REVIEW 20TH CENTURY: 1900-1914

From left to right:

As the 20th century dawned, Queen Victoria reigned over an empire that spanned much of the globe, and was grandmother to most of the crowned heads in Europe. But the Victorian era soon ended with the QueenÕs death in January 1901

An age-old dream came to fruition as man finally learnt to fly. The Wright BrothersÕ petrol-engined ÒFlyerÓ, piloted by Orville Wright, lifted off from the beach at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina for a journey lasting all of 12 seconds

Women stepped up their campaign to win the vote, enduring arrest, prison terms and force-feeding in their struggle to be enfranchised

Charles Stewart Rolls and Frederick Henry Royce joined forces in 1904 to build and sell motor cars. Two years later, the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost was acclaimed as the Òbest car in the worldÓ

Across the Atlantic, Henry Ford had the vision to provide cars for the masses. His Model T, first produced in 1908, would sell 15 million cars by the time production ceased in 1927

Theodore Roosevelt became President of the United States on the assassination of William McKinley in September 1901. A hero of the Spanish-American War, he masterminded the building of the Panama Canal, was the first American to win a Nobel Prize and gave his nickname, Teddy, to one of the most popular toys of the century

Disaster struck in April 1912 when the Titanic, the largest liner then afloat, sank on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York. With insufficient lifeboats aboard only 700 could be rescued; 1,500 perished in the icy waters of the Atlantic

French scientists Marie Curie and her husband Pierre received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903 for their isolation of radium. The first woman Nobel Laureate, Madame CurieÕs work on radioactivity Ð a term she coined Ð won her a second Nobel award, for Chemistry, in 1911

As war in Europe loomed, Lord Kitchener, veteran of the British military campaign in the Sudan and the Boer War, was appointed Secretary of War and tasked to recruit a large army to fight Germany. KitchenerÕs pointed finger featured on a famous poster appealing to national patriotism, which garnered over 3,000,000 volunteers in the first two years of World War One

Keen to acquire new colonies, Kaiser Wilhelm II did much to build up GermanyÕs military might. However, despite being the Òpossessor of the least inhibited tongue in EuropeÓ, as one historian puts it, WilhelmÕs sabre rattling cannot be held solely responsible for the First World War