1905 Wikipedia Summary

Events

January

• January 1 – In a major defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, General Anatoly Stessel of the Russian Army surrender Port Arthur, located in mainland China, to the Japanese.
• January 3 – Japan take former possession of Port Arthur and rename it Ryojun, holding it for the next 40 years. The area will revert in 1945 to China and is now the Lushunkou District.
• January 4 –
  • Gheorghe Grigore Cantacuzino becomes Prime Minister of Romania for the second time, having previously served from 1899 to 1900, and remains in office for more than two years.
  • The city of Bend, Oregon, plotted out in 1900 by Alexander Drake, iss incorporated as a town for local logging companies, and will have a population of 536 in 1910. By the year 2020, it will have almost 100,000 residents.
• January 5 – Baroness Emma Orczy‘s play The Scarlet Pimpernel, the forerunner of her novel, opens at the New Theatre in London, beginning a run of 122 performances and numerous revivals.
• January 6 –
  • The Lick Observatory announces the discovery of a sixth moon of Jupiter, made by their astronomer Charles D. Perrine. Unlike the first five Jovian satellites discovered, the sixth one will be referred to by number as “Jupiter VI” until 1975, and is now called Himalia.
  • The U.S. Senate confirms the nomination of William D. Crum, an African-American, to the office of collector of customs at Charleston, South Carolina after Crum’s nomination by President Theodore Roosevelt.
• January 11 – Under the supervision of five editors, work begins on the comprehensive Catholic Encyclopedia, subtitled “An International Work of Reference on the Constitution, Doctrine, Discipline, and History of the Catholic Church” and published by the Robert Appleton Company. The first volume will appear in 1907.
• January 14 – Jens Christian Christensen takes office as the new Prime Minister of Denmark.
• January 15 – A series of three 133 feet (41 m) high tsunamis kill 61 people in the Norway in the villages of Ytre Nesdal and Bødal, after a rockslide sweeps down Mount Ramnefjell and crashes into Lake Lovatnet.
• January 17 – In France, Prime Minister Émile Combes and his cabinet announce their resignations after being implicated in the Affair of the Cards (L’Affaire des Fiches), a system set up by the War Ministry to purge the French Army officers corps of Jesuits.
• January 21 – The Dominican Republic sign an agreement with the United States to allow the U.S. to administer the collection of customs taxes for Santo Domingo for 50 years, with the U.S. to assume responsibility for payment of the Republic’s debts to foreign nations from Dominican income. The agreement is done as an exercise of the “Roosevelt Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine.
• January 22 (January 9 O.S.) – The Bloody Sunday massacre of peaceful Russian demonstrators at the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg took place, leading to an unsuccessful uprising.
• January 24 – Maurice Rouvier forms a government as the new Prime Minister of France.
• January 25 – Tsar Nicholas II appoints General Dmitri Trepov to be the Governor-General of Saint Petersburg, with absolute power to issue regulations to keep order.
• January 26 – (January 13 O.S. in Russia)
  • The Imperial Russian Army opens fire on demonstrators in Riga, Governorate of Livonia, killing 73 people and injuring 200 in the Russian Revolution of 1905
  • Elections are held in Hungary for the 413 seats in the Országgyűlés, the Kingdom’s parliament within Austria-Hungary. Voters overwhelmingly rejected the Liberal Party, led by Prime Minister István Tisza, that had ruled Hungary since 1875, and the Liberals lost 118 of their 277 seats, but Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria-Hungary (in his capacity as King Ferenc József) ignored the results and kept Tisza in power.
• January 27 – The Nelson Act is passed into law in the United States, providing for racial segregation of schools in the Alaska Territory.
• January 29 – Rioting breaks out in Warsaw, at the time under Russian Imperial rule with a Russian Governor-General.
• January 30 – The U.S. Supreme Court renders its unanimous decision in the landmark case of Swift & Co. v. United States.
• January 31 – “The greatest ball of the Gilded Age” is held by James Hazen Hyde, the 28-year-old heir to the fortune of the founder of the Equitable Life Assurance Association” at New York City’s Sherry Hotel, who spends $200,000 for a “Louis XV costume ball” for invited guests.

February

• February 1 – U.S. Senator John H. Mitchell of Oregon is indicted by a federal grand jury on charges arising from a scandal involving land grants in the state and illegally using his influence for private clients.
• February 3 – The first performance of A Shropshire Lad, the setting to music of the 1896 set of 63 poems of A. E. Housman by Arthur Somervell as a song-cycle, takes place at Aeolian Hall in London
• February 4 – A simultaneous uprising begins at six cities in Argentina against the government of President Manuel Quintana.
• February 5 – The French ship Anjou is wrecked off of the coast of the uninhabited Auckland Island, located 290 miles (470 km) from the nearest inhabited land in New Zealand. The castaways live on the isle for more than three months until being rescued on May 7.
• February 6 – Eliel Soisalon-Soininen, the Chancellor of Justice of the Grand Duchy of Finland (at the time part of the Russian Empire) is assassinated at Helsingfors (now Helsinki).
• February 9 – Dr. Prince A. Morrow begins the movement in the U.S. for sex education, with the founding of the Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis.
• February 12 – The Switzerland national football team plays its first international game, losing to France, 1 to 0.
• February 16 – Six of the 11 crew of the Royal Navy submarine HMS A5 are killed by a pair of explosions caused by gasoline fumes.
• February 17 – Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich of Russia, the Governor-General of Moscow and uncle of Tsar Nicholas II, is assassinated.
• February 20 – In the Russo-Japanese War, the Battle of Mukden began in Manchuria.
• February 21 – Sir Wilfrid Laurier introduces a resolution in the Canadian parliament proposing that two new provinces, Alberta and Saskatchewan, be created out of the Northwest Territories.
• February 23 – Rotary International is founded in Chicago in the U.S.
• February 25 – Alcide Laurin becomes the first known ice hockey player to be killed during a game.
• February 26 – Russian sustains a severe defeat in Manchuria at Tsen-ho-Cheng.
• February 28 – Jane Stanford, the co-founder with her husband Leland of Stanford University, is fatally poisoned while visiting the Moana Hotel in Hawaii.

March

• March 2 – Russia’s Committee of Ministers votes to grant religious freedom to the residents of the Russian Empire.
• March 3 – Tsar Nicholas II of Russia announces his decision to create an elected assembly, the Duma, to represent the people of the Russian Empire in an advisory capacity, although the real power to make laws will remain with the Tsar and the cabinet of ministers.
• March 10 – Russo-Japanese War: The Japanese capture of Mukden (modern-day Shenyang) completes the rout of Russian armies in Manchuria. The Russian Army commander, General Aleksey Kuropatkin, telegraphs the Tsar that his armies will be retreating to avoid further danger.
• March 13 – Mata Hari introduces her exotic dance act in the Musée Guimet, Paris.
• March 14 – Twenty-three of the 26 crew of the British windjammer ship Kyber die when the ship is wrecked off of the coast of Land’s End.
• March 17 – – U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt gives the bride away at the wedding of his 20-year-old niece, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, to her distant cousin, 23-year-old law student Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
• March 18 – Albert Einstein submits his paper “On a heuristic viewpoint concerning the production and transformation of light”, in which he explained the photoelectric effect using the notion of light quanta, for publication.
• March 20 – The Grover Shoe Factory disaster kills 58 employees in Brockton, Massachusetts, when a boiler explodes and the factory building collapses.
• March 22 – Russia’s Committee of Ministers votes to abolish the compulsory use of the Russian language in schools in “Congress Poland” (Tsarstvo Polskoye).
• March 23 – The Theriso revolt begins in Crete as about 1,500 people led by Eleftherios Venizelos demand unification with Greece.
• March 24 – Toastmasters International is founded by Ralph C. Smedley in Bloomington, Illinois.
• March 29 – Jimmy Walsh knocks out Monte Attell, in a controversial six-round bout in Philadelphia, to win recognition of the World Bantamweight Championship by the National Boxing Association, despite being disqualified by the referee.

April

• April 1 – The British Imperial Penny Post is extended to include Australia.
• April 2 – The Simplon Tunnel through the Alps ss opened to railway traffic.
• April 3 – A coal mine explosion at Zeigler, Illinois, kills 50 miners.
• April 4 – In India, the 1905 Kangra earthquake hits the Kangra Valley, killed 20,000 and destroys most buildings in Kangra, McLeod Ganj and Dharamshala.
• April 5 – The body of John Paul Jones, “Father of the American Navy”, is located in Paris almost 113 years after his death.
• April 6 – A violent strike by the Teamsters’ Union begins in Chicago.
• April 8 – Hundreds of people are killed in Spain in the collapse of a dam holding back a reservoir near Madrid.
• April 17 – Russia‘s Tsar Nicholas II issued a decree granting religious freedom to his subjects.
• April 20 – The largest ocean liner in the world at the time, the German cruiser SS Amerika is launched.
• April 23 – German General Lothar von Trotha commander of troops in Germany’s colony of Südwestafrika (now Namibia), orders the extermination of the Nama people within the colony’s borders, ultimately killing 10,000. Von Trotha’s proclamation Aan de oorlogvorende Namastamme, proclaimed that “The Nama who chooses not to surrender and lets himself be seen in German territory will be shot, until all are exterminated.”
• April 24 – China‘s Empress Regent Cixi (Tzu Hsi) abolishes further use in executions of the nation’s three most cruel torture execution methods, lingchi (“death by a thousand cuts”), gibbeting (similar to crucifixion, hanging until dying of exposure, thirst or starvation), and desecration of a dying person.
• April 28 – A tornado strikes Laredo, Texas and kills 100.
• April 30 – Albert Einstein completes his doctoral dissertation, A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions (submitted July 30 to the University of Zurich).

May

• May 4 –The first world championship of professional wrestling takes place at Madison Square Garden in New York City.
• May 9 – Upon the death of U.S. social activist Ann Reeves Jarvis In West Virginia, her daughter Anna Jarvis resolves to campaign across the United States for a proposed “Mother’s Day“.
• May 10 – In the U.S., A tornado destroys the town of Snyder, Oklahoma, killing 97.
• May 11 – Albert Einstein submits for publication his paper “Über die von der molekularkinetischen Theorie der Wärme geforderte Bewegung von in ruhenden Flüssigkeiten suspendierten Teilchen” (“On the Motion of Small Particles Suspended in a Stationary Liquid, as Required by the Molecular Kinetic Theory of Heat”), based on his doctoral research, delineating a stochastic model of Brownian motion.
• May 12 – The Natural History Museum in London unveils its popular exhibit of “Dippy“, an exact replica of the skeleton of the Diplodocus carnegii dinosaur.
• May 15 – Las Vegas, Nevada, is founded when 110 acres (45 ha) of land adjacent to the Union Pacific Railroad tracks are auctioned to what is now today Downtown Las Vegas.
• May 22 – Abdul Hamid II, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire establishes the Ullah Millet for the Aromanians of the empire. For this reason, the Aromanian National Day is sometimes celebrated on this day. The decision is publicly announced the next day, which is more commonly celebrated.
• May 28 – At the end of two days in fighting in the Battle of Tsushima, the Russian Imperial Navy has suffered the deaths of more than 14,000 of the 18,000 sailors and officers it had brought to the battle, and all but four of its Pacific ships. The Japanese loss is three torpedo boats and 800 men.
• May 29 – Brooklyn Superbas pitcher Elmer Stricklett introduced the “spitball” to major league baseball.
• May 30 – Japan’s Prime Minister Katsura Tarō asks U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt to moderate peace discussions to end the Russo-Japanese War.

June

• June 1 – The Lewis and Clark Exposition opens in Portland, Oregon.
  • The Sultan of Morocco rejected France’s demands for a scheme of reforms.
• June 6 – In Germany‘s last royal wedding, Crown Prince Wilhelm, son of Kaiser Wilhelm II and heir to the throne, marries Duchess Cecilie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin at Berlin.
• June 7 – The Norwegian Parliament, the Storting, declares dissolution of the union between Norway and Sweden, giving Norway full independence.
• June 13 – Theodoros Diligiannis, Prime Minister of Greece is assassinated.
• June 15 – Princess Margaret of Connaught married Prince Gustaf Adolf of Sweden, Duke of Skåne, the future King Gustaf VI Adolf.
• June 18 – A coal mine explosion in Russia kills 500 employees at the Ivan Colliery at Kharsisk.
• June 20 – Dr. Ernest Henry Starling introduces the word “hormone” into the English language.
• June 21 – New York Central Railroad‘s 20th Century Limited train is derailed in an apparent act of sabotage, killing 21 people.
• June 25 – The Danish Navy training ship Georg Stage is accidentally sunk after a collision with the English steamship Ancona, killing 22 teeanged recruits.
• June 27 – (June 14 O.S.): Mutiny breaks out on the Russian ironclad Potemkin.
• June 28 – “Pomp and Circumstance“, is first played as a graduation march, after Yale University music professor Samuel Sanford invited its composer, Sir Edward Elgar, to receive an honorary degree.
• June 29 – The Automobile Association is founded in the United Kingdom.
• June 30 – Albert Einstein submits for publication his paper “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”, establishing his theory of special relativity.

July

• July 1 – Hundreds of people died in the flooding of Guanajunto in Mexico.
• July 3 – France’s Chamber of Deputies passes a bill for separation of church and state, 341 to 233.
• July 5 – Alfred Deakin takes office as the new Prime Minister of Australia.
• July 8 – U.S. President Roosevelt sends his 21-year-old daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, and her party on a diplomatic journey to Japan, the Philippines, Hong Kong, China and Korea.
• July 10 – A Japanese expedition takes control of the Russian island of Sakhalin after a short battle.
• July 11 – More than 100 coal miners were killed in an explosion at the United National Colliers Company at Wattstown in Wales.
• July 12 –The University of Sheffield is officially opened by King Edward VII in England.
• July 14 –
  • The government of France instituted its first government assistance program for elderly and disabled persons.
  • In New Zealand, the first known suicide attack by a civilian (as opposed to sacrifices made in military combat) takes place in Murchison.
• July 15 – The popular fictional character Arsène Lupin, the gentleman thief, is introduced in France.
• July 21 – Sixty members of the crew of the USS Bennington were killed in an explosion of the U.S. Navy gunboat in the harbor at San Diego.
• July 22 – Florence Kelly delivered her landmark speech about child labor before the convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in Philadelphia.
• July 24 – An 8.4 magnitude earthquake strikes Mongolia, the second-largest on record there.
• July 27 – The Taft–Katsura agreement is reached in Tokyo.
• July 28 – Frankie Neil becomes the new world bantamweight boxing champion by defeating title holder Harry Tenny in a 25-round bout at Colma, California.
• July 30 – At Basel in Switzerland, the International Zionist Conference delegates vote to reject the British officer of land in Uganda for a Jewish homeland.

August

• August 2 – The Ancient Order of Druids initiates neo-Druidic rituals at Stonehenge in England.
• August 7 – King Oscar II of Sweden appoints Prince Gustaf to serve as his regent.
• August 8 – Fourteen employees of a department store in Albany, New York are killed when the building collapses suddenly.
• August 9 – The peace conference to end the Russo-Japanese War between Russia and Japan begins at Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
• August 11 – The Russian Council appointed by Tsar Nicholas II meets at Peterhoff and approves a plan for a national Duma, the first representative assembly in the Empire.
• August 12 – The first running takes place of the Shelsley Walsh Speed Hill Climb in England, the world’s oldest motorsport event to be staged continuously on its original course.
• August 13 – At a referendum in Norway, voters opt almost unanimously for dissolution of the union with Sweden.
• August 15 – Mexican-American prospector Pablo Valencia gets lost in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona with no water. Enduring almost eight days of dehydration, Valencia wanders until he was discovered on August 23 by anthropologist William J. McGee and McGee’s Papago Indian assistant, Jose.
• August 20 – Chinese revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen forms the first chapter of T’ung Meng Hui, a union of all secret societies determined to bringing down the Manchu dynasty.
• August 21 – The Sequoyah Constitutional Convention takes place in Muskogee in the U.S. Indian Territory and approves a constitution for the proposed State of Sequoyah, seeking admission as the only Native American majority state in the U.S. President Roosevelt will reject the idea in favor of joining the Indian Territory with the white-ruled Oklahoma Territory to create the 46th U.S. state.
• August 22 – The sinking of the Japanese ferry Kinjo Maru kills 160 people after the British ship HMS Baralong collides with it in the Sea of Japan.
• August 23 – A. Roy Knabenshue introduces the dirigible to the skies of New York City, piloting the lighter-than-air vehicle within view of hundreds of thousands of spectators.
• August 24 – Frederick D. White becomes the first Commissioner of the Northwest Territories in Canada, and would serve until his death in 1918.
• August 25 – Theodore Roosevelt became the first U.S. President to travel underwater, after boarding the Navy submarine USS Plunger.
• August 26 – Near Point Barrow, Alaska, the crew of the Norwegian ship Gjoa, led by Roald Amundsen, make the breakthrough of finding the long-sought “Northwest Passage” from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean.
• August 27 – Tsar Nicholas II issues a decree restoring autonomy to Russia’s universities, restoring the autonomy that had been taken away from them in 1884.
• August 30 – A solar eclipse takes place, with greatest visibility in North Africa.

September

• September 1 – The Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan are established, from the southwestern part of the Northwest Territories.
• September 5 – Russo-Japanese War: Treaty of Portsmouth – In New Hampshire, a treaty mediated by U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt is signed by Japan and Russia. Russia cedes the island of Sakhalin together with port and rail rights in Manchuria to Japan.
• September 8 – The 7.2 M_w  Calabria earthquake shakes Southern Italy with a maximum Mercalli intensity of XI (Extreme), killing between 557 and 2,500 people.
• September 10 – Crystal Palace F.C. is founded in London.
• September 27 – Albert Einstein submits for publication his paper “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?”, in which he puts forward the idea of mass–energy equivalence by publishing the famous equation E = mc² (published November 21).

October

• October – Fauvist artists, led by Henri Matisse and André Derain, first exhibit their works, at the Salon d’Automne in Paris.
• October 1 – Turkish Football team Galatasaray was founded in Istanbul.
• October 1 – A Czech worker, František Pavlík (b. 1885), is bayoneted to death during a demonstration for a Czech university in Brno. This event is the motivation for a piano sonata, 1. X. 1905, by composer Leoš Janáček, which premières on 27 January 1906.
• October 2 – HMS Dreadnought (1906) is laid down in the United Kingdom, revolutionizing battleship design and triggering a naval arms race.
• October 5 – The Wright brothers‘ third aeroplane (Wright Flyer III) stays in the air for 39 minutes with Wilbur piloting, the first aeroplane flight lasting over half an hour.
• October 11 – The Institute of Musical Art, predecessor of the Juilliard School, opens in New York City.
• October 14 – The National League’s New York Giants win baseball’s World Series, beating the American League‘s Philadelphia Athletics, 2-0, in Game 5.
• October 16 – The Partition of Bengal is made by Lord Curzon to separate the region of Bengal into Muslim and Hindu territories until its reunification in 1911.
• October 26 – Sweden–Norway agrees to the repeal of the union with Norway, forming the two modern countries today.
• October 29 (October 16 O.S.) – In the Russian Empire:
  • Russian Revolution of 1905: The Imperial Russian Army opens fire on a meeting at a street market in Tallinn, Governorate of Estonia, killing 94 and injuring over 200 people.
  • The Circum-Baikal Railway is brought into permanent operation, completing through rail communication on the Trans-Siberian Railway.
• October 30 (October 17 Old Style) – October Manifesto: Tsar Nicholas II of Russia is forced to announce the granting of his country’s first constitution (the Russian Constitution of 1906), conceding a national assembly (State Duma) with limited powers.

November

• November 1 – Lahti, the city of Finland, is granted city rights by Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, the last Grand Duke of Finland.
• November 4 – The application of the infamous February Manifesto, removing the veto of the Diet of the autonomous Grand Principality of Finland over matters considered by the Emperor to concern Russian imperial interests, is interrupted by the new November Manifesto. The Senate of Finland is ordered to put forward a proposal for parliamentary reform, based on unicameralism and universal and equal suffrage.
• November 7 – Lawyer and liberal politician Karl Staaff becomes Prime Minister of Sweden, after a Riksdag election based mainly on voting rights reform.
• November 9 – The Province of Alberta, Canada, holds its first general election.
• November 12 – Norway holds a referendum, resulting in popular approval of the Storting’s decision to authorise the government to make the offer of the throne of the newly independent country.
• November 17 – The Japan–Korea Treaty of 1905 (“Eulsa Treaty”) effectively makes Korea a protectorate of Japan.
• November 18 – Prince Carl of Denmark becomes King Haakon VII of Norway.
• November 28 – Irish nationalist Arthur Griffith founds Sinn Féin in Dublin, as a political party whose goal is independence for all of Ireland.
• November–December – Russian Revolution of 1905: In the Baltic governorates, workers and peasants burn and loot hundreds of Baltic German manors. The Imperial Russian Army thereafter executes and deports thousands of looters.

December

• December 2 – Norsk Hydro, predecessor of Equinor, a state-run energy product and grid brand in Scandinavia, founded in Norway.
• December 7–18 – Moscow Uprising: A Bolshevik-led revolt is suppressed by the army.
• December 9 – The 1905 French law on the Separation of the Churches and the State is passed, enacting laïcité.
• December 11 – In support of the Moscow Uprising, the Council of Workers’ Deputies of Kiev stages a mass uprising, establishing the Shuliavka Republic in the city, December 12–16.
• December 15 – The Pushkin House is established in Saint Petersburg, Russia, to preserve the cultural heritage of Alexander Pushkin.
• December 16 – In Rugby Union, the “Game of the Century” is played between Wales and New Zealand at Cardiff Arms Park.
• December 30
  • A bomb kills Frank Steunenberg, ex-governor of Idaho; the case leads to a trial against leaders of the Western Federation of Miners.
  • Franz Lehár‘s operetta The Merry Widow is first performed, at the Theater an der Wien, Vienna.

Date unknown

• The title Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is officially recognized by Edward VII.
• Pathé Frères colors black and white films by machine.
• Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer are banned from the Brooklyn Public Library, for setting a “bad example.”
• Alfred Einhorn introduces novocaine.
• Wolves become extinct in Japan.
• Civil service examinations are abolished in Qing dynasty China.
• Ta-Ching Government Bank, predecessor of Bank of China, is founded in Peiping