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 best years, by this time, are behind him. When writing about this great protagonist in the history of modern technology, one must always balance unfair criticism and excessive enthusiasm.

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 main body of the meteorite, which, if metallic, would be worth a fortune just by weight of iron and nickel. He purchases management of the crater area from the federal government and has deep mining carried out, finding traces of iridium and platinum, extremely rare on Earth. He estimates the asteroid’s mass at 1 million tons, which at the time was worth $200 million in iron (in 1902! – today that would be over $5 billion!!!). He then creates the Standard Mining Co. He will never find the main body, as it likely crumbled and pulverized before impact. He spent his entire fortune on the venture for years, and to this day Meteor Crater remains on federal land but is privately managed by his descendants. Daniel Barringer died of a heart attack at age 69 in September 1929, without ever having made a dollar from the crater, which is now also known as Barringer Crater.

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 done. Edison disagrees on this second point (the first was obvious), arguing that the Amazon forests alone will provide fuel for 50,000 years.

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 include film studios, cement factories, and storage batteries.

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 new bell tower will be erected “where and as it was” and completed on April 25, 1912, the feast of St. Mark.

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 planet’s resonant frequency. Although the idea of transmitting through the ground (and not through the air as Marconi did) never materialized, the idea of transmitting news to millions of portable devices was incredibly advanced for its time. Tesla spoke (in 1904) of “an inexpensive receiver, not bigger than a watch, will enable him to listen anywhere, on land or sea, to a speech delivered, or music played in some other place, however distant.” The idea of providing instant access to any information to anyone. This idea, which would later become the hallmark of globalization and consumerism, including information, was not at all obvious at the beginning of the 20th century. The prevailing culture was that of the production of goods, like railroads or steel. Edison had trouble thinking of his phonograph as a means of listening to music in every home: he envisioned it instead for business purposes: to record the speeches of businessmen. Morgan himself had always been involved in businesses related to producer culture, not consumer culture.

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 attend. Notably absent is Nikola Tesla (who lives at this very hotel!), but he sends a congratulatory message. A much more effusive message arrives from Thomas Edison.

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 kHz (350 m wavelength). The experiment was carried out in broad daylight, a terrible condition for ionospheric reflection. This sparked a controversy, which continues to this day, over the scientific validity of the experiment. But whether he heard something genuine or not, a few months later (February 1902) he proved it beyond all doubt (with witnesses), and this time the best transmission occurred at night…

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 year, the company changed its name to Gillette Safety Razor Co. The first razor was sold in 1903, along with 50 others that same year. The following year, it sold 90,000. By 1908, annual sales exceeded one million. King Camp Gillette, the company’s founder and patent holder, was a utopian socialist who, as he wrote in his books (written in 1894 and 1910), advocated moving the entire population of the United States to a megalopolis around Niagara Falls. This megalopolis would have electricity, everyone would eat at a single public soup kitchen, and a single public company would own and manage all businesses. This idea didn’t gain much traction, but the razor made him truly rich and famous, even though he died near poverty during the Great Depression. The company survived and expanded enormously.

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 Physics with Marconi for the invention of wireless (a political decision to equalize the “British” Marconi and Germany, despite the fact that wireless was actually invented by Guglielmo Marconi).

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 hear anything, Mister Kemp?” From the other side of the Atlantic, confirmation comes: “Of course.”

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. It can be seen from New Haven, Connecticut. There are also underground structures extending 40 meters into the ground, the purpose and function of which are unclear. Boilers produce power (200 kW) through a 44,000-volt, four-phase AC generator, and the frequency can be varied between 1,000 Hz and 200,000 Hz. Tesla plans to send these electromagnetic waves across the planet and reflect them back to Wardenclyffe, to establish standing waves by exploiting the Earth’s resonance. His tests in Colorado led him to believe the frequency is 6 Hz. Recent measurements put this value at 8Hz, suggesting he wasn’t off the mark. Tesla’s goal, however, was even more ambitious: to allow anyone in the world to connect to the ground and receive electrical power and an electromagnetic signal with information. Tesla never explained how the electrical signal would return to complete the circuit.

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 Via Gaeta 19. Enrico was the third, after Maria (1899) and Giulio (1900), who died prematurely on 12 January 1915 due to an abscess in his throat, during the anesthesia for the operation.

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…”