone-mounted plaque in the vicinity of the cabin site, which was placed by the Annie Oakley Committee in 1981, 121 years after her birth.
Annie's parents were Quakers of English descent from Hollidaysburg, Blair County, Pennsylvania: Susan Wise, age 18, and Jacob Moses (1860 U.S. Census shows his father's name as Mauzy, born 1799), age 49, married in 1848. A fire burned down their tavern in Hollidaysburg, so they moved to a rented farm (later purchased with a mortgage) in Patterson Township, Darke County. The move occurred sometime between 1855 and her sister Sarah Ellen's Darke County birth in 1857.[citation needed]
Josef Gabriel Rheinberger (17 March 1839, in Vaduz – 25 November 1901, in Munich) was a German organist and composer, born in Liechtenstein.
When only seven years old Rheinberger became organist at Vaduz Parish Church, and his first composition was performed the following year. In 1851 he entered the Munich Conservatory, where he later became professor of piano and subsequently professor of composition. When the Munich Conservatorium was dissolved he was appointed répétiteur at the Court Theatre, from which he resigned in 1867.
Rheinberger married his former pupil Franziska von Hoffnaass in 1867. He was influenced by painting and literature (especially English and German).
In 1877 Rheinberger obtained the rank of court conductor, a position that gave him responsibility for the music in the royal chapel. He was later awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. A distinguished teacher, he numbered many Americans among his pupils, including Horatio Parker, William Berwald, George Whitefield Chadwick, Bruno Klein, and Henry Holden Huss. When the present Conservatorium was founded in Munich, Rheinberger was appointed its professor of organ and composition, a post he held until his death. He was also given the title "Royal Professor".