* Andrew Ainslie Common ( 1841 – 1903 ), built his own very large reflecting telescopes and demonstrated that photography could record astronomical features invisible to the human eye.

* 1903 – The Kishinev pogrom in Kishinev ( Bessarabia ) begins, forcing tens of thousands of Jews to later seek refuge in Israel and the Western world.

* 1903 – Mickey Cochrane, American baseball player ( d. 1962 )

* 1903 – Harold Edgerton, American electrical engineer ( d. 1990 )

* 1903 – Jan Tinbergen, Dutch economist, recipient of the Bank of Sweden Prize ( d. 1994 )

* 1903 – Ferenc Keserű, Hungarian water polo player ( d. 1968 )

* 1819 – Sir George Stokes, 1st Baronet, Irish-English mathematician and physicist ( d. 1903 )

After what the MCC saw as the problems of the earlier professional and amateur series they decided to take control of organising tours themselves, and this led to the first MCC tour of Australia in 1903 – 04.

In Serbia Nikola Pašić ( 1845 – 1926 ) and his Radical Party dominated Serbian politics after 1903 ; they also monopolized power in Yugoslavia from 1918 to 1929 ; during the dictatorship of the 1930s, it furnished the prime minister.

* 1903 – Macedonian rebels in Kruševo proclaim the Kruševo Republic, which exists only for 10 days before Ottoman Turks lay waste to the town.

* 1903 – Habib Bourguiba, Tunisian politician ( d. 2000 )

* 1903 – Louis Leakey, Kenyan-English archaeologist ( d. 1972 )

* 1903 – A 30 million cubic-metre landslide kills 70 in Frank, Alberta, Canada.

* 1876 – Alexander I of Serbia ( d. 1903 )

* Adrian ( costume designer ) ( 1903 – 1959 ), born Adrian Adolph Greenberg, costume designer for over 250 films

* Adrian Rollini ( 1903 – 1956 ), American multi-instrumentalist best known for his jazz music

* 1903 – German engineer Karl Jatho allegedly flies his self-made, motored gliding airplane four months before the first flight of the Wright brothers.

* 1903 – James Gould Cozzens, American novelist ( d. 1978 )

* 1903 – Lewis Sargent, American actor ( d. 1970 )

* 1826 – Karl Gegenbaur, German anatomist ( d. 1903 )

* 1903 – Arpad Elo, American chess player, created the Elo rating system ( d. 1992 )

Alexander I or Aleksandar Obrenović ( Cyrillic: Александар Обреновић ; 14 August 1876 – 11 June 1903 ) was king of Serbia from 1889 to 1903 when he and his wife, Queen Draga, were assassinated by a group of Army officers, led by Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević

* The Rise and Fall of the Anabaptists, by E. Belfort Bax 1903

The university was established in 1903 by Dwight B. Waldo, and as of the Fall 2010 semester, its enrollment is 25, 045.

Evelyn Waugh ( 1903 – 66 ) satirised the " bright young things " of the 1920s and 1930s, notably in A Handful of Dust ( 1934 ), and Decline and Fall ( 1928 ), while Brideshead Revisited ( 1945 ) has a theological basis, setting out to examine the effect of divine grace on its main characters.

A frequent contributor to periodicals, he also published The Decline and Fall of Napoleon ( 1895 ), The Life of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough to the Accession of Queen Anne ( 1894 ), and The Story of a Soldier's Life ( 1903 ), giving, in the last-named work, an account of his career down to the close of the Ashanti War.

Vilfredo Pareto ( 1828 – 1923 ), inspired by Mosca ’ s concepts, contributed The Rise and Fall of the Elites ( 1901 ) and The Socialist System ( 1902 – 1903 ) to the discipline of political psychology, theorizing on the role of class and social systems.

Onno Klopp ( October 9, 1822, Leer-August 9, 1903, Penzing, Austria ) was a German historian, best known as the author of Der Fall des Hauses Stuart ( The Fall of the House of Stuart ), the fullest existing account of the later Stuarts.

While the " Fall Classic " as we know it didn't begin until 1903, Major League Baseball had several versions of a post-season championship series before that.

In 1903 an organized revolt against the Ottoman Empire was carried out by the IMRO.

In 1903 an anarchist group known as the Boatmen of Thessaloniki planted bombs in several buildings in Thessaloniki, including the Ottoman Bank, with some assistance from the IMRO.

* Paul Wolff Metternich ( 1853 – 1934 ), German diplomat, ambassador to the British ( 1903 – 12 ) and Ottoman ( 1915 – 16 ) Empires

Between 1882 and 1903, approximately 35, 000 Jews immigrated to the south-western area of Syria, then a province of the Ottoman Empire.

The Ilinden – Preobrazhenie Uprising or simply the Ilinden Uprising of August 1903 (, Ilindensko-Preobrazhensko vastanie ;, Ilindensko vostanie ) was an organized revolt against the Ottoman Empire, which was prepared and carried out by the Secret Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Organization.

Ali Suat Hayri Ürgüplü ( 13 August 1903, Damascus, Ottoman Empire – 27 December 1981, Istanbul, Turkey ) was a Turkish political figure.

Mustafa Barzani was born in 1903 in Barzan, a village in northern Iraqi Kurdistan, ( then part of the Ottoman Empire ).

* The third Belleisle was the lead ship of her class of ironclad battleship, originally built for the Ottoman Empire as Peiki Shereef, but purchased in 1876, used as a coast defense ship and expended as a target ship in 1903.

In April 1903, a group called Gemidzhii with some assistance from the IMRO blew up the French ship Guadalquivir and the Ottoman Bank in the harbour of Thessaloniki.

It was chosen intentionally, as it was the date of the Ilinden Uprising against the Ottoman rule in 1903.

Beşiktaş established in 1903 during the late Ottoman period.

Nikolaos Zachariadis (; 27 April 1903, Adrianople, Ottoman Empire-8 August 1973, Surgut, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union ) was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Greece ( KKE ) from 1931 to 1956.

Born in Adrianopole in 1903, the son of an employee of the Ottoman tobacco monopoly.

In 1903, the family moved to Odessa, and two years later, to Ottoman Palestine.

He was arrested by the Ottoman authorities on March 3, 1903 and sent to Skopje under enforced police escort during the same night.

Pitu Guli ( Cyrillic: Питу Гули ; 1865, Kuruşova – 1903, Kuruşova, Ottoman Empire ) was an Aromanian revolutionary in Ottoman Macedonia, a local leader of what is commonly referred to as the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization ( IMRO ).

In September 1903 he accompanied Nicholas II to Vienna and Mürzzuschlag. Lamsdorf was anxious to prevent the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the face of Slavic nationalism and emphatically condemned the Ilinden-Preobrazhenie Uprising and other activities of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization.

The Baghdad Railway (,, ), was built from 1903 to 1940 to connect Berlin with the ( then ) Ottoman Empire city of Baghdad, where the Germans wanted to establish a port in the Persian Gulf, with a line through modern-day Turkey, Syria, and Iraq.

Other nations of Europe paid little attention to the building of the railway lines until 1903 when the Ottoman Government gave permission to an Ottoman corporation to build the railway line from Konia to Baghdad.

Awards received in thanks for services to foreign governments included Commander, first class, of the Royal Order of Vasa in 1900 from Sweden, the Grand Cordon of the Imperial Ottoman Order of Osmanieh in 1903, Commander of the Légion d ' honneur in 1906 from France, the Order of the Crown, first class, in 1908 from Germany, the Grand Cross of the Order of the Polar Star in 1909 from Sweden, the Order of the Rising Sun, first class, in 1911 from Japan and the Order of the Red Eagle, first class with brilliants in 1913 from Germany.