| 1845–1958 | Germany [earth sciences] | German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt lays the basis of modern geography with the publication of Kosmos/Cosmos, in which he arranges geographic knowledge in a systematic fashion. |
| 1895 | England [fiction] | The English writer H G Wells publishes his fantasy novel The Time Machine. |
| 1895 | USA [fiction] | The US writer Stephen Crane publishes his novel The Red Badge of Courage. |
| 1895 | UK [conservation] | Octavia Hill, Sir Robert Hunter, and Canon Hardwicke D Rawnsley found the National Trust, a British charity established to protect historic and landmark buildings, parks, gardens, and areas of natural beauty. |
| 1895 | Germany, England [births and deaths] | Friedrich Engels, German socialist philosopher who, with Karl Marx, wrote The Communist Manifesto (1848) which laid the foundations of modern communism, dies in London, England (75). |
| 1895 | Russian Empire [ballet] | A new version of the ballet Lebedinoe ozero/Swan Lake, written in 1877 by the Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, is first performed, in St Petersburg, Russia. The choreography of this, the most familiar version, is by the French choreographer Marius Petipa and the Russian choreographer Lev Ivanovich Ivanov. |
| 1895 | Austria [literature and language] | The Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud publishes Studien über Hysterie/Studies in Hysteria. |
| 1895 | Austria [literature and language] | The Austrian architect Otto Wagner publishes his influential book Moderne Architektur/Modern Architecture. |
| 1895 | USA [motor vehicles] | More than 300 cars are in use in the USA. |
| 1895 | Germany [orchestral music] | The German composer Richard Strauss completes his symphonic poem Till Eulenspiegel. |
| 1895 | France [social theory] | French sociologist Emile Durkheim publishes Les Règles de la méthode sociologique/The Rules of the Sociological Method, in which he formulates the scientific methodology of sociology and establishes it as a discipline. |
| 1895 | Russia [space exploration] | Russian scientist Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky publishes Gryozy o zemle i nebe/Dreams of Earth and Sky. The first book about space travel, it discusses the possibility of space flight using liquid-fuelled rockets, and the idea of designing spacecraft with a closed biological cycle to provide oxygen from plants for long flights. |
| 1895 | USA [sports] | Volleyball is invented by William G Morgan, director of physical training at the Holyoke YMCA, Massachusetts. It is originally known as ‘mintonette’. |
| 1895 | UK [physics] | Scottish physicist Charles Thomson Rees Wilson develops the first cloud chamber. He builds it to duplicate the effects of clouds on mountain tops, but later realizes its potential in nuclear physics. |
| 1895 | UK [plays] | The comedy The Importance of Being Earnest by the Irish writer Oscar Wilde is first performed, at the St James Theatre in London, England. |
| 1 February 1895 | USA [births and deaths] | John Ford (adopted name of Sean O'Feeney), US film director best known for his Westerns, born in Cape Elizabeth, Maine (–1973). |
| 6 February 1895 | USA [births and deaths] | (George Herman) ‘Babe’ Ruth, US professional baseball player, born in Baltimore, Maryland (–1948). |
| 12 February 1895 | China, Japan [wars] | The Japanese navy achieves a resounding victory over Chinese forces at Weihaiwei during the Sino-Japanese war. |
| 13 February 1895 | France [cinema and film] | French inventors Auguste and Louis Lumière patent the cinématograph, a device for taking and projecting moving pictures. On 28 December 1895, in the basement of the Grande Café in Paris, France, they show the film La Sortie des ouvriers de l'usine Lumière/Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, the first film shown to a paying public. It sparks an entire new industry. It is also the first documentary film, and projects at 16 frames per second. They make more than 40 films during 1896 and record everyday French life. |
| 30 March 1895 | USA, UK [sports] | US-born British cinematographic pioneer Birt Acres films the Oxford and Cambridge University Boat Race. This is the first sporting event to be filmed in Britain, and the first regular event in the sporting calendar to be filmed anywhere in the world. |
| 17 April 1895 | Korea, Japan, China [treaties] | Under the Treaty of Shimonoseki, China and Japan recognize the independence of Korea following war over its status as a Chinese vassal state. |
| 2 May 1895 | Southern Rhodesia [colonization] | Territory belonging to the British South Africa Company south of the Zambezi is organized to form Southern Rhodesia. |
| 6 May 1895 | Italy, USA [births and deaths] | Rudolph Valentino, Italian-born US silent film star, known as the ‘Great Lover’, born in Castellaneta, Italy (–1926). |
| 11 June 1895 | Togoland, UK, Transvaal [colonization] | Britain annexes Togoland in order to block the Transvaal's access to the sea. |
| 25 June 1895 | UK [law and government] | Robert Cecil, Lord Salisbury, forms a unionist ministry in Britain with the former radical Joseph Chamberlain as colonial secretary. |
| 1 July 1895 | Africa [colonization] | The British government creates an East African protectorate on the dissolution of the British East Africa Company. |
| 29 August 1895 | UK [rugby] | Rugby league is born when 22 clubs in the north of England break away from the Rugby Union to form the Northern Rugby Football Union after being refused compensation for loss of wages while playing. |
| 28 September 1895 | France [births and deaths] | Louis Pasteur, French microbiologist who proved that micro-organisms cause disease and fermentation and who developed the process of pasteurization, dies in Saint-Cloud, near Paris, France (73). |
| 4 October 1895 | USA [golf] | English-born US golfer Horace Rawlins receives $150 as the winner of the inaugural US Open golf championship, which is played on a nine-hole course at Newport, Rhode Island. |
| 8 November 1895 | Germany [physics] | German scientist Wilhelm Konrad Röntgen experiments with a Crookes' tube and notices that a sheet of paper coated with barium pltinocyanide becomes fluorescent. Realizing that this is due to some unknown emission from the tube, he names it the X-ray. |
