1842: Information and Much More from Answers.com
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Serbia's young prince Michael III Obrenovic leaves the country in August under pressure from opponents who resent his heavy taxation and internal reforms (see 1839). They elect Aleksandr Karageorgevic, 36, to succeed Michael, and he begins a reign that will continue until 1858.
Spain has another republican revolt (see 1841). Prime Minister Baldomero Espartero suppresses it with the same severity he showed last year (see 1843).
Portuguese strongman António Bernardo da Costa Cabral restores the nation's charter and begins an ultraconservative rule that will continue until 1846.
Napoleonic War general Rowland Hill, 1st Viscount Hill (of Hawkestone and Hardwicke), dies at Hardwicke Grange, Shropshire, December 10 at age 70, having been made viscount shortly before his death.
British forces in Afghanistan leave Kabul January 6 under pressure from Pashtun tribesmen who have promised them safe conduct back to India (see 1841). Lord Auckland has 4,500 Anglo-Indian troops under his command and is accompanied by 10,000 camp followers, but from January 6 to 13 Akbar Khan and his Ghilzai tribesmen use long-barreled rifles (jezails) to massacre all but 121 of Auckland's men at Jugdulluck (Gandamack) on the Kabul-Jellalabad road in the Khyber Pass, slaughtering the camp followers and perhaps 15,000 camels. Akbar's father, Dost Mohammed, regains the throne that he held from 1835 to 1839 and will keep until his death in 1863; a punitive force from India under General Sir George Pollock, 56, forces the Khyber Pass (the first army in history to do so), relieves the siege of Jellalabad April 16, and reoccupies Kabul in September, burning the Great Bazaar in retribution, but the emirs of Sind have shown hostility toward the British, and London gives Scottish soldier General Sir Charles (James) Napier, 58, complete civil and military authority to deal with them rather than leaving that authority to the resident governor (see 1843). The British and their sepoy troops withdraw from the exposed position in October on orders from London.
A British expeditionary force of 16 warships carrying 4,000 troops and 540 guns arrives off the coast of China, leases more ships from Jardine, Matheson & Company at Hong Kong, moves up the coast with Jardine opium chests, and occupies Shanghai June 19 (see 1841). The Treaty of Nanjing ends the Opium War that began in 1839; signed August 29 aboard H.M.S. Cornwallis moored in the Yangzi (Yangtse) River, it obliges China to bear the cost of the opium destroyed at Guangzhou (Canton) in 1839 and Britain's expense in prosecuting the war by paying the equivalent of £21 million, forbids her to impose any tariff above 5 percent, forces her to open her markets to foreign trade, legalizes the opium trade, and makes the country vulnerable to wholesale exploitation by the Western powers. China cedes Hong Kong to Britain (see 1841; 1860); Xiaman (Amoy), Guangzhou (Canton), Fuzhou (Foochow), Ningbo (Ningpo), and Shanghai are set apart as cities in which foreigners receive special privileges, including immunity from Chinese law, and in which foreigners may conduct trade under consular supervision. Traffic in opium continues without restraint (see Shanghai, 1843; Taiping Rebellion, 1850; Second Opium War, 1856).
The U.S. Supreme Court rules in its January term that parties to civil litigation in a federal court will use general common law rather than the law existing in the states in which the dispute arose. Justice Joseph Story's opinion in Swift v. Tyson expands federal court jurisdiction and will stand for 96 years (seeErie Railroad v. Tompkins, 1938).
Rhode Island's new People's Party adopts a new constitution, holds elections, and installs Thomas W. Dorr as governor May 3 (see 1841). The preexisting government refuses to recognize him, conservative elements in the state declare martial law, and although Dorr takes over the northwestern part of the state he fails to seize a state arsenal, will be tried for treason, and will be sentenced in 1844 to life imprisonment, although he will be released in 1845 (see Supreme Court decision, 1849).
The Webster-Ashburton Treaty signed August 9 by U.S. Secretary of State Daniel Webster and Alexander Baring, Baron Ashburton, now 68, finalizes the Maine-Canadian border, but the boundary of the Oregon Territory remains in dispute (see 1845).
A new civil war begins in South America as Peru remains locked in the war that began last year. Uruguay's exiled former president Manuel Oribe, now 46, gains support from the Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas in an effort to subjugate Uruguay, whose first president José Fructuoso Rivera, now 52, has just completed a second term in office (see 1843).
Former United Provinces of Central America president Francisco Morazán attempts to restore the federation (see 1840); he defeats the forces of Costa Rican dictator Braulio Carillo, but is betrayed, captured, and executed by a firing squad at San José, Costa Rica, September 15 at age 49.
Former Chilean dictator Bernardo O'Higgins dies in Peru sometime in October at age 65 (approximate).
The owner of a fugitive slave may recover him under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, the Supreme Court rules March 1 in Prigg v. Pennsylvania. The court overturns the 1826 Pennsylvania law that made kidnapping a slave a felony, saying that an owner cannot be stopped from recovering a slave, but it says also that state authorities are under no obligation to help the slaveowner (see 1850).
Rep. Joshua (Reed) Giddings, 46, of Ohio resigns his seat March 22 after being censured by the House for introducing antislavery resolutions in violation of the gag rule adopted in 1836, but his constituents reelect Giddings and he is back in his seat May 8.
The Oregon Trail is mapped by U.S. Army lieutenant John C. Frémont, now 29, who eloped last year with Jessie Benton, the 16-year-old daughter of Sen. Thomas Hart Benton, 60 (Mo.). His guide is trapper Christopher "Kit" Carson, 33, who ran away from his Kentucky home at age 17 and at 20 joined an expedition to California. "Mountain man" Thomas Fitzpatrick is also in the Frémont expedition, whose trail will take thousands of emigrants westward (see 1845).
A wagon train of 120 people led by physician Elijah White, 36, is the first large-scale emigration to Oregon Territory. White has been appointed Indian agent for the Northwest (see Whitman, 1843).
Navigator Jules-Sébastien-César Dumont d'Urville dies in a railway accident near Meudon May 8 at age 51. He arrived home late last year, having made extensive voyages of exploration to the South Pacific and Antarctic; Texas pioneer Michel B. Menard dies at Galveston September 2 at age 50.
The U.S. Navy's Wilkes expedition sails into New York Harbor June 10 after a 4-year voyage of 87,000 miles in which it has circled the world by way of South America, some South Pacific Islands, Australia, and the Antarctic Ocean, making the first sight of land in Antarctica (the region will become known as Wilkes Land). New York-born Lieut. Charles Wilkes, 44, brought along a captain's uniform and commodore's pennant, surveyed the Fiji Islands, survived towering ice cliffs and rolling seas in the Antarctic, climbed Mauna Loa in the Sandwich Islands, and returns with useful charts of the Columbia River and San Francisco Bay. He is court-martialed for having massacred the inhabitants of a tiny Fijian island and administered excessive punishment to some crew members (he had a 16-year-old cabin boy flogged for traveling a quarter mile to visit his mother) and is given a public reprimand, but he will be promoted to commander next year and spend the next 16 years preparing a 19-volume report of his expedition (see education [Smithsonian Institution], 1846).
The Treaty of Nanjing that ends the Opium War has the unintended effect of ending the Hong monopoly on trade, freeing Chinese traders to build up the port cities even as it enforces Western privilege at those ports.
A Chartist petition presented to the House of Commons May 2 by Yorkshire-born Thomas Duncombe, MP, 45, not only demands that the six points of the 1838 Charter be implemented but also complains about the 1834 Poor Law, "cruel wars against liberty," the "unconstitutional police force," factory conditions, and church taxes on Nonconformists. Duncombe is a close friend of William Lovett, who has been imprisoned (see 1839), and his speech draws warm praise from members of both parties. Signed by 3,250,000 people, the petition contrasts Victoria's income of "£164 s. 10d. a day" with that of "the producing millions," but the Commons rejects it by a vote of 287 to 47.
British workers react to Parliament's rejection of the Chartist petition by going on strike in the Midland coalfields (see 1841). The strike spreads in August to Scotland, textile workers in Lancashire and Yorkshire join in the protest, and in some cases they remove the boiler plugs from the steam engines in their plants (the demonstrations will come to be known as the Plug Plot or Plug Riots), and some workers say they will remain on strike until the People's Charter becomes law. A conference of trade-union leaders at Manchester adopts a resolution linking the strikes to demands for universal suffrage (see O'Connor, 1843).
Wales has another outbreak of the so-called Rebecca Riots that were suppressed 3 years ago, and this time there is greater violence, with gates as well as tollhouses being destroyed. The riots will continue into 1844 (see Lord Cawdor's Act, 1844).
Britain's Mines Act takes effect, prohibiting employment in mines of women, girls, and boys under age 10.
Massachusetts enacts a child labor law that limits the working hours of children under 12 to 10 per day (see age limit, 1848; Britain, 1802).
Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, 61, upholds the legality of trade unions in a decision handed down in March (Commonwealth v. Hunt). Reshaping the common law that has held unions to be criminal conspiracies, Shaw reasons that the intention of the Boston Journeyman Bootmakers Society is not "to accomplish some criminal or unlawful purpose" but rather to persuade "all those engaged in the same occupation to become members," and he rules that a strike for a closed shop is quite legal and that a union is not responsible for illegal acts by individuals.
State-chartered U.S. banks continue to issue their own bank notes (the federal government mints coins but does not print currency), and the value of notes varies from place to place depending on the strength of the issuing banks (see 1792). A $1 note issued by Nashville's Planters Bank fetches only 80¢ at Philadelphia in March; a $1 note from State Bank of Illinois is worth only 50¢, and the differing values make it difficult to transact interstate business. A New York City directory lists 51 exchange offices or money collectors whose chief business is buying and selling bank notes, many of them counterfeit (see 1863).
New York's Curb Exchange has its beginnings as brokers in Broad Street start trading stocks in companies too small to be listed on the Stock & Exchange Board (see 1921).
Scottish-born Hudson's Bay Company fur trader Robert Campbell, 34, establishes the company's first Yukon area factory (trading post) at Frances Lake. He began exploring the region 2 years ago and will remain until 1852, traveling on snowshoes as he deals with local tribes for beaver pelts and other skins.
A drop cut-off system for steam engines patented May 20 by New Jersey-born mechanical engineer Frederick E. (Ellsworth) Sickels, 22, gains immediate use nationwide. The system makes it possible to detach the valve from the moving mechanism.
The first U.S. wire suspension bridge opens January 2 to span the Schuylkill River outside Philadelphia at Fairmount. The $35,000 bridge is 25 feet wide, has a span of 358 feet, is supported by five wire cables on either side, and has been built by local civil engineer Charles Ellet, Jr., 32, who has studied at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, is familiar with the Seguin bridge of 1825, and will be called the Brunel of America (see Seguin, 1825; Roebling aqueduct, 1845).
The Paris-Versailles train jumps the track May 8 and catches fire. Two locomotives have pulled the wooden cars, many passengers are trapped inside, and the dead include navigator Jules-Sébastien-César Dumont d'Urville along with his wife and son.
A French railway act provides for government construction of roadbeds, bridges, tunnels, and stations.
A new U.S. railroad opens to connect Boston with Albany, New York.
The Philadelphia & Reading Railroad chartered in 1833 opens a line from Philadelphia through Reading to Pottsville, Pennsylvania.
Connecticut-born inventor George W. (Whitfield) Scranton, 31, develops a process to smelt iron ore with anthracite coal.
The steam hammer patented by Edinburgh-born engineer James Nasmyth, 34, permits the forging of huge drive shafts for steam engines. Having built successful model steam engines as a schoolboy, Nasmyth worked in Henry Maudslay's London machine shop for 2 years, moved to Manchester, and since 1836 has been developing his own foundry near the junction of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway and the Bridgewater Canal.
The British government rejects the calculating machine that Charles Babbage has been working on since 1833. The government has advanced £17,000 to help Babbage develop the prototype computer (he has spent some £20,000 of his own capital), and Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel has joked, "How about setting the machine to calculate the time at which it will be of use?" but Italian engineer Luigi Menabrea publishes an account of Babbage's "difference engine" in French and it is read by Augusta Ada King, 27, countess of Lovelace and only legitimate daughter of the late Lord Byron (she married William King in July 1835 and he was created earl of Lovelace in 1838). She sees possibilities in Babbage's calculator, translates Menabrea's account into English, has it published over her initials A. A. L. in Taylor's Scientific Memoirs, and shows the translation to Babbage. He asks why she did not write an original paper, and Lady Lovelace responds with an extension of the Italian's paper that is three times longer, corrects some serious errors in Babbage's own work, and compares his machine with the Jacquard loom of 1801, also programmed with punched cards. "It weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves," she writes, but Babbage and Lady Lovelace will lose heavily with an "infallible" betting system for horse races that employs the "difference engine" (see Baldwin, 1875).
Die Thierchemie by Baron Justus von Liebig applies classic methodology to studying animal tissues, suggests that animal heat is produced by combustion, and founds the science of biochemistry.
Chemist Pierre-Joseph Pelletier dies at his native Paris July 19 at age 54, having helped to establish the chemistry of alkaloids.
Swiss botanist Karl Wilhelm von Nägeli, 25, publishes a paper on pollen formation of seed and flower plants, accurately describing cell division and taking note of what he calls transitory cytoblasts (they later will be identified as chromosomes). Nägeli has studied under Augustin Pyrame de Candolle at the University of Geneva and under Matthias Jakob Schleiden at the University of Jena (see 1858).
Report . . . on an Enquiry into the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain by Lancashire-born physician-reformer Edwin Chadwick, 42, exposes the squalor of the nation's milltown slums. Published by the Poor Law commissioners, Chadwick's report shows that working people have a much higher incidence of disease than do the middle and upper classes (see Public Health Act, 1848).
Britain's Health of Towns Association calls for the substitution of "health for disease, cleanliness for filth [and] enlightened self-interest for ignorant selfishness." Established in response to the Chadwick report, the citizens group demands "the simple blessings of Air, Water, and Light" for everyone (see water purification, 1829; cholera epidemic, 1849; Engels, 1845).
Jefferson, Georgia, physician Crawford W. (Williamson) Long, 27, performs the first recorded operation under general anesthesia. Friends familiar with Humphry Davy's 1799 paper on nitrous oxide have asked Long to stage a "laughing gas" frolic. He has suggested that sulfuric ether is more powerful, and when he finds that some of the partygoers have bruised themselves but experienced no pain, he uses ether on his patient James Venable March 31 while removing a cyst from Venable's neck. Long will publish his findings on the anesthetic properties of ether in surgery in 1849 (see 1845; Morton, 1846).
Military surgeon Dominique-Jean, Baron Larrey, dies at Lyons sometime between July 25 and August 1 at age 76.
Unitarian clergyman and author William Ellery Channing dies at Bennington, Vermont, October 2 at age 62 following publication of his essay "Duty of the Free States." He has been minister at Boston's Federal Street Congregational Church since he was 23 and will be remembered as the apostle of Unitarianism.
New York's first Board of Education is established following political and religious controversies over the role of the Public School Society, the private organization that has managed the public schools up to now with state funding (see Hughes, 1841). The Maclay Bill bars all religious instruction from public schools (in accordance with the establishment clause in the First Amendment) and provides no money for parochial schools (see 1843). The new Board will gradually eliminate the Bible from school curricula in response to complaints that the King James Version is anti-Catholic and therefore "sectarian"; the city's new bishop John Hughes will build a system of parochial schools while still continuing to insist that such schools receive public financial support, but he will have no success, nor will any of his successors.
Notre Dame University is founded at South Bend, Indiana, by French-born Catholic missionary Edward (Frederick) Sorin, 28, who arrived at New York from Le Havre in September of last year as a steerage passenger aboard the packet Iowa, reached Vincennes with some fellow priests a month later, and now takes over three log cabins beside a frozen lake. He will bring over some Sisters of Holy Cross from France next year, obtain a charter from the General Assembly of Indiana in mid-January 1844, and serve as Notre Dame's first president until 1865.
Rugby School headmaster Thomas Arnold dies at Rugby, Warwickshire, June 12 on the eve of his 47th birthday, having in 14 years elevated Rugby's academic status and developed a system that other schools will follow.
The Illustrated London News begins weekly publication May 14, using crudely reproduced pictures.
Samuel F. B. Morse lays an insulated copper telegraph wire under New York Harbor from Governor's Island to the Battery October 18 (see 1837), but although messages are transmitted and received, a ship soon pulls up its anchor and hauls the wire with it, breaking the connection (see 1843).
Nonfiction: Cours de Philosophie positive by French philosopher and social theorist (Isidore) Auguste (Marie François Xavier) Comte, 44, is published in its sixth and final volume (the first appeared in 1830); The Genius of Religions (La Génie des religions) by poet-political philosopher Edgar Quinet, who expresses sympathy for all religions, commits himself to none (his radical views will soon alienate him completely from Roman Catholicism), and obtains a professorship at Paris, where his lectures at the Collège de France will attack the Church and exalt the French Revolution (he will lose his position in 4 years); Religionsphilosophie der Juden (two volumes) by Prussian-born religious philosopher Samuel Hirsch, 27, who was forced to resign as rabbi at Dessau last year because of his extreme Reformist views (rejecting the Hegelian view that Judaism has no right to consider itself an "absolute religion," he notes that Christianity and Judaism were identical until the apostle Paul created a break between the two. Hirsch will serve as chief rabbi of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg beginning next year and remain until 1866); A Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion by Massachusetts Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, 32, who last year provoked a hostile reaction when he delivered a sermon entitled, "The Transient and Permanent in Christianity." Ordained pastor of the Unitarian Church at West Roxbury in 1837, he resigned a few years later in the face of opposition to his liberal views (see 1848).
Fiction: Dead Souls (Metitrye Dushi, first part) by Nikolai Gogol, whose earlier novel Taras Bulba appears in an enlarged, rewritten version; Zanoni by Edward Bulwer, who will change his name next year to Bulwer-Lytton; "The Masque of the Red Death" by Edgar Allan Poe appears in the May Graham's Magazine, which sacks Poe for drunkenness; "The Mystery of Marie Roget" by Poe begins in the November Snowden's Ladies Companion; Six Nights with the Washingtonians: A Series of Original Temperance Tales by Philadelphia editor-author Timothy Shay Arthur, 36.
The novelist Stendhal dies at Paris March 23 at age 59. He suffered a stroke last year and did not recover.
Poetry: Poems by Alfred Tennyson, whose two-volume work includes "Break, Break, Break," "Godiva," "Locksley Hall," "Morte d'Arthur," and "Sir Galahad": "In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love" ("Locksley Hall"). "The old order changeth, yielding place to new,/ And God fulfills Himself in many ways" ("Morte d'Arthur"). "My strength is as the strength of ten,/ Because my heart is pure" ("Sir Galahad"). Dramatic Lyrics by Robert Browning includes "Incident at the French Camp," ending, "'You're wounded!' 'Nay,' the soldier's pride/ Touched to the quick, he said:/ 'I'm killed, sire!' And his chief beside,/ Smiling the boy fell dead." Browning's "The Last Duchess" begins, "That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,/ Looking as if she were alive"; Lays of Ancient Rome by Thomas Babington Macaulay includes "Horatius at the Bridge"; "The Rainy Day" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: "Into each life some rain must fall"; "Excelsior" by Longfellow: "The shades of night were falling fast,/ As through an Alpine village passed,/ A youth who wore 'mid snow and ice,/ A banner with the strange device/ Excelsior!"
Painting: Young Man Playing the Bass-Viol by Lyons-born painter Ernest Meissonier, 27, who begins a series of small, thumb-nail pictures that will outshine his larger works. Painter Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun dies at her native Paris March 30 at age 86.
Theater: The Shoemaker and the King (El Zapatero y el Rey), part II, by José Zorilla y Moral at Madrid's Teatro de la Cruz.
A new British copyright law (The Literature Copyright Act) encourages playwrights not to publish their works since acting rights of published plays belong to publishers (see 1833; 1866).
"Tom Thumb" goes on exhibit at Scudder's New York Museum, recently purchased by showman P. T. Barnum (see 1835); Barnum has discovered the midget Charles Sherwood Stratton at Bridgeport, Connecticut, and will use him to gain world prominence. Now 4, Stratton will stand no taller than 25 inches until he is in his teens, at maturity he will be no more than 40 inches tall, with a weight of 70 pounds, and Queen Victoria will give him the title General Tom Thumb (see 1863; Barnum's American Museum, 1843).
Opera: Nabucco (Nebuchadnazzar) 3/9 at Milan's Teatro alla Scala, with music by Giuseppe Verdi; Linda of Chamonix (Linda di Chamonix) 5/19 at Vienna's Kärntnerthor Theater, with music by Gaetano Donizetti; Rienzi, der Letzte der Tribunen (Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes) 10/20 at Dresden, with music by German composer Richard Wagner, 29; Russlan and Ludmilla 12/9 at St. Petersburg with music by Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka.
Ballet: La Gypsy 7/10 at Copenhagen's Royal Theater, with Fanny Elssler performing the Polish folk dance cracovienne, music by Jozef Damise and Karol Kurpinski based on Polish folk music and arranged by Ambroise Thomas.
First performances: Symphony No. 3 in A minor (Scotch) by Felix Mendelssohn 3/3 at Leipzig's Gewandhaus.
Composer Luigi Cherubini dies at Paris March 15 at age 81.
The Vienna Philharmonic gives its first concert March 28 under the direction of Königsberg-born composer-conductor Otto Nicolai, 31.
The New York Philharmonic gives its first concert December 7, with all musicians except the cellist standing up as they play in the manner of the Leipzig Gewandhaus concerts, a practice they will continue until 1855. The cooperative will give four concerts each year until 1863, when the number will be increased to five (see Carnegie Hall, 1893).
Illinois lawyer and politician Abraham Lincoln is married at Springfield November 4 at age 33 to Kentucky-born slaveowner's daughter Mary Todd, 23, whose family, like Lincoln's, opposes slavery. The cultivated, petite, politically ambitious Mary sees a potential for greatness in the moody, six-foot-four, self-educated Lincoln.
Novelist Charles Dickens visits Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary (he has said on his arrival at New York that the two things he wanted most to see were the penitentiary and Niagara Falls) (see 1829). He is impressed by the physical features of the facility, but after talking to some inmates he calls its system of solitary confinement a form of mental torture (when 18 prisoners went mad in 1838, their insanity was blamed on self-abuse, meaning masturbation; overcrowding forced the prison to begin last year to put two men in many of the cells, and by the end of the century solitary confinement will be used mostly for punishment).
Florida Territory physician John Gorrie, 39, pioneers air conditioning (and mechanical refrigeration) with a method for lowering the temperature in his wife's sick-room at Apalachicola. Having waited in vain for ice from Maine that has been lost in the wreck of the schooner that was carrying it, Dr. Gorrie takes measures to alleviate the unbearable heat that oppresses his yellow fever patients. He sets a vessel of ammonia atop a stepladder, lets it drip, and thus invents an artificial ice-making machine whose basic principle of compressing a gas, sending it through radiating coils, and then expanding it will be employed in air conditioning (and in refrigeration) (see 1881; Perkins, 1834; Carré, 1858; Linde, 1873; Carrier, 1902).
Paris's Church of La Madeleine is completed in Greek revival style after 36 years of construction.
The Walhalla temple is completed outside Regensberg after 11 years' work to designs by Leo von Klenze.
Hamburg is largely destroyed by a fire that rages in the German city from May 5 to 7 and in 100 hours ravages 4,219 buildings that include 2,000 dwellings. Property damage amounts to £7 million, 100 are killed, 20 percent of the city is left homeless, and contributions to help rebuild Hamburg pour in from other German states and principalities.
Croton River water enters New York's new 41-mile aqueduct at 5 o'clock in the morning of June 22, emerges at the Harlem River end of the line 22 hours later, crosses the 1,450-foot High Bridge, is admitted June 27 into the Yorkville receiving reservoir in what will become Central Park (later the Great Lawn), and on July 4 reaches the Murray Hill Distributing Reservoir (it will be popularly called the Croton Reservoir) on the west side of Fifth Avenue between 40th and 42nd streets via cast-iron pipes to give Manhattan its first good municipal reservoir system (see 1837). The system's great 36-inch pipes have been cast by the Phoenix Foundry, owned by Rhinebeck-born engineer Cornelius Henry Delamater, 20, in partnership with Peter Hogg. Stone ventilating towers every mile keep the air fresh inside the tunnels, and waste weirs allow diversion of the water for repairs; construction will continue until 1848, and total cost, including the purchase of land, will amount to between $12 million and $13 million. The first aqueduct of its kind ever built in America, it uses an inverted siphon of two 36-inch iron pipes, covered with five feet of earth, to put the water under pressure, and it not only provides safe and reliable drinking water, but will also make it easier to put out fires like the conflagration of 1835 (see 1892).
John Deere produces 100 plows and peddles them by wagon to farmers in the area of Grand Detour, Illinois. (see 1837; 1847).
County and state fair promoter Elkanah Watson dies at Pittsfield, Massachusetts, December 5 at age 84.
New York receives its first shipment of milk by rail as the Erie Railroad line is completed to Goshen in Orange County. New Yorkers are unaccustomed to milk rich in butterfat and complain of the light yellow scum atop the milk.
Starch is produced from corn for the first time at Jersey City, N.J.
France has nearly 60 sugar beet factories producing two pounds of sugar per capita annually (see 1810; 1878).
Mott's apple cider and Mott's vinegar are introduced by Bouckville, New York, entrepreneur Sam R. Mott.
Vienna has 15,000 coffeehouses (see 1683).
Ireland loses some 60,000 people to emigration (see 1840; 1847).
1841 1842 1843 1844 1845 1846 1847 1848 1849 1850
Anthropology
Swedish anatomist Anders Adolf Retzius [b. Stockholm, Sweden, October 13, 1796, d. Stockholm, April 18, 1860] introduces his theory on the use of head shapes, including the cranial index, to differentiate races (such as the Nordic, Mediterranean, and Alpine "races"). See also 1795 Anthropology.
Archaeology
Karl Richard Lepsius [b. (Germany) 1810, d. 1844] begins a four-year expedition to Egypt. He will bring 60 barge loads of material, containing about 15,000 Egyptian antiquities, to Berlin from Egypt at the end of the tour. See also 1822 Archaeology; 1849 Archaeology.
Astronomy
On July 8 a total solar eclipse is observed by European astronomers. From it, Francis Baily infers that the corona and prominences are solar rather than lunar--previously, it had been an open question. Dominique François Arago suggests correctly that the Sun consists of gas. Austrian astronomer G. A. Majocchi in Milan makes the first attempt to photograph totality, but misses. See also 1860 Astronomy.
Biology
Darwin writes a 35-page abstract of his theory of the evolution of species, known as the "pencil sketch" from the method of composition. See also 1844 Biology.
Johann Japetus Steenstrup [b. Denmark, 1813, d. 1897] describes alternation of sexual and asexual generations in both plants and animals. See also 1851 Biology.
Chemistry
Eugène-Melchior Péligot [b. February 24, 1811) discovers uranium (U).
Construction
Charles Ellet, Jr. [b. Penn's Manor, Pennsylvania, January 1, 1810, d. Cairo, Illinois, June 21, 1862] builds the first important U.S. suspension bridge over the Schuykill River near Philadelphia. See also 1825 Construction; 1848 Construction.
Earth science
English zoologist Richard Owen [b. Lancaster, England, July 20, 1804, d. Richmond Park, London, December 18, 1892] coins the name dinosaur to describe what we now recognize as two unusual groups of reptiles that were the dominant animals for about 175,000,000 years. See also 1822 Earth science; 1858 Earth science.
Darwin's The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, being the first part of the geology of the voyage of the Beagle, classifies coral reefs into three types and presents Darwin's theory of the formation of atolls by subsidence of islands. See also 1840 Biology; 1844 Earth science.
Energy
(Julius) Robert Mayer [b. Heilbronn, Württemberg (Germany), November 25, 1814, d. Heilbronn, March 20, 1878] is the first to state the law of conservation of energy, noting specifically that heat and mechanical energy are two aspects of the same thing. This is often called the first law of thermodynamics. See also 1824 Energy; 1847 Physics.
Food & agriculture
Samuel Dana describes how phosphates play a role in manure as fertilizer. Agriculturalist Sir John Bennett Lawes [b. Rothamsted, England, December 28, 1814, knighted 1882, d. Rothamsted, August 31, 1900] patents superphosphate, an artificial fertilizer made from phosphate rock. In 1843, with aid from a student of chemist Justus von Liebig, he begins manufacturing superphosphate, which remains in common use today. See also 1820 Food & agriculture.
The brothers M.A. and I.M. Cravath of Bloomington, Illinois, invent the disk plow. See also 1837 Food & agriculture.
Materials
Ernst Werner von Siemens [b. Lenthe, Hanover, Germany, December 13, 1816, d. Berlin, December 6, 1892] invents and patents an electroplating process. See also 1837 Materials.
Mathematics
Ludwig Otto Hesse [b. Königsberg, (Kaliningrad, Russia), April 22, 1811, d. Munich, Germany, August 4, 1874] publishes a paper on cubic and quadratic curves that introduces the Hessian determinant, a function that is useful in determining maximum, minimum, and turning points for surfaces (similar to the use of the second derivative in calculus of one variable for finding such points for curves).
Medicine & health
The first use of ether in surgery is by Crawford Williamson Long [b. Danielsville, Georgia, November 1, 1815, d. Athens, Georgia, June 16, 1878] on March 30, but lack of publication allows credit for the discovery to go to dentist William Thomas Morton [b. Charlton City, Massachusetts, August 9, 1819, d. New York, New York, July 15, 1868] in 1846. Long publishes his own results in 1849. See also 1841 Medicine & health; 1844 Medicine & health.
Physiologist Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig [b. Witzenhausen, Germany, December 29, 1816, d. Leipzig, Germany, April 27, 1895] shows that the "Malpighian corpuscles" in kidneys act as passive filters. After filtering, waste products become concentrated when they pass through the tubules. See also 1953 Medicine & health.
Physiologist and physicist Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz [b. Potsdam, Prussia, Germany, August 31, 1821, d. Charlottenburg, Germany, September 8, 1894] studies the relation between nerve cells and nerve fibers. See also 1838 Medicine & health; 1849 Biology.
Physics
William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) publishes On the Uniform Motion of Heat in Homogeneous Solid Bodies
British mathematician and physicist Sir George Gabriel Stokes [b. Skreen, Sligo, Ireland, August 13, 1819, d. Cambridge, England, February 1, 1903] publishes On the Steady Motion of Incompressible Fluids. See also 1851 Physics.
Austrian physicist Christian Johann Doppler [b. Salzburg, Austria, November 29, 1803, d. Venice, Italy, March 17, 1853] discovers that the frequency of waves emitted by a moving source changes when the source moves relative to the observer. This newly recognized phenomenon is called the Doppler effect. See also 1845 Physics.
Tools
William Howe invents the link-motion reversing gear for steam engines. It consists of two eccentrics, one for forward motion and one for backward motion, that alternately can be connected to the valve rod. This system will later be used by Stephenson on locomotives. See also 1763 Tools; 1844 Tools.
James Nasmyth discovers that a competitor has copied and built his design for a steam hammer, which Nasmyth had not yet constructed. Credit for the invention is generally assigned to Nasmyth, however (although there is evidence that the first to envision uch a tool was James Watt). See also 1839 Tools.
Thomas Woodward of Brooklyn, New York, patents a form of safety pin that lacks a spring to keep it closed. Instead, it relies on the material being pinned being thick enough to hold the point of the pin in its shield. See also 500 bce Tools; 1849 Tools.
Joseph Whitworth develops an improved planer that is able to cut in both directions. See also 1835 Tools.
Transportation
William Samuel Henson [b. Somerset, England, 1812, d. 1888] in this year and continuing into 1843 designs the "aerial steam carriage," an early concept for a powered airplane based on the concepts put forth by George Cayley. See also 1809 Transportation; 1871 Transportation.
Karl von Ghega (b. 1802, d. 1860) begins construction of the first railway over the Alps, linking Vienna and Trieste. The project is completed in 1854. See also 1830 Transportation.