The first German submarine, or U-boat, is constructed in a programme to catch up with Britain and France in this area

H.G. Wells publishes Kipps: the story of a simple soul, a comic novel about a bumbling draper's assistant

Aristide Maillol has his first major success with a large sculpture at the Salon d'Automne in Paris

Claude Debussy completes the three symphonic sketches forming La Mer

Albert Einstein relates mass and energy in the equation e = mc2

Matisse, Derain and others, exhibiting in Paris their shockingly colourful new works, are dubbed fauves ("wild beasts") by a critic

The first soviet ("council") of workers is set up in St Petersburg, introducing a word of great significance in Russian Communist history

The Dutch dancer Gertrud Zelle begins a career in Paris, using the stage name Mata Hari

Tsar Nicholas II reluctantly signs the October Manifesto, authorizing an elected duma or legislature

Gustav Mahler's cycle of five songs, Kindertotenlieder, hs its first performance in Vienna

The monk Grigory Rasputin exercises a powerful influence over the Russian empress Alexandra

Bernard Shaw has two new plays opening in London in the same year, Major Barbara and Man and Superman

The designer Edward Gordon Craig publishes a theatrical manifesto, The Art of the Theatre

Richard Strauss's Salome, based on Oscar Wilde's play, has wide success in spite of censorship difficulties

Franz Lehár's operetta The Merry Widow opens in Vienna at the start of an immensely successful run

Sir Percy Blakeney rescues aristocrats from the guillotine in Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel

Britain's Labour Party achieves its first electoral success, winning twenty-nine seats at Westminster

Britain launches HMS Dreadnought, the first of a massive new class of battleship

The first part of the Post Office Savings Bank in Vienna is completed, to the designs of Otto Wagner

More than 1200 French miners die in an underground explosion in the district of Calais

English biologist William Bateson uses the word 'genetics' to describe the phenomenon of heredity and variation

Frederick Soddy observes his first examples of chemically identical elements with differing atomic weights, to which he later gives the name isotopes

The Liberals win a majority in election for Russia's new duma and press ahead with proposals for land reform

Antoni Gaudí completes his radical rebuilding of the Casa Batlló in Barcelona

17-year-old Charlie Chaplin joins the Fred Karno company, touring slapstick comedy