On October 20, Alexander III, Emperor of Russia, died of kidney disease. Doctors explained the illness as the result of serious internal injuries the tsar had sustained in Borki during his miraculous escape from a train crash. Thrown from the embankment into a ditch, he was pulled out from beneath the wreckage of a railcar. Two years before his death he fell ill with influenza, which finally undermined his health.
On November 2 — after the sudden death of his father, Nicholas II ascended the throne. That same year he married Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt (in Orthodoxy, Alexandra Feodorovna).
On June 23 — the International Athletic Congress, convened at the Sorbonne University in Paris, heard a report by the French public figure and sports enthusiast Baron Pierre de Coubertin. In it he presented to those assembled the organizational foundations of the Olympic Games that he had developed. Coubertin’s proposal was met with applause, and the congress approved the baron’s suggestion to revive the tradition of the ancient Greek Olympiads so that once every four years “competitive games be held, inviting all nations to take part.”
On April 14 — the first public demonstration of Edison’s film projector took place.
R. Kipling’s "The Jungle Books" are published.
On April 17 — Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev was born, First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee.
On December 3 — Robert Louis Stevenson, an English writer ("Treasure Island"), died.
The mother of five-year-old Charlie Chaplin, while performing a number and singing the little song “Jack Jones,” cracked on a note; the audience began to whistle... And her son volunteered to sing the same little song in her place, even imitating exactly how his mother’s voice broke. This earned him the first ovation of his life. The debut took place.