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The Wright brothers learn to turn their aircraft; the aircraft suffers several damages but is repaired

Wilbur Wright reaches 400m in flight with his aircraft

Russia. The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party splits into the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. The former advocate a more gradual approach to socialism, the latter more radical and revolutionary.

Rich Man’s Panic: stock market crisis on Wall Street.

Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Henri Becquerel, Pierre Curie, and Marie Curie for their work on radioactivity.

At the age of 15, Srinivasa Ramanujan was inspired to study mathematics by a copy of a book by George Carr, a list of 4,400 classical mathematical results, without proof. Ramanujan spent the following years proving, with his own mathematics, as many assertions as possible.

Frank Nelson Cole, a professor of mathematics at Columbia University in New York, stood up at the American Mathematical Society conference, went to the blackboard, and without saying a word wrote: 2^67 – 1 = 193707721 * 761838257287, and returned to his seat. After a

First regular radio news service between New York and London sent via Marconi’s invention

Cuba leases Guantanamo Bay military base to the United States

Pius X (Giuseppe Sarto) is Pope

Albert Einstein married Mileva Maric, who had given him a daughter a few years earlier (who was lost after being sent to an orphanage); he divorced Mileva in 1919.

William Harley and Arthur Davidson sell their first motorcycle

United States. Nikola Tesla is no longer able to find finance for his inventions. Guglielmo Marconi has already made the first transmission across the Atlantic, despite Tesla’s promise to JP Morgan. Nikola Tesla will suffer a nervous breakdown. He will live until 1943, but his

Meteor Crater, Arizona. After the interest expressed by German immigrant Fred W. Volz and meteorite collector Albert E. Foote, mining magnate Daniel Barringer also enters the scene: he hopes and believes that the small metallic fragments found near the crater are merely crumbs of the

Volcano eruption on Martinique island: dust and incandescent gases cause 35,000 deaths

Nikola Tesla and Lord Kelvin meet in New York. They agree on two key points: 1) that Martians are attempting to communicate with Earth via radio, and Tesla’s measurements are proof of this; 2) that the planet’s resources are being depleted and something must be

Giuseppe Bezzera invents the electric espresso machine.

Englishman Frederich Lancaster invents disc brakes

P.Cooper-Hewitt and Sir John S. Edward Townsend invent the arc rectifier

The first air conditioner is manufactured by American Willis H. Carrier

Paul Dirac was born in Bristol, England.

Philosopher Sigmund Freud is appointed to the chair of neuropathology at the University of Vienna.

Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. President William McKinley is assassinated. His days of agony receive widespread media coverage. He is succeeded by Vice President Theodore Roosevelt. The Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo also features the electric lighting of Thomas Alva Edison, whose commercial and manufacturing businesses also

Philippines. The insurrection against the United States ends with 4,200 Americans killed (over 10 times those killed in the conflict against Spain, which also claimed the Philippines, among other territories) and over 20,000 Filipinos dead.

Upon hearing the news of Marconi’s experiment, the British writer Rudyard Kipling wrote the science fiction essay “Wireless,” which was published in Scribner’s Magazine in New York.

Venice. The bell tower of St. Mark’s has collapsed. Terrifying cracks had been appearing on the north side for several weeks, worsening until its sudden, tragic end. The bell tower had been under construction since the 9th century, and was not completed until 1511. The

De Beers controls 90% of the global diamond market. It will air the commercial “A diamond is forever,” which, however, isn’t true: every diamond slowly but surely turns into graphite, like that in pencils…

Frenchman Leon-Philippe Teisserenc de Bort, traveling in a hot air balloon, discovers the tropopause, or the boundary between the troposphere and the stratosphere, and also discovers the presence of the ozone layer.

Theodor Herzl’s utopian book “Old New Land” (Altneuland; Hebrew: תֵּל־אָבִיב Tel Aviv, the name of the city that will be founded in Israel; Yiddish: אַלטנײַלאַנד) is published, set in the future year 1923 in the author’s imagined prosperous Jewish state.

Guglielmo Marconi performs a second demonstration of transatlantic electromagnetic transmission, this time public and aboard the ship Philadelphia.

Nikola Tesla proposed to his financier JP Morgan a World Telegraph System, with a number of transmission stations that would send news to millions of personal devices distributed around the world. The electromagnetic signals would be distributed through the ground, exploiting standing waves and the

Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York. The AIEE (American Institute of Electrical Engineers) hosts a gala dinner to celebrate Guglielmo Marconi, despite the experiment’s still controversial nature (there’s no scientific explanation for how radio waves travel beyond the horizon, and no independent witnesses were present). 300 guests

Newfoundland. A first faint message is picked up by Guglielmo Marconi and his collaborators. It comes from the other side of the Atlantic. It consists of the three dots that identify the letter “S” in Morse code. The frequency used must have been around 850

Newfoundland. Guglielmo Marconi and his collaborators secretly begin the first experiments in wireless transmission across the Atlantic.

The American Safety Razor Co. filed for a patent (issued November 15, 1905: US775134) for the famous “T” razor with interchangeable blades (the folding model in vogue at the time had been the subject of incidents of assault and murder). In June of the following

Germany. Under pressure from the Kaiser, several competing companies in the field of new technologies merge to form Telefunken. One person who played a significant role in the merger and subsequent development of Telefunken was Ferdinand Braun. In 1909, he shared the Nobel Prize in

Guglielmo Marconi makes the first transatlantic transmission between Poldhu, Cornwall, and St. John’s, Newfoundland. The antennas are 120 meters long and held aloft by kites. The three dots (Morse) of the letter “S” are transmitted; Marconi hears them but then asks for confirmation: “Can you

Long Island, New York. Nikola Tesla builds the Wardenclyffe Tower. This is a tower for transmitting radio signals worldwide through the ground. It has a hemisphere on top, 21 meters in diameter and weighs 55 tons. It is constructed of pine wood for electrical insulation.

Guglielmo Marconi sets sail for Newfoundland to conduct his experiment, The Big Thing: wireless communication between the two sides of the Atlantic. He is accompanied by his trusted assistants, Kemp and Paget.

Enrico Fermi was born in Rome, son of Alberto Fermi (Head of Division in the Ministry of Railways), from Piacenza, and Ida De Gattis, a teacher, originally from Bari. The two had married in 1898 and lived not far from Termini Station in Rome, at

Buffalo, United States. US President McKinley dies of gangrene around wounds caused by the assassination attempt a few days earlier.

Nikola Tesla, in an article in Century, predicted the concept and advent of Radar: “…we will be able to determine the relative position and trajectory of a moving object, such as a ship at sea, the distance it has covered, or its velocity…”

Paul Gerber anticipates Einstein’s calculations for the perturbation of Mercury’s orbit by simply imposing Newtonian physics to propagate at the (finite) speed of light.

Independently of Albert Einstein, the French mathematician Henri Poincaré, built the essential mathematical structure of special relativity.

German physician Paul Ehrlich, a truly eccentric character (for example, he smoked 25 cigars a day and spent hours in pubs discussing philosophy), noticed that various coal-derived dyes stained some tissues and microorganisms, but not others. He correctly deduced that this property would allow a

Grove Karl Gilbert, a planetary geologist, was the first to propose, in academic circles, that lunar craters were not volcanic but impact craters. He had also proposed, years earlier, incorrectly, that Meteor Crater in Arizona was due to the explosion of underground steam accumulated by

Edward Emerson Barnard identifies, with his 910mm telescope, Jupiter’s fifth moon, Amalthea.

August Weismann intuits that chromosomes are the heart of heredity

Italy also adopts modern time: the meridian time (time zone) of the capital

Henry Perky introduces the first Corn Flakes to the market

Official announcement of the merger between Edison General Electric Company and Thomson-Houston. General Electric is born.

News leaks of the merger between Edison General Electric Company and Thomson-Houston. General Electric is born. It will be officially announced on April 15th.

London. Nikola Tesla delivers a lecture at the Institution of Electrical Engineers. James Dewar, Fullerian Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution, to persuade Tesla to give a repeat performance the following evening, offers him a glass of whiskey and sits him in Faraday’s chair.

First experiments in using aluminum tubes in packaging

The Pennsylvania Railroad, with 110,000 employees, is the largest corporation in the world.

The German Ward Leonard conceived a system with an AC motor powered by the mains, coupled with a DC generator which in turn powers a DC collector motor, exploiting its advantages of flexible control.

Battle of Wounded Knee (300 Indians and 25 soldiers killed): end of the Indian Wars

The collapse of London-based financial institution Baring Brothers causes panic in the markets. Among those affected is Westinghouse, whose bankers are hounding him to terminate Tesla’s contract, including royalties, presumably because they want to put a stop to Westinghouse’s high research and development expenditures. Reluctantly,

Thomas Alva Edison developed the cinematograph and the kinetograph. It was a machine for viewing images and hearing synchronized sound, and a film camera, based on the cylindrical Kinetoscope he had designed years earlier. They recorded images on film at 10 frames per second, a

Galileo Ferraris and Nikola Tesla separately study the AC induction (asynchronous) motor

Henrich Hertz puts Maxwell’s theories into practice

Brazil, Emperor Pedro II abolishes slavery

George Eastman’s slogan is “You push the button, we do the rest: ship your camera to Rochester, New York, and we’ll develop your photos while we send you a new, pre-loaded camera.”

Edison remarried for the second time, to 20-year-old Mina Miller, daughter of inventor Lewis Miller. They moved to Llewellyn Park, an exclusive, gated hillside enclave in West Orange, New Jersey, not far from New York City. They had three more children: Madeleine, Charles, and Theodore.

Heinrich Rudolf Hertz proves that electricity is transmitted at the speed of light

Michele Novaro, the man who, moved by listening to the poetry of Goffredo Mameli, sat down at the harpsichord and set the Mameli Anthem to music, dies of starvation.

Thomas Alva Edison writes to Lewis Miller, Mina’s father, to ask for her hand in marriage.

London. Karl Marx dies.

Charles Darwin browses through Wilhelm Olbers Focke’s book Die Pflanzen-Mischlinge (Plant Hybrids) but fails to read pages 108-110 (which remain sealed – to be trimmed) where one of the few references of the time to Mendel’s “genetic” theory is contained; the importance of Mendel’s studies

The world does not end, as predicted by Mother Shipton (1488 – 1561). In reality, many of these predictions were invented by a man named Hindley in 1871.

John Hopkinson, a professor at King’s College London, realizes that you can have an AC (synchronous) motor by reversing the operation of an AC generator.

Third American economic and social cycle. From Garfield to Carter. Millions of immigrants arrive in America, mostly from Ireland, Italy, and Eastern Europe. These immigrants are culturally completely different from the previous ones, who had come from England and Scotland. At the same time, the

Mr. Dunlop invents the pneumatic tire

Menlo Park, New Jersey. Thomas Alva Edison, with his colleague Clarke, is testing a dynamo 16 times more powerful than any previously made. The rotating armature alone weighs a ton and a half. It is attached to a 100-horsepower Porter Allen steam engine. Edison is

Menlo Park, New Jersey. The diaspora begins with the departure of Charles Batchelor for Paris.

Giok-Tepe, Central Asia. The Turkmen, traditionally great warriors, put up stubborn resistance to the invading Cossacks of Tsar Russia. The battle marks the end of all resistance to the Russians in Central Asia. The Tsarist army consists of 7,000 soldiers and 60 cannons. The Turkmen

Nikola Tesla moves from Prague to Budapest after reading that Edison has granted Tivadar Puskas the rights to build a city telephone network in Budapest. Nikola Tesla asks his uncle to intercede for him to be hired in this business, having served as an officer

Thomas Alva Edison’s first ship with all-electric lighting: the Columbia. On April 27, Edison boarded the ship with his wife on the East River in New York. There were four 110-volt dynamos. The steamship Columbia, 100 meters from stern to bow, belonged to railroad magnate

Paul Emile Lecoq de Boisbaudran confirmed Jean Charles Galissard De Marignac’s discovery a few months earlier and suggested calling the new element Gadolinium, after the name of the mineral (gadolinitie) that contained it.

American James J. Ritty builds the cash register