WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE (March 7): Finland becomes the first country to give women the vote, decreeing universal suffrage for citizens over 24.

FOOTBALL RULES! (March 31): President Theodore Roosevelt summons to the White House representatives of Harvard, Princeton and Yale to spur changes in college football rules. One of the most brutal seasons of college football was in 1905, which featured the "flying wedge" offense. Eighteen players died and 154 were seriously injured, largely because almost no protective gear was worn in those days. At a subsequent meeting in New York, representatives of 62 schools form the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States. The federation will become the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in 1910.

	View of quake damage

SAN FRANCISCO CRUMBLES (April 18): At 5:13 a.m., San Franciscans are jolted from their beds by a violent trembling of the earth. Afterward come the fires, fed by broken gas mains. Hapless survivors try to cook on damaged stoves, which causes more explosions and fires. Soon, it seems, everyone left in the city is either fleeing the flames and destruction, seeking missing relatives, or helping with relief efforts.

The fires rage for three days, destroying two-thirds of the city of about 400,000. Estimates at the time put the death toll in the hundreds, but modern researchers estimate that as many as 3,000 may have died in the worst quake ever to hit an American city. Hundreds of thousands more are homeless, and the City by the Bay is stripped of its Gold Rush-era finery. In all, 28,000 buildings are destroyed. Property damage is put at $400 million.

WIRELESS CHRISTMAS STORY (Dec. 24): The first Christmas Eve broadcast has no sponsor or star -- and not much of an audience. Wireless operators on ships off the New England coast are puzzled to hear a man's voice coming through the equipment normally used to send and receive Morse code; no one has ever heard a voice or music broadcast before. The man reads the Christmas story from the Gospel of Luke, then plays a violin solo and a recording of Handel's Largo. He is no performer; he is engineer Reginald Fessenden, who in 1901 patented a way of transmitting radio waves to carry natural sounds rather than chirps of code. Fessenden's brief broadcast from a remote coastal station at Brant Rock, Mass., is a harbinger of a global communications revolution.