The Swedish-American poet Carl Sandburg makes his name with 'Chicago', published in the magazine Poetry

Charlie Chaplin introduces his most famous character, the little tramp, in Kid Auto Races at Venice

Alexander Graham Bell again summons his assistant Thomas Watson (as in 1876), but this time he is in New York and Watson in San Francisco

Black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson loses his title, in the 26th round, to the "Great White Hope", Jess Willard

The Corning Glass Company launches Pyrex, a new range of heat-resistant kitchen ware made from borosilicate glass

D.W. Griffith's epic film The Birth of a Nation has its premiere in New York

Thomas Edison invents a machine to record telephone conversations, calling it the telescribe

American campaigner for birth control Margaret Sanger publishes a controversial pamphlet, Family Limitation

Charlie Chaplin makes The Tramp, giving prominence to the famous character he launched the previous year in Kid Auto Races at Venice

Typhoid-carrier Mary Mallon is detained in New York after leaving a trail of destruction

Edgar Lee Masters makes his name as a poet with the publication of Spoon River Anthology

William Joseph Simmons, a suspended Methodist preacher in Georgia, wins a big racist following in the south with his revival of the defunct Ku Klux Klan

'Earth's the right place for love' in Robert Frost's 'Birches', included in his collection Mountain Interval

The Provincetown Players are founded in Massachusetts, opening with a production of Eugene O'Neill's Bound East for Cardiff

In his first World Series for the Boston Red Sox, 21-year-old Babe Ruth sets a still unbroken record, pitching 13 successive scoreless innings

William Boeing flies an aircraft built by himself, and a month later sets up in Seattle his own Aero Product company

The Passing Show of 1916 is the first of 22 musicals written in the short span of 17 years by the brothers George and Ira Gershwin

In his ground-breaking film Intolerance D.W. Griffith intercuts four parallel stories from different historical periods

The Imagist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) publishes her first collection, Sea Garden

Margaret Sanger opens the first US birth control clinic, in a poor district of Brooklyn, and is gaoled for thirty days

Woodrow Wilson wins re-election as US president after campaigning on the slogan 'He kept us out of war'

Marcel Duchamp submits a ceramic urinal to the Society of Independent Artists in New York, giving it the title Fountain

New York responds with enthusiasm when the Original Dixieland Jazz Band performs a new kind of music in Reisenweber's restaurant

Silent film comedian Harold Lloyd adopts the glasses and the straw hat that become his familiar props

Comedian Buster Keaton makes his first appearance in a film, The Butcher Boy