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All Events
Black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson loses his title, in the 26th round, to the "Great White Hope", Jess Willard
The Metropolitan Water Board Light Railway, with a two foot guage, is constructed to connect the coal wharf and pumping stations in Hampton Waterworks and the Kempton Park pumping station
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
Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag, by George Asaf and Felix Powell, rapidly becomes one of the most popular songs of the day
Somerset Maugham publishes his semi-autobiographical novel Of Human Bondage
Canadian army surgeon John McCrae writes 'In Flanders Fields' after a friend is killed in the trenches
Radiotelephone messages are transmitted from Arlington in Virginia to the Eiffel Tower in Paris
Thomas Edison invents a machine to record telephone conversations, calling it the telescribe
Australian author C.J. Dennis creates the Sentimental Bloke, featuring first in a book of poems and four years later in a film
After years of slow decline, the Star and Garter is bought by the Auctioneers and Estate Agents Institute and presented to Queen Mary to become a hospital for disabled servicemen
American campaigner for birth control Margaret Sanger publishes a controversial pamphlet, Family Limitation
US novelist Ernest Poole publishes The Harbor, set on the Brooklyn waterfront
Franz Kafka publishes Metamorphosis, the tale of a travelling salesman who wakes up to find himself transformed into an insect
Woodrow Wilson sends US marines to take control in Haiti after a spate of political assassinations
Kasimir Malevich exhibits his painting Black Square in Petrograd, in the final Futurist exhibition
Charlie Chaplin makes The Tramp, giving prominence to the famous character he launched the previous year in Kid Auto Races at Venice
The nearest star to earth, the red dwarf Proxima Centauri 4.22 light years away, is discovered by Robert Innes, Scottish director of the Johannesburg Observatory
Typhoid-carrier Mary Mallon is detained in New York after leaving a trail of destruction
The Irish painter Jack Yeats develops a romantic Expressionist style, with a new interest in Celtic myth
The English writer Virginia Woolf publishes her first novel, The Voyage Out
The inflationary pressures of world war force nations to abandon the established gold standard
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret develops Maison Domino, a system of low-cost housing with reinforced concrete columns and precast floors
D.H. Lawrence's novel about the Brangwen family, The Rainbow, is seized by the police as an obscene work
The Russian poet and dramatist Vladimir Mayakovsky publishes his first major long poem, A Cloud in Trousers
