January 28 » Walter Arnold of East Peckham, Kent, becomes the first person to be convicted of speeding. He was fined one shilling, plus costs, for speeding at 8mph (13km/h), thereby exceeding the contemporary speed limit of 2mph (3.2km/h).
February 21 » An Englishman raised in Australia, Bob Fitzsimmons, fought an Irishman, Peter Maher, in an American promoted event which technically took place in Mexico, winning the 1896 World Heavyweight Championship in boxing.
March 1 » Henri Becquerel discovers radioactive decay.
April 15 » Closing ceremony of the Games of the I Olympiad in Athens, Greece.
May 26 » Nicholas II becomes the last Tsar of Imperial Russia.
December 30 » Filipino patriot and reform advocate José Rizal is executed by a Spanish firing squad in Manila.
Day of death May 15, 1898
The temperature on May 15, 1898 was about 12.4 °C. The airpressure was 76 cm mercury. The atmospheric humidity was 91%. Source: KNMI
June 22 » Spanish–American War: In a chaotic operation, 6,000 men of the U.S. Fifth Army Corps begins landing at Daiquirí, Cuba, about 16 miles (26km) east of Santiago de Cuba. Lt. Gen. Arsenio Linares y Pombo of the Spanish Army outnumbers them two-to-one, but does not oppose the landings.
July 4 » En route from New York to Le Havre, the SS La Bourgogne collides with another ship and sinks off the coast of Sable Island, with the loss of 549 lives.
August 13 » Carl Gustav Witt discovers 433 Eros, the first near-Earth asteroid to be found.
August 23 » The Southern Cross Expedition, the first British venture of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, departs from London.
August 28 » Caleb Bradham's beverage "Brad's Drink" is renamed "Pepsi-Cola".
December 26 » Marie and Pierre Curie announce the isolation of radium.
When copying data from this family tree, please include a reference to the origin: Michael Jacobs, "Family tree Jacobs", database, Genealogy Online (https://www.genealogieonline.nl/stamboom-michael-jacobs/I64335.php : accessed February 17, 2026), "Petrus de Wilt (1872-1898)".
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