New Zealand inventor Ernest Godward, who had invented the spiral hairpin and received a patent  in 1899, sells the American rights to the spiral hairpin for £20,000, which is a fortune at this time.

Born in Marylebone, London, on April 7, 1869, he is the son of Henry Robert Godward, a fireman, and his wife, Sarah Ann Pattison.

When Godward was twelve he was sent to prep-school but ran away to sea reaching Japan where he worked on a cabling ship between Nagasaki and Vladivostok before he was returned home by the British Consul, Nicholas Hannen.

On his return he was apprenticed to Shand, Mason and Co in London, a firm of hydraulic engineers and steam powered fire engine manufacturers, where he trained as a mechanic.

Quitting Shand Mason, he returned to the sea in 1884 as a ship's steward. 

In 1886 Godward emigrated to New Zealand arriving at Port Chalmers aboard the 1310 ton Shaw, Savill & Albion Line sailing ship Nelson on December 31.

During his time in Dunedin he learned to play the banjo and formed a music group called the Star Variety Company.

He worked in the cycle trade for Sam Stedman before shifting in 1893 to  Invercargill, where he became a partner in the Southland Cycle Works (later Godward and McKenzie) of Dee Street, which makes Sparrowhawk cycles.

On January 28, 1896, he married Marguerita Florence Celena Treweek; the couple will eventually have ten children: nine of their own plus a niece of Marguerita's.

Leaving the Southland Cycle Works in 1900 Godward had embarked on inventing and manufacturing a wide range of everyday objects. 

Included among these are a non-slip egg-beater, a new post-hole borer, a new type of hair curler, a burglar-proof window and a hedge trimmer made from bicycle parts.

He founds the Godward Spiral Pin and New Inventions Co. Ltd.,  which is a listed company on the New Zealand stock exchange.

Miles Franklin, the nom de plume of Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin, portrays an irrepressible teenage girl, Sybylla Melvyn, growing to womanhood in contemporary rural New South Wales in My Brilliant Career, published in 1901, when Franklin is twenty.

Written while she was still a teenager, as a romance to amuse her friends, Franklin had submitted the manuscript to Henry Lawson, who had contributed a preface and taken it to his own publishers in Edinburgh.

The popularity of the novel in Australia and the perceived closeness of many of the characters to her own family and circumstances as small farmers in New South Wales near Goulburn causes Franklin a great deal of distress and leads her to withdrawing the novel from publication until after her death.

Shortly after the publication of My Brilliant Career, Franklin writes a sequel, My Career Goes Bung, which will not be published until 1946.

Cornelll graduate Willard Straight is hired in 1901 by the Imperial Chinese Maritime Customs Service, an agency of the Chinese government, which conducts opium traffic.

He serves as secretary to Sir Robert Hart, the Service's head, in Nanjing. (Straight will later become head of Morgan Bank’s Far Eastern operations.)

Born on January 31, 1880, in Oswego, New York, the son of two Yankee missionaries to China and Japan, Henry H. Straight (1846-1886) and née Emma Dickerman (1850–1890), who were faculty members at Oswego Normal School, Willard was orphaned at age ten, by the death of his father in 1886 and his mother in 1890.

Willard and his sister were taken in by Dr. Elvire Ranier, one of the earliest woman physicians in the country.

He attended Bordentown Military Institute in New Jersey, and in 1897 he enrolled at Cornell University in upstate New York and graduates in 1901 with a degree in architecture.

At Cornell, he had joined Delta Tau Delta, edited and contributed to several publications, and helped to organize Dragon Day, an annual architecture students' event.

He was also elected to the Sphinx Head Society, membership in which was reserved for the most respected men of the senior class.

The Relief Society For German Jews (Hilsvereinder Deutschen Juden), founded in the same year as the Jewish National Fund (JNF), 1901, is designed to facilitate the immigration of Eastern European Jews to Germany.

The Kleinflammenwerfer, the first German man-portable flamethrower, is created by and developed alongside the Grossflammenwerfer, which is a larger flamethrower, by Richard Fiedler, who submits evaluation models of his Flammenwerfer to the German Army in 1901.

Fiedler has studied engineering and works as an engineer in Berlin; the development of the flame thrower results from his focus on nozzles for spraying liquids.

Fiedler originally performed a trick called "Brennender See" (Burning Lake) at festivals in Berlin-Weißensee.

The trick entailed pouring a flammable liquid onto a water surface and setting it on fire.

A first flamethrower patent is granted in 1901, and Fiedler turns to the German army, who grant him financial support for continuing development of the device.

Fuel is stored in a large vertical, cylindrical backpack container.

High-pressure propellant is stored in another, smaller container attached to the fuel tank.

A long hose connects the fuel tank to a lance tube with an igniting device at the nozzle.

The propellant forces the fuel through the hose and out of the nozzle at high speed when a valve is opened.

The igniting device at the nozzle sets fire to the fuel as it sprays out.

The flamethrower is operated by two soldiers, one carrying the fuel and propellant tanks, another wielding the lance (though it is 31.8 kilograms it can be operated by one soldier).

Postimpressionist artists such as Lovis Corinth and Max Slevogt, working with the peculiar recklessness that is endemic to German painting, have unwittingly laid the technical foundations of Expressionism.

The roots of the German Expressionist school lie in the works of van Gogh, Edvard Munch, and James Ensor, each of whom in the period 1885­-1900 had evolved a highly personal painting style.

These artists used the expressive possibilities of color and line to explore dramatic and emotion-laden themes, to convey the qualities of fear, horror, and the grotesque, or simply to celebrate nature with hallucinatory intensity.

They had broken away from the literal representation of nature in order to express more subjective outlooks or states of mind.

Renoir exhibits twenty-three works at a mixed show at Paul Cassirer in Berlin.

Otto Wagner continues to combine academic geometry with classical modified Art Nouveau decoration in his Karlsplatz Stadtbahn Station (1899­-1901).

The buildings above ground on Karlsplatz are a well-known example of Jugendstil architecture.

These buildings are included in the Vienna Secession, as they follow many of the artistic styles of that movement.

Designed by Wagner, adviser to the Transport Commission in Vienna, and Joseph Maria Olbrich, they are, unlike the other Stadtbahn stations, made of a steel framework with marble slabs mounted on the exterior.

These stations allow Wagner to achieve his goal of creating two modern axes of architecture in a city that is becoming one of the most modern cities of its time.

These buildings will go on to become the most modern monument of the modern city.

The domestic scandal forces King Alexander to grant a more liberal constitution (1901) and to create a senate as the second house in the Serbian legislature.

During his reign he also improves his state's economy, reforms the army, and tries to improve Serbia's international position by encouraging the revival of the Balkan alliances that were originally negotiated between 1865 and 1868 by King Michael (Mihailo Obrenovic; reigned 1860–68).

Meanwhile, Dragutin Dimitrijevic, a young army officer and already a member of the Serbian general staff, in 1901 initiates an officers' conspiracy to assassinate the unpopular king.