Firsts: Basketball, The London—Paris telephone system, the removable pneumatic bicycle tire, New Scotland Yard, the Tesla coil, the Swiss Army Knife and Stanford University. Carnegie Hall has its grand opening and first public performance, with Tchaikovsky as guest conductor.
Disasters: The Springhill Mining Disaster. The SS Utopia, carrying Italian migrants to New York, sinks in the inner harbor of Gibraltar, killing 564. In Japan the 8.0 Ms Mino—Owari earthquake killed over 7,200, and created fault scarps that still remain visible. The Chinese Juu Uda League in Inner Mongolia massacres tens of thousands of Mongols.
Also: Liliuokalani is proclaimed Queen of Hawaii, and the Portuguese republican revolution breaks out.
Born
Mikhail Bulgakov, Russian writer (d. 1940)
Ole Kirk Christiansen, founder of the Lego group (d. 1958)
Ronald Colman, English actor (d. 1958)
Max Ernst, German painter (d. 1976)
Antonio Gramsci, Italian Communist writer and politician (d. 1937)
Henry Miller, American writer (d. 1980)
Cole Porter, American composer and songwriter (d. 1964)
Sergei Prokofiev, Soviet composer (d. 1953)
Earl Warren, American politician and Chief Justice of the United States (d. 1974)
Grant Wood, American painter (d. 1942)
Died
P. T. Barnum, American showman (b. 1810)
Sir Joseph Bazalgette, English civil engineer (b. 1819)
Helena Blavatsky, Russian-born author and theosophist (b. 1831)
KalÄkaua, last reigning King of Hawaii (b. 1836)
Pierre Lallement, French inventor of the bicycle (b. 1843?)
John A. Macdonald, 1st Prime Minister of Canada and Father of Confederation (b. 1815)
Herman Melville, American novelist (b. 1819)
Arthur Rimbaud, French poet (b. 1854)
Wilhelm Eduard Weber, German physicist (b. 1804)