Battle of Tsushima
A fleet sails halfway round the world to be destroyed in a day
In May 1905 a Russian fleet that had sailed some 33,000 km from the Baltic around Africa was almost entirely destroyed by Admiral Togo's Japanese fleet in the Tsushima Strait. The defeat decided the Russo-Japanese War and fuelled the 1905 Revolution.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1914–1918 World War I — 9 years later
- 1918–1920 Spanish flu pandemic — 13 years later
- 1920 League of Nations founded — 15 years later
Europe
- 1886 Benz's first automobile — 19 years earlier
- 1889 Eiffel Tower — 16 years earlier
- 1905 Einstein's miracle year and relativity — same year
- 1914 Assassination of Franz Ferdinand — 9 years later
- 1919 Treaty of Versailles — 14 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1905–1907 Russian Revolution of 1905 — same year
- 1908 Tunguska event — 3 years later
- 1917 October Revolution — 12 years later
- 1917–1922 Russian Civil War — 12 years later
- 1929–1933 Collectivization in the Soviet Union — 24 years later
Middle East
- 1905–1911 Persian Constitutional Revolution — same year
- 1908 Oil struck at Masjed Soleyman — 3 years later
- 1908 Young Turk Revolution — 3 years later
- 1915–1917 Armenian genocide — 10 years later
- 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement — 11 years later
Africa
- 1897 The British sack Benin City — 8 years earlier
- 1898 Battle of Omdurman — 7 years earlier
- 1899–1902 Second Boer War — 6 years earlier
- 1904–1908 The Herero and Nama genocide — 1 year earlier
- 1922 Discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb — 17 years later
Americas
- 1903 Wright brothers' first flight — 2 years earlier
- 1906 San Francisco earthquake — 1 year later
- 1910–1920 Mexican Revolution — 5 years later
- 1914 Opening of the Panama Canal — 9 years later
- 1929 Wall Street Crash — 24 years later
Oceania
- 1893 New Zealand women win the vote — 12 years earlier
- 1893 Overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom — 12 years earlier
- 1911 Amundsen reaches the South Pole — 6 years later
- 1912 The death of Scott's polar party — 7 years later
Alive at the time
- Leo Tolstoy (aged 77)
- Dmitri Mendeleev (aged 71)
- Thomas Edison (aged 58)
- Nikola Tesla (aged 49)
- Marie Curie (aged 38)
- Mahatma Gandhi (aged 36)
- Vladimir Lenin (aged 35)
- Ernest Rutherford (aged 34)
- Winston Churchill (aged 31)
- Joseph Stalin (aged 27)