March 18 – Phoebe, the ninth-known moon of the planet Saturn is discovered by U.S. astronomer William H. Pickering from analysis of photographic plates made by a Peruvian observatory seven months earlier, the first discovery of a satellite photographically.
October 19 – 17-year-old Robert H. Goddard in Worcester, Massachusetts, receives his inspiration to develop a rocket capable of reaching outer space, after viewing his yard from high in a tree and imagining "how wonderful it would be to make some device which had even the possibility of ascending to Mars, and how it would look on a small scale, if sent up from the meadow at my feet."[1]
December 31 – Retrospectively, day zero for dates in Microsoft Excel. This is to ensure backwards compatibility with Lotus 1-2-3, which had a bug misinterpreting 1900 as a leap year.[2][3][4]
July 4 – The most famous skeleton of a dinosaur ever found intact, a Diplodicus, is discovered at the Sheep Creek Quarry in the western United States near Medicine Bow, Wyoming. The expedition team, financed by Andrew Carnegie for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh and led by William Harlow Reed, bestows the name "Dippy" on the Diplodicus carnegii, which becomes well known after Carnegie has plaster cast replicas made for donation to museums all over the world. These dinosaurs are estimated to have roamed in North America more than 152,000,000 years ago.[12]
March 3 – Guglielmo Marconi conducts radio beacon experiments on Salisbury Plain in England and notices that radio waves are being reflected back to the transmitter by objects they encounter, one of the early steps in the potential for developing radar.[13]
January 26 – German inventor Karl Ferdinand Braun (who will in 1909 share the Nobel Prize in Physics with Marconi) receives British Patent No. 1899-1862 for his wireless radio invention "Telegraphy without directly connected wire".[15]
May 4 – German-born inventor John Matthias Stroh applies for a patent for the 'Stroh violin', a stringed musical instrument with an amplifying horn attached.[19]
May 26 – The guns of British cruiser HMS Scylla, commanded by Captain Percy Scott, hit their targets 56 out of 70 times after Scott and his crew solve the problem of aiming a ship cannon on rolling seas.[20]
June 27 – A patent for a form of paperclip is applied for by Johan Vaaler, a Norwegian inventor, although it is never put into production.[21]
July 18 – The patent for the first sofa bed (a foldable bed frame that can be stored under the cushions of a couch) is taken out by African American inventor Leonard C. Bailey.[22]
August 23 – The first ship-to-shore test of a wireless radio transmission is made from the U.S. lightship LV 70 with the sending of Morse code signals to a receiving station near San Francisco. The tests are made over 17 days.[23]
October 26 – Indirect fire, a shooting technique based on calculating azimuth and inclination to aim a weapon at an enemy that cannot be hit by direct fire, is used for the first time in battle.[24] British gunners in the Second Boer War, using the techniques developed by Russian Lieutenant Colonel K. G. Guk, fire a cannon on a high trajectory toward the Boer Army, with the objective of having the shell coming down on the enemy.
November 7 – The flash-lamp, the first to use electricity to ignite photographers' magnesium flash powder, is awarded as U.S. patent 636,492 to Joshua Lionel Cohen. While flash powder had been in use since 1887, the ignition was more dangerous because it had to be performed manually.
January 29 – A lawyer for the estate of John W. Keely, an inventor who had persuaded investors in his Keely Motor Company that an automobile could be created that would operate from Keely's "induction resonance motion motor" which had achieved perpetual motion, reveals that the late Mr. Keely's motor has been a fraud, and that the widow knew nothing of it.[27]
^Huurdeman, Anton A. (2003). The Worldwide History of Telecommunications. Wiley. p. 215.
^Desmond, Kevin (2016). "Jungner, Ernst Waldemar". Innovators in Battery Technology: Profiles of 95 Influential Electrochemists. McFarland Publishing. p. 116.
^Haines, Catharine M. C. (2001). International Women in Science: A Biographical Dictionary to 1950. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. p. 10. ISBN978-1-57607-090-1.