March 18 – Phoebe, the ninth-known moon of the planet Saturn is discovered by U.S. astronomer William H. Pickering from analysis of photographic plates made by a Peruvian observatory seven months earlier, the first discovery of a satellite photographically.
October 19 – 17-year-old Robert H. Goddard in Worcester, Massachusetts, receives his inspiration to develop a rocket capable of reaching outer space, after viewing his yard from high in a tree and imagining "how wonderful it would be to make some device which had even the possibility of ascending to Mars, and how it would look on a small scale, if sent up from the meadow at my feet."[1]
December 31 – Retrospectively, day zero for dates in Microsoft Excel. This is to ensure backwards compatibility with Lotus 1-2-3, which had a bug misinterpreting 1900 as a leap year.[2][3][4]
July 4 – The most famous skeleton of a dinosaur ever found intact, a Diplodicus, is discovered at the Sheep Creek Quarry in the western United States near Medicine Bow, Wyoming. The expedition team, financed by Andrew Carnegie for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh and led by William Harlow Reed, bestows the name "Dippy" on the Diplodicus carnegii, which becomes well known after Carnegie has plaster cast replicas made for donation to museums all over the world. These dinosaurs are estimated to have roamed in North America more than 152,000,000 years ago.[12]
Physicsedit
March 3 – Guglielmo Marconi conducts radio beacon experiments on Salisbury Plain in England and notices that radio waves are being reflected back to the transmitter by objects they encounter, one of the early steps in the potential for developing radar.[13]
January 26 – German inventor Karl Ferdinand Braun (who will in 1909 share the Nobel Prize in Physics with Marconi) receives British Patent No. 1899-1862 for his wireless radio invention "Telegraphy without directly connected wire".[15]
May 4 – German-born inventor John Matthias Stroh applies for a patent for the 'Stroh violin', a stringed musical instrument with an amplifying horn attached.[19]
May 26 – The guns of British cruiser HMS Scylla, commanded by Captain Percy Scott, hit their targets 56 out of 70 times after Scott and his crew solve the problem of aiming a ship cannon on rolling seas.[20]
July 18 – The patent for the first sofa bed (a foldable bed frame that can be stored under the cushions of a couch) is taken out by African American inventor Leonard C. Bailey.[22]
August 23 – The first ship-to-shore test of a wireless radio transmission is made from the U.S. lightship LV 70 with the sending of Morse code signals to a receiving station near San Francisco. The tests are made over 17 days.[23]
October 26 – Indirect fire, a shooting technique based on calculating azimuth and inclination to aim a weapon at an enemy that cannot be hit by direct fire, is used for the first time in battle.[24] British gunners in the Second Boer War, using the techniques developed by Russian Lieutenant Colonel K. G. Guk, fire a cannon on a high trajectory toward the Boer Army, with the objective of having the shell coming down on the enemy.
November 7 – The flash-lamp, the first to use electricity to ignite photographers' magnesium flash powder, is awarded as U.S. patent 636,492 to Joshua Lionel Cohen. While flash powder had been in use since 1887, the ignition was more dangerous because it had to be performed manually.
January 29 – A lawyer for the estate of John W. Keely, an inventor who had persuaded investors in his Keely Motor Company that an automobile could be created that would operate from Keely's "induction resonance motion motor" which had achieved perpetual motion, reveals that the late Mr. Keely's motor has been a fraud, and that the widow knew nothing of it.[26]
^Lehman, Milton (1988). Robert H. Goddard: Pioneer of Space Research. Da Capo Press. p. 16.
^Porter, Remy (2019-02-05). "Set the Flux Capacitor for 12/30/1899". The Daily WTF. Retrieved 2022-09-25.
^helenclu (2022-07-22). "Excel incorrectly assumes that the year 1900 is a leap year - Office". learn.microsoft.com. Retrieved 2022-09-25.
^helenclu (2022-05-05). "Differences between the 1900 and the 1904 date system - Office". learn.microsoft.com. Retrieved 2022-09-25.
^Borchgrevink, C. E. (1901). First on the Antarctic Continent: being an account of the British Antarctic Expedition, 1898-1900. London: Newnes.
^Volkert, Klaus, ed. (2015). David Hilbert: Grundlagen der Geometrie. Springer. p. ix.
^Grattan-Guinness, Ivor (2005). Landmark Writings in Western Mathematics 1640-1940. Elsevier. p. 713.
^Cartan, Élie (1899). "Sur certaines expressions différentielles et le problème de Pfaff" (PDF). Annales Scientifiques de l'École Normale Supérieure. Série 3 (in French). 16. Paris: Gauthier-Villars: 239–332. ISSN 0012-9593. JFM 30.0313.04. Retrieved 2018-05-02.
^Crilly, Tony (2007). 50 Mathematical Ideas you really need to know. London: Quercus. p. 113. ISBN 978-1-84724-008-8.
^"Aspirin". Milestones: Aspirin. German Patent and Trademark Office. 2022-10-18. Retrieved 2023-03-06.
^Lewenson, Sandra B. (2013). Taking Charge: Nursing, Suffrage, and Feminism in America, 1873-1920. Routledge. p. 95.
^Tschopp, Emanuel; et al. (2015). "A specimen-level phylogenetic analysis and taxonomic revision of Diplodocidae (Dinosauria, Sauropoda)". PeerJ.
^Andia, Gianfranco; Duroc, Yvan; Tedjini, Smail (2018-01-19). Non-Linearities in Passive RFID Systems: Third Harmonic Concept and Applications. Wiley. ISBN 9781119490739.
^Huurdeman, Anton A. (2003). The Worldwide History of Telecommunications. Wiley. p. 215.
^Desmond, Kevin (2016). "Jungner, Ernst Waldemar". Innovators in Battery Technology: Profiles of 95 Influential Electrochemists. McFarland Publishing. p. 116.
^"World's first colour film footage viewed for first time". BBC News. 2012-09-12. Retrieved 2020-08-11.
^Penguin Pocket On This Day. Penguin Reference Library. 2006. ISBN 0-14-102715-0.
^British Patent No. GB9418 granted March 24, 1900.
^Friedman, Norman (2013). Naval Firepower: Battleship Guns and Gunnery in the Dreadnought Era. Barnsley: Pen & Sword. p. 18.
^Veronico, Betty S. (2008). Images of America: Lighthouses of the Bay Area. Arcadia Publishing. p. 34.
^Sweet, Frank W. (2000). The Evolution of Indirect Fire. Backintyme Publishing. pp. 28–33.
^Henderson, Ron (February 2011). "Fire King". Vintage Spirit (103): 30–34.
^Ord-Hume, Arthur W. J. G. (2015). Perpetual Motion. Adventures Unlimited Press. p. 146.
^"Copley Medal | British scientific award". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 23 July 2020.
^Haines, Catharine M. C. (2001). International Women in Science: A Biographical Dictionary to 1950. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. p. 10. ISBN 978-1-57607-090-1.