1901
Marconi sends signal across Atlantic
On a wind-whipped Newfoundland hill, Guglielmo Marconi pressed a telephone receiver to his ear and heard three faint clicks sent from Cornwall, two thousand miles away. Experts had said radio waves would travel in straight lines and miss the curving earth. They were wrong. The world had begun to shrink.
Queen Victoria dies at Osborne
After sixty-three years on the throne, the small widow in black finally closed her eyes at her island retreat on the Isle of Wight, surrounded by children and grandchildren who sat on the thrones of Europe. An age ended with her. The empire she left stretched across a quarter of the globe and seemed eternal. Her great-grandchildren would preside over its dismantling within fifty years.
Australia becomes a commonwealth
At midnight the six British colonies of Australia federated into a single dominion of the British Empire. The ceremony in Sydney drew half a million spectators, more than the population of most Australian cities. Edmund Barton became the first prime minister. A new country had been born under a southern sky, still in the empire's clothes.
Anarchist shoots President McKinley
At a Buffalo exposition, William McKinley extended his hand to a young man with a bandaged fist. Leon Czolgosz fired twice. The president lingered eight days before gangrene killed him, despite surgeons' desperate efforts under electric light. Theodore Roosevelt, the barrel-chested vice president dismissed as a lightweight, burst into the White House and the century.
First Nobel Prizes awarded
In Stockholm, the first Nobel Prizes were handed out under the terms of Alfred Nobel's will, which had tried to balance his fortune from dynamite with an annual endowment for human benefit. Roentgen took physics, Dunant the peace prize, Sully Prudhomme literature. A new hierarchy of global prestige had been created.