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Louis Pasteur founded microbiology and immunology (vaccinations)

Karl Ferdinand Braun introduces the first inductive coupling and the first directional antenna

Herbert G. Wells publishes “The War of the Worlds”

Nikola Tesla gives a crowded demonstration at Madison Square Garden in New York City of a remote-controlled robot ship with built-in automatic torpedoes. But Tesla is truly ahead of his time. Rumors that he is a “Venusian” alien are spreading in the popular press.

Nikola Tesla told a New York newspaper that he could heat water simply with the sun’s rays to produce steam, which then turned a turbine and an alternator to produce electricity.

Pierre and Marie Curie discovered radium during their research on radioactivity (alpha, beta, gamma rays)

Fashoda (present-day Kodok), Eastern Sudan. The British, led by Sir Herbert Kitchener, and the French, led by Major Jean-Baptist Marchand, unexpectedly meet. The former want to create a continuous British territory from Cairo to the Cape of Good Hope, the latter want to do the

Sudan. Battle of Omdurman. British and Egyptian forces, using Maxim machine guns and rifles, massacre the vastly superior Sudanese army. (1,000 British and 17,000 Egyptians defeat 57,000 Sudanese. The former suffer 47 dead, while the Sudanese leave 10,000 dead and 13,000 wounded.

H.G. Wells’s short story “The War of the Worlds” is published.

Calcutta. Englishman Ronald Ross explains the cause of malaria. He will win the Nobel Prize for it. For decades, there will be a dispute with Italian Giovanni Battista Grassi over the authorship of the discovery.

Crete becomes a British protectorate

Max Planck discovers the photon

Spain-USA War over the Philippines and Cuba, 2,446 American casualties

Italy. The first hydrofoil is launched, designed by Milanese Enrico Forlanini. It will remain an experimental vessel for a long time, until half a century later it is developed by the Americans, before returning to calm Italian waters.

The Klondike, between Canada and Alaska, is the destination of 100,000 workers a year to extract gold; the area was practically uninhabited until a few years earlier; the US Army and the Canadian Red Coats intervened to maintain order.

Planck’s constant is not 0!!!

McKinley is president of the United States

German Felix Hoffman of Bayer synthesizes aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid)

The first Oldsmobile (which would later become GM) is produced.

The 38-Minute War. Between 9:02 and 9:40, Britain was officially at war with Zanzibar. It was the shortest conflict in history. Sultan Hamad bin Thuwaini opposed the Royal Navy’s attempt to enter the port and opened fire. The Royal Navy returned fire and destroyed the

Joseph John Thomson discovered that a cathode ray tube emitted charged particles with a mass 1/1800th that of a hydrogen atom. These were electrons. The usefulness of this discovery and of these particles was completely unknown at the time. Thomson himself wondered how such a

A tsunami in Japan causes 22,000 deaths.

Nicholas II becomes Tsar

Rebirth of the Olympics. On April 6, 1896, the first Olympic Games of the modern era were held in Athens, reviving the ancient Greek tradition banned 1,500 years earlier by Roman Emperor Theodosius I. The initiative was initiated by French Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who

It is well established that caffeine is present not only in coffee and tea, but also in kola nuts and cocoa.

Becquerel and Curie discover the rays emitted by natural elements (uranium, thorium, radium)

London. Guglielmo Marconi’s provisional patent, “Improvements in Telegraphy and Related Apparatus,” is approved. The final patent, number 12039, will be approved on July 2, 1897. It is a formidable patent that will give Marconi an incredible advantage over the competition.

Bologna. Just two days after obtaining his passport from the police station, Guglielmo Marconi and his mother, Annie Jameson, depart by train from Bologna station for London, where their cousin Enrico (Henry Jameson Davis) awaits them. Henry, a 42-year-old engineer and seasoned entrepreneur, will be

Würzburg Physical Medical Society Reading Theater. Physicist Roentgen provides the first public practical demonstration of X-rays, so called because he did not know what they were, thus assigning them the letter of the quintessential unknown variable.

First film screening in Modena held at the Teatro Storchi

The Lumiere brothers’ 50-second film showing a train arriving at a railway station is screened in Paris.

Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company, which merged with two other companies to become the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM).

Svante Arrhenius builds the theory of the greenhouse effect

Lorentz conjectures that the forces that hold matter together are electromagnetic in nature

Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen discovers X-rays: he manages to illuminate the target by piercing thick materials: he tries first with a deck of cards, then with a book and other materials, and finally with lead, which blocks the X-rays; finally, he shows his discovery to his

Guglielmo Marconi, a twenty-year-old with no college degree, leaps to global prominence as a pioneer of a revolutionary new technology: wireless communication.

The Pittsburgh Reduction Company, which later became Alcoa, was founded. A key factor in making the business viable was the introduction of high-voltage AC (made possible by AC transformers, which DC was not possible at the time). As Tesla predicted, the take-off of the aluminum

The Japanese captured the Korean king during the Korean crisis and installed a pro-Japanese governor. The Chinese, who had also sent a contingent to Korea, were thus outwitted.

Sino-Japanese War, won by Japan

Hong Kong. Frenchman Alexandre Yersin isolates the bubonic plague bacillus.

Modena. The city council approved a project for the city’s urban redevelopment, which included, among other things, the demolition of the block between Via Blasia and Via Coltellini, a part of the former ghetto area considered one of the city’s “unsanitary zones.” The demolition was

Heinrich Hertz publishes “Research on the Propagation of Electric Force”.

John Froehlich builds the first gasoline-powered tractor: it’s a revolution for agriculture.

Henri Poincare’ publishes the trilogy “New Methods of Celestial Mechanics” which deals in particular with the topological study of nonlinear differential equations and the apparently chaotic behavior of their solutions depending on small changes in the initial conditions.

Basketball is born. Canadian James E. Naismith nailed two peach baskets to opposite sides of a gymnasium, developed a simple set of rules, and invented basketball. In 1891, the YMCA (International Young Men’s Christian Association) of Massachusetts presented Naismith, a physical education instructor, with a

Maria Sklodowska (Curie) arrives in Paris to study at the Sorbonne

Thomas Alva Edison sits on the edge of his bed to read a telegram: Judge Wallace has upheld his patent for electric light using a bulb. After all the imitations, challenges, and infringements of the previous 11 years, his first light bulb, in 1880, finally

Columbia College, New York. Nikola Tesla gives a lecture, in which he speaks, in nervous English, to a large audience about ether as a medium for electricity, current as ether in motion, high-frequency current for artificial lightning, and the wireless lamp. The Columbia lecture definitively

Nikola Tesla continued to produce patents continuously, with 40 being approved in 1891 alone, including the polyphase motor and the polyphase transformer.

Oscar Wilde wrote The Canterville Ghost. In the book, he has his ghost use the fourth dimension to walk through walls and escape this world.

Independence of Luxembourg from the Netherlands.

Anti-Tsarist revolutionary movements in Russia

The French company responsible for building the Panama Canal goes bankrupt, leaving many small savers destitute; 20,000 workers die from disease.

Friedrich Nietzsche publishes Twilight of the Idols

Nikola Tesla leaves Westinghouse and travels to Europe, to Paris, to visit the Paris Exposition. Just the year before, Tesla had filed 15 patents for Westinghouse.

Dow Jones & Co. publishes the first issue of the Wall Street Journal

Expo in Paris: the Universal Exposition marking the centenary of the storming of the Bastille and the French Revolution, as well as the 18th anniversary of the Third Republic. The event was financed by state and city funds, with the help of a lottery and

Inauguration of the Eiffel Tower. The Eiffel Tower is inaugurated in Paris. When French engineer Alexander Gustave Eiffel proposed building a wrought-iron lattice tower for the 1889 Paris Exposition, few took him seriously. But Eiffel was a stubborn man, and on March 31, 1889, the

The Eiffel Tower is finished

American Hannibal Goodwin and the American company Eastman Kodak develop cellulose-based photographic and movie film. Both obtain patents. The ability to produce images on flexible material is the cornerstone of the motion picture industry.

Vincent Van Gogh attacks the artist Gauguin, his roommate since February 1888, with a razor; Gauguin takes refuge in a hotel; that same night, Van Gogh cuts off a piece of his left ear.

The French government awarded the Alessandro Volta Prize to Alexander Graham Bell for his patent on the first telephone. The prize would then be awarded by the U.S. Senate, over a century later, to Antonio Meucci (an Italian living in New York, and a friend

Marsh’s first Triceratops fossil, Bisonalticornis, has been discovered in Colorado.

Peano’s Axiomization of Arithmetic: Introducing the 5 Properties of Natural Numbers

England. The unusual personal friendship between Queen Victoria and her subject Abdul, an Indian Muslim, begins. It will last until the queen’s death, 14 years later. Her son, Edward VII, will destroy every trace of this affair, which will only resurface in 2010.

Nikola Tesla founds the Tesla Electric Company with headquarters at 33-35 South Fifth Street a few blocks from Edison’s company.

The United States Patent Office awards the patent for the induction coil transformer to Karolyi Zipernovsky, Otto Blathy, and Miksa Deri of Budapest. This is the so-called ZBD transformer. The AC vs. DC “War of the Currents” begins between Edison and Tesla (who worked for

Statue of Liberty Unveiling Ceremony: US President Grover Cleveland officially unveils the Statue of Liberty. Designed by Frederic Bartholdi, the statue was donated by the French people to the Americans as a sign of friendship. The 152-foot-tall copper and steel sculpture, depicting a woman raising

Thomas Alva Edison enlisted his wife Mina as his assistant in his laboratory. He called her “Billy.”

San Francisco. Levi Strauss had his jeans, patented in 1872, adorned with the famous leather trademark depicting two horses unable to tear a pair of Levi’s. The red label was added in 1936.

The Maxim machine gun is the first functioning portable automatic weapon. It owes its name to American inventor Hiram Maxim, who invented it in 1885. The first portable automatic weapon (which in its first version required 4-6 men to operate) demonstrated in initial tests a

Neodymium is discovered by Baron Carl Auer von Welsbach. The discovery occurred after an attempt to separate the components of didymium, which turned out to be neodymium (a new twin) and praseodymium. A century later, neodymium would be the main component of the most powerful

Arizona, United States. Geronimo and other Chirikawa Apache warriors escape the reservation one last time. They are pursued into Mexico by 5,000 federal soldiers.

The Germans claim the inhospitable coasts of southwest Africa.

First telephone exchange in Modena on Via dello Zono

Thomas Alva Edison’s Hannus horribilis, despite his hyperactivity in patenting and more: his financial follies, the brink of bankruptcy, the humiliating sale of his house (in reality bought back by a trusted front man), the sudden loss of his young wife and mother of his

In 1884, Nikola Tesla arrived in the United States and began working briefly for Thomas Edison. This marked the beginning of a complex relationship between the two inventors, characterized by collaboration, conflict, and, ultimately, a rivalry known as the “War of the Currents.” Edison took

Thomas Alva Edison is awarded US Patent 307031 for the thermionic emission indicator (Edison Effect). Edison did not develop it further, but it was the first vacuum tube that would launch the electronics industry.

From a yacht in St. Augustine, Thomas Alva Edison managed to kill a 700-pound shark with an electrified fishing line. The shark was fatally electrocuted, and was then loaded aboard to be placed on permanent display at the local Vedder Museum.

Gregor Mendel dies in the monastery of Brunn