Discover what happened in this year with HISTORY’s summaries of major events, anniversaries, famous births and notable deaths.
Jan
05
French officer Alfred Dreyfus, condemned for passing military secrets to the Germans, is stripped of his rank in a humiliating public ceremony in the courtyard of Paris’ Ecole Militaire. The Jewish artillery captain, convicted on flimsy evidence in a highly irregular trial, began his life sentence on the notorious Devil’s Island Prison in French Guyana four months later.
Apr
05
Apr
21
May
25
Writer Oscar Wilde is sent to prison after being convicted of sodomy. The famed writer of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest brought attention to his private life in a feud with Sir John Sholto Douglas, whose son was intimately involved with Wilde.
Aug
19
Oct
04
Nov
08
On November 8, 1895, physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (1845-1923) becomes the first person to observe X-rays, a significant scientific advancement that would ultimately benefit a variety of fields, most of all medicine, by making the invisible visible.
German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen (1845 - 1923), who in 1895 discovered the electromagnetic rays which he called X-rays. (Photo by Nicola Perscheid/Getty Images)
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Nov
28
On this Thanksgiving Day in 1895, piloting a gas-powered “horseless carriage” of his and his brother’s own design, the mechanic, inventor and now racecar driver Frank Duryea wins the first motor-car race in the United States. The race, sponsored by the Chicago Times-Herald, was intended to drum up publicity for the nascent American car industry. It worked, especially for the Duryeas: In the year after the Times-Herald race, the brothers sold 13 of their eponymous Motor Wagons, more than any other carmaker in America.
Dec
25
Dec
28
On December 28, 1895, the world’s first commercial movie screening takes place at the Grand Cafe in Paris. The film was made by Louis and Auguste Lumière, two French brothers who developed a camera-projector called the Cinematographe. The Lumière brothers unveiled their invention to the public in March 1895 with a brief film showing workers leaving the Lumière factory. On December 28, the entrepreneurial siblings screened a series of short scenes from everyday French life and charged admission for the first time.
FRANCE - APRIL 26: Coloured lithograph, signed Duzol. The audience are watching the film, 'L'Arroseur Arrose', in which a mischievous boy steps off a hose-pipe when the gardener examines the nozzle of his hose to see why the water has stopped. Auguste Lumiere (1862-1954) and his brother Louis (1865-1948) invented the 'Cinematographe', in 1895. This was the first machine to project images onto a screen. In the same year, they built the first cinema in Lyons, France, and by December they had successfully hosted their first show to a paying audience in Paris. (Photo by SSPL/Getty Images)
SSPL via Getty Images
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