The first competitive event for cars is held over a distance of 78 miles from Paris to Rouen

The tenor Enrico Caruso makes his debut in his home town of Naples

Swan Lake is performed in St Petersburg in its definitive version, with choreography shared between Lucien Petipa and Lev Ivanov

Oscar Wilde's most brilliant comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest is performed in London's St. James Theatre

Scottish chemist William Ramsay isolates the element helium

Oscar Wilde loses a libel case that he has brought against the marquess of Queensberry for describing him as a sodomite

21-year-old Guglielmo Marconi succeeds in transmitting a radio signal more than a mile at his home near Bologna

Oscar Wilde is sent to Reading Gaol to serve a two-year sentence with hard labour after being convicted of homosexuality

General Alfred von Schlieffen devises plans for a potential two-pronged attack against France and Russia in a swift war

German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen discovers rays that can penetrate light-proof barriers, and names them x-rays because their nature is as yet unknown

Lenin is arrested in St Petersburg, along with other members of the Union for the Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class

H.G. Wells publishes The Time Machine, a story about a Time Traveller whose first stop on his journey is the year 802701

Gwen John persuades a reluctant father to allow her to follow her younger brother to the Slade School of Art in London

A promenade concert, presented by Henry Wood in London's Queen's Hall, turns out to be the beginning of a very long tradition

Giacomo Puccini's opera La Bohème has an unsuccessful premiere in Turin

French physicist Antoine Henri Becquerel discovers in uranium salt the phenomenon of natural radioactivity

Theodor Herzl publishes The Jewish State, calling for a national homeland for all Jews

The first modern Olympic Games, organized by Pierre de Coubertin, are held in Athens

Otto Lilienthal dies when a wing fractures on his glider and he crashes from a height of 17 metres

Jean Sibelius's 'symphonic legend' The Swan of Tuonela has its premiere in Helsinki

English poet A.E. Housman publishes his first collection, A Shropshire Lad

Anton Chekhov's play The Seagull has a disastrous premiere in St Petersburg (but is well received two years later in Moscow)

22-year-old Guglielmo Marconi takes out a patent in Britain for the invention of radio

Jewish composer Gustav Mahler is baptized a Christian so as to be eligible to conduct the Vienna Opera

English physicist Joseph John Thomson, working at the Cavendish laboratory in Cambridge, discovers the existence of the electron