April 1 — Belgian emigrant Charles Van Depoele received a U.S. patent for the first trolleybus.
M. A. Vrubel’s painting “Demon” was created.
February 10 — Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, Russian poet and writer, was born.
September 15 — Agatha Christie (Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller), English writer and author of detective novels, was born.
December 19 — the premiere of P. I. Tchaikovsky’s opera “The Queen of Spades” took place in St. Petersburg.
March 23 — eighteen-year-old prima ballerina Matilda Kshesinskaya wrote in her diary: “…The entire imperial family stayed with us for supper… I was very pleased that the heir sat beside me… …he truly took my fancy, and not for just one day…”
“News of the Day” wrote about a project for an all-metal airship developed by K. E. Tsiolkovsky, though they mixed up his surname. “A teacher at the Borovsk District School (in Kaluga Governorate), Mr. Tsankovsky, has drawn up a plan for the construction of an aerostat. This plan was reviewed by the technical society in Petersburg. Having checked Mr. Tsankovsky’s mathematical calculations, the society found that they were done correctly and that Mr. Tsankovsky’s ideas were sound; but the society refused him the monetary subsidy he sought to carry out his plan, on the grounds that the designer had not taken into account all the difficulties that might arise in implementing the project…”