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.
May 26 » Nicholas II becomes the last Tsar of Imperial Russia.
August 17 » Bridget Driscoll became the first recorded case of a pedestrian killed in a collision with a motor car in the United Kingdom.
September 21 » Anglo-Egyptian conquest of Sudan: British forces under the command of Horatio Kitchener take Dongola.
November 1 » A picture showing the bare breasts of a woman appears in National Geographic magazine for the first time.
Day of death January 31, 1897
The temperature on January 31, 1897 was about -7.0 °C. The airpressure was 74 cm mercury. The atmospheric humidity was 86%. Source: KNMI
January 31 » Czechoslav Trade Union Association is founded in Prague.
April 30 » J. J. Thomson of the Cavendish Laboratory announces his discovery of the electron as a subatomic particle, over 1,800 times smaller than a proton (in the atomic nucleus), at a lecture at the Royal Institution in London.
May 26 » Dracula, a Gothic horror novel by Irish author Bram Stoker, is published.
August 10 » German chemist Felix Hoffmann discovers an improved way of synthesizing acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin).
December 6 » London becomes the world's first city to host licensed taxicabs.
December 9 » Activist Marguerite Durand founds the feminist daily newspaper La Fronde in Paris.
When copying data from this family tree, please include a reference to the origin: Hans Weening, "Family tree Weening", database, Genealogy Online (https://www.genealogieonline.nl/stamboom-weening/I75884.php : accessed October 11, 2026), "Johannes Hendrik Metzlar (1896-1897)".
Copy warning
Genealogical publications are copyright protected. Although data is often retrieved from public archives, the searching, interpreting, collecting, selecting and sorting of the data results in a unique product. Copyright protected work may not simply be copied or republished.
Please stick to the following rules
Request permission to copy data or at least inform the author, chances are that the author gives permission, often the contact also leads to more exchange of data.
Do not use this data until you have checked it, preferably at the source (the archives).
State from whom you have copied the data and ideally also his/her original source.