Born
15 Jan: Aristotle Onassis, Greek shipping tycoon.
13 Apr: Samuel Beckett, Franco-Irish playwright.
3 June: Josephine Baker, US-born French dancer and jazz singer
19 Dec: Leonid Brezhnev, Soviet leader

Died
19 Apr: Pierre Curie, Nobel Prize-winning French physicist.
3 May: Henrik Ibsen, Norwegian dramatist.
22 Oct: Paul Cezanne, French painter.

Devastated
On 8 Feb Tahiti and the Cook Islands were hit by a cyclone. 10,000 were killed by 192 km/h (120mph) winds.

On 7 Apr the town of Ottaviano was destroyed by an eruption of Vesuvius.

On 18 Aug Valparaiso, Chile was struck by an earthquake, leaving hundreds dead and destroying two-thirds of the city.

At 5:18 on the morning of 18 April, a devastating earthquake rocked the city of San Francisco on the western US coast with powerful shock waves which were registered on seismographs as far away as Australia. The main quake lasted a full three minutes and was followed by a series of aftershocks.

The city was reduced to chaos. Buildings everywhere collapsed into the streets and fires broke out as lamps and stoves were overturned. Within three hours these fires were ragging out of control with firefighters unable to get access to damaged water mains. Many buildings which survived the quake succumbed to the blaze which took days to bring under control.

Thousands of San Franciscans fled their homes and left the city, packing into trains and ferries. Parks and squares were crowded with thousands more homeless people without access to food or water. Martial law was imposed in an attempt to keep order.

A thousand or more lives are believed to have been lost and 250,000 people made homeless -- two thirds of San Francisco's population. A total of 28,000 buildings were destroyed over a huge area, causing estimated damage of up to US$200 million.

On 10 December, the Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov received the Nobel Prize for physiology in Stockholm for his research on the digestive system. His experiments showed that even when a dog's gullet had been severed, gastric juices were still released into the stomach when the dog was fed. The brain, triggered by messages sent by nerve endings in the mouth, caused digestive juices to flow even though no food had reached the stomach.

Pavlov also investigated what he termed "conditioned reflexes". Every time he fed his laboratory dogs, he rang a bell. After a time, when the dogs had become used to the bell ringing, he noticed that the dogs dribbled when the bell rang, even if no food was offered. Pavlov thus proved that it is possible to "condition" the dribbling reflex, a discovery which helped the understanding of how we learn.