1903 (thing)

1. The Wright Brothers take to the skies above Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
2. Teddy Roosevelt ensures that Panama successfully secedes from Colombia, paving the way for the Panama Canal.
3. Emmeline Pankhurst forms the Women’s Social and Political Union, Britian’s notorious suffragist organization.
4. At the Edison studios, Edwin Porter films the first true motion picture, the twelve minute story The Great Train Robbery.
5. Painter Paul Gauguin dies in Polynesia.
6. Marie and Pierre Curie win the Nobel Prize in physics for their work with radioactivity.
7. Czech composer Leos Janácek completes the opera Jenufa.
8. Automotive milestones: Britain raises the speed limit to 20 mph, the first gas powered taxi operates in London, the first transcontinental road trip – San Francisco to NYC, and Henry Ford begins his success in the car business.
9. Jack London’s The Call of the Wild.
10. An anti-Semetic pogrom claims the lives of 45 Jews in Kishinev, Russia.
11. The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party is split between the Mensheviks and Lenin’s Bolsheviks.
12. Henry James’ The Ambassadors.

- Our Times: The Illustrated History of the 20th century