1858: Information and Much More from Answers.com
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Austrian field marshal Joseph Radetzky, Graf Radetzky von Radetz, dies at Milan January 5 at age 91. An assassination attempt on France's Napoleon III and his wife as they enter the Paris Opéra January 14 kills 10 and injures 150, but the bomb explosions leave the emperor and Eugènie untouched. The French execute Italian revolutionist Felice Orsini, 39, and his accomplice Joseph Pieri March 13, but only after Orsini has appealed to Napoleon from prison for help in freeing Italy from Austrian rule.
Napoleon meets secretly with Count Cavour at Plombières July 10, agrees to join Piedmont in a war against Austria provided that the war can be provoked in a way that will make it appear justified in the public opinion of Europe, sends Prince Jérome on a mission to Warsaw in order to assure himself of Russian goodwill, and signs a formal treaty with Cavour December 10 (see 1859).
Britain's Princess Royal Victoria is married at London January 25 at age 18 to Prussia's Crown Prince Frederich Wilhelm.
Prussia's Friedrich Wilhelm IV is declared insane a year after suffering two paralytic strokes. His brother Wilhelm, 61, is made regent October 7.
Ottoman forces suffer a humiliating defeat May 1 as a 5,800 man Montenegrin army headed by Prince Danilo II and his older brother, the 38-year-old volvode (grand duke) Mirko Petrovic, inflicts heavy losses on the Turks in the Battle of Grahovo. A European commission gives de facto recognition in November to Montenegro's independence, demarking the frontier between Turkey and Montenegro, whose territory grows as a result.
Serbians depose their prince Aleksandr Karageorgevic December 23 after a weak 16-year reign. Now 52, he is succeeded by Milos Obrenovic, now 79, who was deposed in 1836 and will reign until his death in 1860.
The Ottoman grand vizier Mustafa Reshid dies December 17 at age 58, having helped to westernize his country in six terms as chief viceroy and two as foreign minister.
Russian diplomat Nikolai Pavlovich, Graf Ignatiev, 26, leads a mission to Central Asia and concludes a treaty of friendship and trade with the khan of Bukhara (see China, 1859).
The Treaties of Tienjin (Tientsin, or T'ien-ching) signed between June 26 and June 29 end the first part of the Second Opium War that began with the Arrow incident in 1856 (see 1857). China agrees to open 11 more ports to Britain, France, the United States, and Russia (two ports on Taiwan—Tainan [Tai-nan] and Dan Shui [Tan-shui] are designated treaty ports); the Russians obtain the north bank of the Amur by the Treaty of Aigun, forced upon the Chinese general I-shan by explorer Nikolai Nikolaivich Muravyov, 48, who has obtained plenipotentiary powers from the czar and greatly expands Russia's Siberian territories. The emperor Xianfeng (Hsien-feng) initially refuses to ratify the treaties, Anglo-French forces begin an advance on Beijing (Peking), and the emperor flees the city before the Europeans reach it in October; he will remain at Rehe (Jeho) while his ministers sign the Beijing Convention signifying acceptance of the treaties (see 1859).
Japan's feeble shōgun Iesada Tokugawa dies of beriberi at age 34 without an heir, the last Tokugawa shōgun of any consequence. Reformer Nariaki Tokugawa, now 57, tries to gain the shōgunate for his seventh son, Keiki, 20, but Iesada has appointed Iemochi, 12, as his successor through the influence of Prime Minister Ii Naosuke, 43, the feudal lord of Hikone who has won appointment as tairo under the shōgun Iesada. Nariaki and Keiki are placed under house arrest, and Iemochi will reign until 1866. The courtier Tomomi Iwakura, 32, suggests a reconciliation by having the emperor's sister married to the young shōgun, but other supporters of the emperor revile Iwakura for not standing up to Iesada, and he will lose his position in the court (see 1862).
A U.S.-Japanese commercial treaty is signed July 29 through the influence of Prime Minister Ii Naosuke. U.S. consul Townsend Harris has pointed out the fate that China has met at the hands of European imperialists and persuaded the Japanese that a treaty with the United States will be on favorable terms and serve to protect Japan from more rapacious Western powers. Commodore Matthew G. Perry has died at New York March 4 at age 63, having opened Japan to the West 5 years ago. The treaty covers tariffs, provides for an exchange of diplomats, and is followed by similar treaties—with the Netherlands August 18, Russia August 19, Britain August 26, France October 27. Japan's emperor refuses to ratify the U.S. treaty on the advice of courtier Tomomi Iwakura and reformer Nariaki Tokugawa (who considers the Tokugawa shōguns to be usurpers who cannot conclude treaties without the emperor's consent), his refusal angers Prime Minister Naosuke, and the emperor's supporters back off.
Jahnsi falls in April to British forces as Sir Hugh Ross conducts mopping up operations in India's continuing Sepoy Rebellion, but the rajah's widow, Lakshmibai, escapes with most of her troops (see 1857). Tantia Topi welcomes Lakshmibal at Kalpi and makes a successful escape to Gwalior June 1. Lakshmibal manages to gain control of 300 horsemen but is unable to impress upon the male rebel leaders that their situation is perilous; despite her own careful preparations for battle, the swift attack of the British overwhelms her men and she is killed in battle. The British take savage revenge on the rebels in various places, shooting hundreds of sepoys from cannon. Tantia Topi's forces are broken up June 19, although he continues guerrilla resistance in the jungle (see 1859). Peace is declared officially July 8, George Canning is elevated from governor general to viceroy, General Sir Colin Campbell is raised to the peerage as Baron Clyde, and the East India Company is abolished November 1 as Canning announces Queen Victoria's proclamation to "The Princes, Chief, and Peoples of India," initiating a new British policy of perpetual support for the "native princes" and nonintervention in matters of religious belief or worship, reversing Lord Dalhousie's policy of political unification through annexation of princely states. The British crown rules most of India directly, taking over the duties and treaty obligations of the East India Company and assuming responsibility for India's "protected" states (see 1861).
A French naval force of 14 ships and 2,500 men under the command of Vice Admiral Charles Rigault de Genouilly, 50, lands at the Vietnamese city of Tourane (later Da Nang) in August, storms the harbor's defenses September 1, and occupies the town September 2 (see religion, 1857). Rigualt de Genouilly assumed command of French naval forces in the Far East last year and held Guangzhou (Canton) with the British (see Saigon, 1859).
French forces under the command of Colonel Louis Faidherbe end Moorish domination over lower Senegal in what later will be Mauritania. French colonists have long since settled at Saint-Louis at the mouth of the Sénégal River, and Faidherbe, now 40, has been governor of Senegal since 1854 (see 1860).
The warrior king Glele ascends the throne of Dahomey (Benin) in West Africa and will prove invincible in battle.
Former Republic of Texas president Anson Jones commits suicide at his plantation on the Brazos River outside Houston January 9 at age 59, having twice failed to gain appointment as U.S. senator.
"Cotton is king," says Sen. James Henry Hammond, 41, (D. S.C.) in a speech March 4 taunting critics of the South (the phrase was used 3 years ago as the title of a book by David Christy): "You dare not make war upon cotton! No power on earth dares make war upon it. Cotton is king."
Minnesota enters the Union May 11 as the 32nd state. It incorporates a small part of the old Northwest Territory lying between the St. Croix and Mississippi rivers.
"A house divided against itself cannot stand," says former congressman Abraham Lincoln June 16 at Springfield, Illinois, in accepting nomination as the Republican candidate for U.S. senator. "I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect that it will cease to be divided." Lincoln loses to the five-foot-four Stephen A. Douglas after a series of seven debates in which the Democratic incumbent has argued that the country can endure half slave and half free, that people in the territories have a democratic right to choose; Lincoln has called that argument morally bankrupt, and although he outpolls Douglas the state legislature at Springfield is controlled by Democrats and chooses Douglas (but see 1860; railroads, 1854; railroads, 1856).
Mexican reactionaries overthrow President Comonfort in January with support from the clergy (see 1857); Vice President Juárez is supposed to become president under terms of the constitution promulgated nearly a year ago, but he has no troops to enforce his claim and retires to Veracruz, where he proceeds to nationalize all Church property except buildings actually used for religious instruction and worship, nationalizes all cemeteries, separates Church and state, guarantees religious freedom to people of all faiths, and puts registration of births and deaths under civil control rather than that of the Church. The reforms bring condemnation from Pope Pius IX at Rome (see 1862; Juárez, 1861). Revolutionary leader Valentin Gómez Farías dies at Mexico City July 5 at age 77, having seen his reforms embodied in the nation's new constitution.
The Dominican Republic has a coup d'état that ousts President Buenaventura Báez, whose second term began 2 years ago and has been marked by corrupt financial transactions (see 1844). Báez invites Spain to occupy his country, Madrid accepts, and the Spaniards finance his retirement to a comfortable life in Europe (see 1865).
Former U.S. Minister to Mexico James Gadsden dies at his native Charleston, South Carolina, December 26 at age 70.
Oberlin College students and one of their professors rescue a fugitive slave in Ohio and send the man off to safety in Canada (see 1854; 1859).
The League of United Southerners is founded with help from slavery advocate William L. Yancey of 1848 Alabama Platform notoriety, who has agitated for secession since 1850, organized other Southern-rights associations, and delivered scores of speeches urging Southerners of all parties to join him in his position of states' rights with uncompromising opposition to any interference with the right to own slaves.
Portugal abolishes slavery in her colonial possessions, but emancipation is to take effect only after 20 years' "apprenticeship" (see 1761).
Czar Aleksandr II begins the emancipation of Russia's serfs; he is motivated not by humanitarian feelings but rather by the need for soldiers who will be a match for the literate French and British troops who defeated the Russians in the Crimean War, partly because they were enlisted for much shorter periods of time than the 25 years of Russian enlistments (see 1861).
Explorers Richard F. Burton and John Hanning Speke strike out from the East African coast and in February reach Lake Tanganyika, becoming the first Europeans to visit Africa's second largest lake (see 1855). The world's longest freshwater lake, it extends for 410 miles at the southern end of the Rift Valley, is 10 to 45 miles in width, covers about 12,700 square miles, and is as much as 4,710 feet deep, making it second in depth only to Russia's Lake Baikal. Speke leaves Burton and goes on alone to the north, reaching a much larger, albeit shallower, lake July 10. Covering 26,828 square miles, it is as much as 210 miles long and as much as 150 miles wide; the Arabs have called it Ukerewe, but Speke names it Victoria Nyanza (Lake Victoria) (see 1862).
French naturalist-explorer (Alexandre-) Henri Mouhot, 32, explores the tributaries of the Mekong River in Indochina and discovers the ruins of the ancient Khmer capital Angkor in Cambodia.
Denver is founded in Kansas Territory that will become Colorado. The town established at the junction of the South Platte River and Cherry Creek is named in honor of Kansas Territory governor James William Denver, 40.
A gold rush to the British Columbia colony begins in February following the arrival at San Francisco of the ship Otter, whose purser carries gold found on the Fraser River (see 1857). The Hudson's Bay Company has sent 800 ounces of raw gold nuggets and flakes to be minted at San Francisco, the paddlewheel steamer Commodore docks at Fort Victoria on Vancouver Island April 25 with 390 Americans, Germans, Hungarians, Italians, and other foreigners plus 60 Britons (the white population of the island has been only 400), and the region's fur-trading industry is soon eclipsed by a new industry. More ships arrive, and by May 8 Vancouver Island's governor James Douglas, 54, estimates that 1,000 men are on the 800-mile-long Fraser; he raises the estimate to 1,500 a week later. By other estimates, at least 23,000 people have sailed from San Francisco by July and another 8,000 have made their way overland to British Columbia. Born in Demerara, British Guiana, Douglas severs his connection with the Hudson's Bay Company and becomes governor of British Columbia.
A placer gold strike in the eastern Colorado region of Kansas Territory 90 miles from Pike's Peak begins a new gold rush to Cherry Creek.
American Bank Note Company is created at New York by a merger of the seven independent engraving-printing firms that have printed U.S. paper currency since the Revolution. The company will print U.S. currency until 1879, U.S. postage stamps until 1894, and currency and stamps for scores of foreign nations thereafter.
Britain imposes legal trade in opium on China; by 1900 some 90 million Chinese will be addicted (see 1842; Boxer Rebellion, 1900).
Utopian manufacturer and socialist reformer Robert Owen dies at his native Newtown, Montgomeryshire, Wales November 17 at age 87.
Isaac M. Singer offers sewing machine inventor Walter Hunt of 1854 paper collar fame $50,000 in five annual payments to clear up any possible patent claims (but see 1859).
New York's 40-year-old Brooks Brothers opens its first branch at Broadway and Grand St. with a custom department housed in a circular room lit from a 68-foot dome (see 1909).
R. H. Macy Company opens October 27 with an 11-foot storefront on New York's Sixth Avenue, just south of 14th Street. Nantucket-born merchant Rowland Hussey Macy, 36, went to sea on a whaling ship at age 15, returned with a red star tattooed on his arm, opened a dry goods store at Haverhill, Massachusetts, in 1851 selling only for cash and never deviating from a fixed price, failed after 3 years, but will use flamboyant advertising to make his New York store more successful; while his first day's sales of ribbons, trimmings, hosiery, and gloves total only $11.06, his gross sales next year will be $90,000 (see Getchell, 1860).
Citizen Gas Light Company begins serving the Brooklyn, New York, public, competing with companies established earlier. It will become common practice for a new company to buy the rights to some unserved territory from a competitor and, once established, to send salesmen door to door in an attempt to win away customers in more prosperous areas, often laying parallel gas lines.
A new Southern Overland Mail Company wins a government contract to deliver mail between St. Louis and San Francisco via El Paso and Tucson (see 1857). The company's semiweekly stagecoaches take roughly 25 days each way. The Overland Mail stage reaches St. Louis October 9 after 23 days and 4 hours on its first trip from San Francisco. A westbound stage that has left at the same time reaches San Francisco October 10 after 24 days, 20 hours, 35 minutes (see 1861; transcontinental railroad, 1869).
The Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad reaches the Missouri River as railroads continue to push westward.
Brocton, New York, cabinetmaker George M. (Mortimer) Pullman, 27, perfects the first practical sleeping car for the Chicago & Alton Railroad; its retractable upper berth doubles the car's payload (see 1864).
"Commodore" van Derbilt sells his New York-to-California shipping line to rivals who will operate via Panama rather than Nicaragua (see 1857). Van Derbilt takes the $20 million that he has gained in the shipping trade and begins buying up shares in the New York & Harlem Railroad running out of New York City (see 1839), and the Hudson River Railroad running north to East Albany (see 1862).
London's Chelsea Bridge is completed across the Thames. Tolls will be collected until 1879 and the bridge will be rebuilt in the 1930s.
Hydraulic engineer Henri-Philibert-Gaspard Darcy dies at Paris January 3 at age 54 (the darcy will become the standard unit of permeability).
The McKay machine invented by South Abingdon, Massachusetts, shoemaker Lyman Reed Blake, 23, permits production of low-cost shoes by eliminating the heavy work of hand sewing. Gordon McKay, now 37, will promote Blake's machine and it will become famous as the McKay machine.
Physicist-engineer William J. M. Rankine breaks new ground in applied mechanics. Now 37, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society 4 years ago and since 1855 has held the chair of engineering at the University of Glasgow. Rankine will enunciate the basic theory of steam engines next year.
London's 69-year-old Linnaean Society hears a paper read July 1 on the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence in nature (see Nonfiction [Spencer], 1851). Naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, now 35, was experiencing a severe attack of malaria in February at Ternate in the Moluccas when he remembered the 1798 Thomas Malthus Essay on Population, drafted his theory, spent two successive evenings writing it out in full, and sent it off by mail March 9 (see Wallace, 1840). Charles Darwin receives a copy June 9 and writes to geologist Sir Charles Lyell, "I never saw a more striking coincidence." Read as a joint paper with an abstract of Darwin's ideas, Wallace's essay "On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type" demonstrates that the rate of multiplication of animals is dependent on their food supply and concludes that "those that prolong their existence can only be the most perfect in health and vigor, . . . the weakest and least perfectly organized must always succumb" (see Darwin, 1859).
Botanist Karl von Nägeli demonstrates the importance of the sequence of cell divisions in determining what form various plant parts will have (see 1842). Now 41, he believes that cells receive their hereditary characteristics from a certain part of the protoplasm, which he calls the ideoplasm, and he used chemical analyses to demonstrate the presence of nitrogenous matter in protoplasm, but Nägeli continues to believe in spontaneous generation and does not accept the notion that environmental factors act on variations in species (see Mendel, 1865).
The Theory of the Vertebrate Skulls by biologist T. H. Huxley supports the idea of evolution.
Uber die Konstitution und die Metamorphosen der chemischen Verbindungen und über die chemische Natur des Kohlenstoffs by German chemist Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz, 29, demonstrates the composition of organic molecules. Kekulé shows that they are formed by carbon atoms linked together to form long skeletal chains (see 1865).
A paper published June 14 by University of Edinburgh chemist Archibald Scott Couper, 27, contains the same revolutionary ideas as Kekulé's, whose paper has been published about 2 months earlier, and is the first to use formulas that picture structural relationship of organic molecules by continuous or dotted lines to show the tetravalency of carbon and the ability of carbon atoms to bond with each other, but Couper has submitted his paper through Charles-Adolphe Wurtz, who is not a member of the French Academy, and it is ignored whereas Kekulé gains international renown.
Cellular Pathology (Die Cellularpathologie) by Berlin physician Rudolf Virchow calls the cell the basic element in the life process (see Neanderthal man, 1856). Virchow has analyzed diseased tissues from the point of view of cell formation and cell structure, and he concludes that all cells arise from cells ("omnis cellula e cellula") (see von Kolliker, 1850; Strasburger, 1877).
Botanist-physician Antoine de Jussieu dies at Paris April 12 at age 71; chemist Carl Mosander at Angsholmen, Sweden, October 15 at age 61.
Anatomy of the Human Body, Descriptive and Surgical by London physician Henry Gray, 33, is published in its first edition (the author is a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons); Gray's Anatomy will be a standard text for more than a century.
Physician Richard Bright of Bright's disease fame dies of heart disease at London December 16 at age 69.
French schoolgirl Bernadette Soubirous, 14, at Lourdes has a vision February 11 of "a lady" dressed in a white robe with a blue sash, the first of 18 such visions that she will have through mid-July. The asthmatic daughter of a poor miller, Bernadette lives with her parents and six siblings in a one-room stone house. She is cured of her asthma, tells local priests that "the lady" has urged her to "tell the priests to build a chapel here" at the grotto near a bend in the Gave de Pau River, and is called a sorceress, but there are reports of miraculous cures at the grotto and a chapel will be built (see 1866).
Protestants and Jews in Europe and America register strong protests against the Vatican in the case of Edgardo Mortara, an Italian infant who has been taken away from his Jewish parents by the Church. After learning that an illiterate Christian servant sprinkled water on the child and recited a baptismal litany, the Inquisitor of Bologna has decreed that a Christian child could not be raised by Jews and had the boy removed to a monastery at Rome. France's Emperor Napoleon III has joined in the protest to the Vatican.
Queen Victoria and President Buchanan exchange messages August 16 over the first transatlantic cable. New York paper merchant Cyrus West Field, 39, has promoted the project first proposed by Frederick N. Gisborne, consulted with Samuel F. B. Morse, and founded the New York, Newfoundland, and London Telegraph Company with backing from Peter Cooper and others. Queen Victoria cables, "Glory to God in the Highest, peace on earth, good will to men," and the first commercial cable message follows (at $5 per word). London merchant John Cash, whose firm J. and J. Cash makes woven name labels, cables his New York representative, "go to Chicago," but the cable's electrical insulation soon fails and by October it is useless (see 1866).
London Daily Telegraph publisher-printer Joseph Levy drops the price of his 3-year-old paper to one penny and circulation rises quickly to 27,000. It will have double the circulation of the Times by 1860, and by 1870 will be the largest paper in the world, with a circulation of more than 270,000.
The Territorial Enterprise begins publication at Mormon Station in the Territory of Western Utah with a press freighted in from San Francisco. Operations will soon move to Virginia City (see 1859).
The pen name "Artemus Ward" appears in the 17-year-old Cleveland Plain Dealer. Maine-born city editor Charles Farrar Browne, 24, uses the name to sign a letter to the editor allegedly written by a shrewd showman with Yankee dialect and unconventional spelling (see "Josh Billings," 1865).
Street & Smith Publications, Inc., has its beginnings in the New York Weekly published by former Sunday Dispatch bookkeeper Francis S. Street and former Sunday Dispatch reporter Francis S. (Shubael) Smith, 38, who buy out the New York Weekly Dispatch for $40,000 and rename it. Begun in 1843 as the Weekly Universe, the fiction magazine has a small circulation and Street and Smith have less than $100 between them, but founder Amos J. Williamson agrees to wait for his money until the new owners have earned it, they boost circulation by attracting well-known writers with enormous sums, and by 1861 their Weekly will have a circulation of 100,000 (see Nick Carter, 1886).
Clergyman and Freeman's Journal cofounder Samuel E. Cornish dies at New York November 5 at age 63.
The Philological Society at London gives formal agreement January 7 to the proposal made in November of last year that it undertake the compilation of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles. The Society engages Herbert Coleridge, 29, as editor (he is a grandson of the late poet), but he will die in 1860, and his successor, Frederick Furnival, will fail to maintain the enthusiasm of the project's volunteers (see Murray, 1878).
Nonfiction: The Frigate Pallas (Fregat Pallada) by novelist Ivan Goncharov describes a voyage that he made to Japan as secretary to a Russian mission; Timothy Titcomb's Letters to Young People by Springfield, Massachusetts, author-editor Josiah Gilbert Holland, 39, who last year sold his financial interest in the Springfield Republican and writes under a pen name.
Fiction: Dr. Thorne by Anthony Trollope.
Poetry: Les Amoureuses by French poet-short story writer Alphonse Daudet, 18, who has dedicated the book to his amour, the Paris model Marie Rieu; The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems by English poet-craftsman William Morris, 24; The Courtship of Miles Standish by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; "The Deacon's Masterpiece; or, The Wonderful One Hoss Shay" by Oliver Wendell Holmes is published as a satirical poem in Holmes's Atlantic Monthly column "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table": Holmes's Deacon completes his "chaise" on the day of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and some take his "Logical Story" to be a satire on the collapse of Calvinism; "The Chambered Nautilus" by Holmes appears in his Atlantic Monthly column with a final stanza that begins, "Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,/ As the swift seasons roll"; Legends and Lyrics by English poet Adelaide Ann Procter, 33, whose lyric poem "The Lost Chord" begins, "Seated one day at the organ,/ I was weary and ill at ease,/ And my fingers wandered idly/ Over the noisy keys" (see popular song, 1877).
Juvenile: The Coral Island by R. M. Ballantyne, whose adventure story contains a geographical error that so disturbs the author that he will hereafter travel extensively to make sure all his facts are correct.
Painting: Derby Day by English painter William Powell Frith, 39 (see 1779); Eight Bells by Boston-born painter Winslow Homer, 22; Odalisque with Slave by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Ukiyoe painter Arido Hiroshige dies at Edo October 12 at age 61.
Sculpture: California by Hiram Powers.
Theater: Jessie Brown, or The Relief of Lucknow by Dion Boucicault 2/22 at Wallack's Theater, New York; Foul Play by Charles Reade and Dion Boucicault 5/28 at London's Adelphi Theatre; Our American Cousin by Tom Taylor 10/18 at Laura Keene's Theater, New York, introduces the bewhiskered dimwit Lord Dundreary.
Actress Rachel Félix (la grande Rachel) dies of tuberculosis at a villa in the south of France January 3 at age 36. Her funeral procession to Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris brings out a crowd of 40,000 mourners and more than 600 carriages.
Both the 1843 Mendelssohn "Wedding March" from A Midsummer Night's Dream music and the 1850 Wagner "Wedding March" from the opera Lohengrin are played at Britain's royal wedding January 25, beginning a tradition that will endure for weddings of royalty, nobility, and commoners in much of the world.
Opera: Giulia Grisi sings the role of Valentin (Giovanni Mario is Raoul) in the 1836 Meyerbeer opera Les Huguenots 5/15 at London's Covent Garden Theatre, which has been rebuilt after a fire in 1856; Orpheus in the Underworld (Orphée aux Enfers) 10/21 at the Bouffes Parisiens, Paris, with music by German-born French composer Jacques Offenbach (Jacob Eberst), 39, who was conductor at the Comédie Française from 1849 to 1855 and has been managing his own theater for 3 years. The opera introduces "Le Cancan," a risqué new dance.
London's Covent Garden Opera House is completed to designs by architect Sir Charles Barry, now 63 (see Theater, 1732).
Ballet: A Regency Marriage (Un Mariage sous la régence) 12/18 at St. Petersburg's Bolshoi Theater, with Mariya Surovshchikova in a production staged for her by her husband, Marseilles-born dancer Marius Petipa, now 40, music by Cesare Pugni, now 56.
Popular songs: "The Yellow Rose of Texas" with music by a composer identified only as "JK"; "The Old Grey Mare (Get Out of the Wilderness)" by songwriter J. Warner, whose song will be adapted as an 1860 presidential campaign song by supporters of Abraham Lincoln.
U.S. heavyweight champion John "Old Smoke" Morrissey fights West Troy, New York-born challenger John C. (Carmel) Heenan, 25, of Benicia, California, October 20 at Long Point, Ontario (see 1853). Morrissey breaks his hand early in the match and is knocked out in the 11th round (see 1859).
Lincolnshire-born dressmaker Charles Frederick Worth, 36, opens a Paris atelier at 7, rue de la Paix and establishes the first house of haute couture at a time when ready-to-wear clothes are not available. Son of a country solicitor who lost his money in speculation, Worth came to Paris without money or friends in 1845 after serving an apprenticeship with textile firms and visiting art galleries, where he studied what women wore in earlier times. He found work with a Paris wholesale house that sold silk and dress accessories, married one of his employer's models, and has designed simple but elegant gowns for her to wear while modeling the company's wares. Patrons have asked him to make gowns for them, and since his employer has refused him a partnership he has gained backing from Swedish entrepreneur Otto Bobergh to go it alone. He cultivates an association with the fashion-conscious Princess Pauline von Metternich, wife of the Austrian ambassador, and by 1864 will be couturier to the court of the Empress Eugénie. Instead of catering to the whims of his customers, he will create crinolined ball gowns, walking skirts that do not drag in the mud, housecoats, maternity dresses, and other garments of his own design, often using machine-made laces, ribbons, and other trims. He will speed up the patternmaking process with a system of standardized, interchangeable bodices, collars, sleeves, and other components, be credited with creating the caged crinoline, and be the first to show an entire collection (see 1871).
Big Ben begins chiming out the hours, half-hours, and quarter-hours in the 316-foot tall clock tower of London's Westminster Palace opened by Queen Victoria in 1852. The 13.5-ton great bell that chimes the hours solo for the 23-foot clock is tuned to the note E, it is the lowest note in the chime that strikes the quarter-hours, and it is named for Sir Benjamin Hall, Baron Llanover, who is chief commissioner of works. The clock itself has been designed by lawyer-horologist Edmund Beckett Denison, 42, working with royal astronomer Sir George Airy and clockmaker Edward J. Dent.
London tobacco merchant Philip Morris opens a cigarette factory using mostly smoke-cured Latakia leaf from Turkey (see 1902; Gloag, 1856; U.S. factories, 1860).
St. Petersburg's iron-domed Isaakiyevky Sobor (St. Isaac's Cathedral) is completed after 4 decades' work. Designed in Russian Empire style by architect Auguste de Montferrand, the cruciform granite-and-marble building occupies a full hectare (2.5 acres).
Boston begins filling in its Back Bay, using newly developed steam shovels and rail lines to bring gravel nine miles from Needham. By 1882 the entire area will be filled to create land on which Commonwealth Avenue, Copley Square, and much of modern Boston will stand.
The Crystal Palace erected in 1853 for New York's world's fair burns to the ground October 5. Although reputed to be fireproof, it is destroyed by some accounts in just 15 minutes.
Central Park opens to the public in the autumn, although it is still 5 years short of completion (see 1857). Calvert Vaux has designed cast-iron bridges, boat houses, and other structures while working with Frederick Law Olmsted to develop the recreation area. Workers have moved more than 10 million cartloads—5 million cubic yards—of dirt in and out of the park under their direction, created seven man-made bodies of water, installed 95 miles of drainage pipes, dug sunken transverse roads, and planted more than 4 million trees of 632 different species along with 815 varieties of flowers, plants, and vines; the project has cost $5 million, but the high cost of horsecar and elevated railway transportation will for years keep the sylvan retreat beyond the reach of most New Yorkers, and bone boilers still occupy shacks in the southern part of the park near 59th Street (see 1859).
Henry David Thoreau pleads for "national preserves in which the bear and the panther, and some even of the hunter race may still exist, and not be civilized off the face of the earth—not for idle sport or food, but for inspiration mid our own true recreation" (see fish, 1849; Yellowstone National Park, 1872).
Grenada in the Caribbean harvests its first crop of nutmeg and mace to begin the island's career as the world's leading producer of those spices. An English sea captain bound home with spices from the East Indies presented seedlings to his hosts at the port of St. George's in 1843 (see 1955).
A steam-powered plow designed by English engineer John Fowler, 32, and Jeremiah Head wins a £500 prize offered by the Royal Society for a "steam cultivator" that would be an "economic substitute for the plough or the spade." Fowler founded a company at Bristol 8 years ago with Albert Fry to produce steam-powered implements.
The first steam-driven tractors for field use go into service; by 1888 some 38 U.S. companies will be listed as building tractors with steam-traction engines, but their main purpose will be to generate power, delivered by belt pulleys, to drive threshing machines.
The Marsh harvester patented August 17 by Canadian-born U.S. inventor Charles W. (Wesley) Marsh, 24, improves on the McCormick harvester. As the grain is cut, it falls on a revolving apron carrier, which bears it in a continuous stream to the side, where an elevating apron delivers it to a receiver. From there it is taken to two men who ride the machine and bind the grain by hand, and the two men can bind more grain than four men working on the ground (see 1863; self-rake, 1852; self-binder, 1872).
San Francisco butcher Henry Miller goes into partnership with his former competitor Charles Lux and purchases the Rancho Santa Fe in Merced County from men who had bought it from the original Mexican grantee (see 1854). Lux manages the San Francisco office while Miller serves as field agent, buying out heirs to obtain large spreads, raising cattle on the land as tenant in common with the remaining heirs, whose interests he will then buy out. Miller will cut off back-country homesteaders from the water, forcing them to sell out to him at distress prices. Learning of a new swamplands law that permits a settler to gain title to lands that are underwater and pay nothing if he agrees to drain the land, Miller loads a rowboat atop a wagon and has himself pulled across a large stretch of dry land, whereupon he files a map of the sections with a sworn statement that he has covered the land in a rowboat. By such means, and by purchasing land from speculators who have obtained rights while working as U.S. Government inspectors, Miller will one day own more than 14.5 million acres of the richest land in California and Oregon, a territory three times the size of New Jersey (see 1905; Haggin and Tevis, 1877).
San Francisco grain speculator Isaac Friedlander begins buying up wheat from the Central Valley for export to Britain and Europe in a fleet of ships he has chartered for the purpose (see 1852). Now 35, the six-foot-seven Friedlander will make himself California's grain king as the Central Valley becomes a vast wheat-growing empire (see 1877).
London's meat becomes fatter and juicier as the Smithfield market receives rail shipments of ready-dressed carcasses from Aberdeen 515 miles away. Beef, mutton, pork, and veal arrive in perfect condition the night after the animals are slaughtered, and the meat is far less lean than if the animals had been driven to market as in the past.
St. Louis bag maker Judson Moss Bemis obtains his first order—for 200 cotton half-barrel flour sacks—on the promise that his machine-stitched bags will not tear. Started with an $2,000 in personal savings, his little factory on the Mississippi levee has six sewing machines, two small printing presses, and some wooden type contributed by a cousin. In 2 years it will be turning out 4,000 bags per day for flour and feed merchants, and by 1874 Bemis Bros. & Company will have 200 employees manufacturing 20,000 cotton bags per day.
French inventor Ferdinand P. A. Carré, 34, patents the first mechanical refrigerator, employing liquid ammonia in the compression machine that he will demonstrate at the 1862 London Exhibition by using it to manufacture blocks of ice (see science [Joule-Thomson effect], 1852; Harrison, 1856). Industrial concerns will make wide use of Carré's machine, which can lower temperatures to -30° C. (-122° F.) (see Lowe, 1865; Linde, 1873).
Chef Alexis Soyer dies in August at age 58. He has never recovered from the fever he contracted in the Crimea shortly after Florence Nightingale was stricken.
London's Express Country Milk Company has its beginnings in a firm started by local retailer George Barham, 22, whose company will have the world's largest milk-bottling center (see consumer protection [Margarine Act], 1887).
New York Condensed Milk Company is established by Gail Borden (see 1857; 1861).
The Mason jar patented November 30 by New York metalworker John Landis Mason, 26, is a glass container with a thread molded into its top and a zinc lid with a threaded ring sealer. "Be it known that I, JOHN L. MASON . . . have invented Improvements in the Necks of Bottles, Jars, &c., Especially such as are intended to air and water tight, such as are used for sweetmeats &c." The first Mason jar is produced at the glass shop of one Samuel Crowley at Batsto, New Jersey, and it soon goes into production at Whitney Glass Works in Glassboro, New Jersey. Mason's reusable screw-cap jar is far superior to jars sealed with corks and wax (see Appert, 1810). It will free farm families from having to rely on pickle barrels, root cellars, and smoke houses to get through the winter. Urban families, too, will use Mason jars to put up excess fruits and vegetables, especially tomatoes, sweet corn, berries, peaches, relish, and pickles, and the jars will soon be sealed with paraffin wax (see technology, 1851). Mason's patent will run out before he can capitalize on it, and he will die in the poor house (see "Lightning" seal, 1882; Ball Brothers, 1887).
Schweppe's Tonic Water has its beginnings in "an improved liquid known as quinine tonic water" patented at London. J. Schweppe & Co. Ltd. will make and sell the product beginning in 1880 (see 1891; 1953).
The mint julep created at Old White Springs in Virginia's Allegheny Mountains contains brandy, cut-loaf sugar, limestone water, crushed ice, and mountain mint, but the French brandy will generally be replaced by bourbon whiskey.
1851 1852 1853 1854 1855 1856 1857 1858 1859 1860
Astronomy
Englishman William Usherwood takes the first photograph of a comet (Donati's).
Warren De la Rue develops the photoheliograph, which makes taking photographs of the Sun routine. See also 1891 Astronomy.
Biology
The secretary of the Linnaean Society reads communications from Darwin and Alfred Wallace, an unpublished manuscript of Darwin's from 1844, a letter from Darwin to Asa Gray written in 1857, and a letter from Wallace to Darwin from February 1858. All three describe the theory of evolution by natural selection. See also 1844 Biology; 1859 Biology. (See essay.)
Chemistry
Stanislao Cannizzaro [b. Palermo, Sicily (Italy), July 13, 1826, d. Rome, May 10, 1910] learns of the hypothesis of Amedeo Avogadro that all gases at a given temperature contain the same number of particles, the essential idea that leads Cannizzaro to clarify the concept of a molecule. See also 1811 Chemistry; 1860 Chemistry.
Friedrich Kekulé shows that carbon's valence of 4 can account for the different isomers of organic compounds. He reports that this idea came to him in a half-asleep dream on a London bus, featuring atoms dancing together and forming chains, essentially the concept of the chemical bond. Archibald Scott Couper [b. Kirkintilloch, Scotland, March 3, 1831, d. Kirkintilloch, March 11, 1892] independently introduces the concept of bonds into chemistry at this time. Couper also assumes that carbon atoms form the backbone of organic compounds. See also 1857 Chemistry; 1865 Chemistry.
Communication
The first successful transatlantic telegraphic cable is laid, although it breaks after three months (an attempt the previous year failed before it was entirely laid). See also 1857 Communication; 1866 Communication.
Louis Ducos du Hauron [b. Langon, France, December 8, 1837, d. Agen, France, August 31, 1920] patents a method of color printing based on photographs made on zinc plates through color filters. See also 1855 Communication; 1861 Communication.
Julius Plücker observes light emitted by electrons hitting the glass walls of a partially evacuated vacuum tube. This is a precursor of the cathode-ray tube still used in many applications, such as television and computer monitors. See also 1878 Communication.
Cromwell Fleetwood Varley [b. London, April 6, 1828, d. Bexleyheath, England, September 2, 1883] improves the pneumatic system for sending telegrams between the Stock Exchange and the International Telegraph Company in London. Compressed air and a partial vacuum (suction) are both used as motive powers, allowing documents to travel in both directions. See also 1853 Communication; 1859 Communication.
Earth science
Lawyer William Parker Foulke, while vacationing in Haddonfield, New Jersey, finds nearly half of the skeleton of a dinosaur, the most complete fossil of its kind found to that time. The scientific name of Hadrosaurus foulkii ("Foulke's bulky lizard") will be assigned to the dinosaur. See also 1842 Earth science.
Energy
The Foreland lighthouse in Kent, England, is the first to be equipped with electrically powered arc lights. See also 1809 Energy.
Food & agriculture
Ezra J. Warner [b. Middlebury, Vermont, March 8, 1841, d. 1910] of Waterbury, Connecticut, invents the can opener, nearly 20 years after U.S. canners switched from jars to metal cans and almost 50 years after the metal can was invented (in 1810). Previously, metal cans were expected to be opened with general-purpose tools, such as a hammer and a chisel. See also 1839 Food & agriculture.
Materials
Henry Deacon [b. London, July 30, 1822, d. Widnes, England, July 23, 1876] introduces a process for making chlorine from hydrochloric acid and oxygen using a temperature of 400°C (750°F) and a copper chloride catalyst absorbed on pumice stone. See also 1851 Materials; 1861 Materials.
August Wilhelm von Hofmann makes the artificial dye magenta (often called fuchsin, from its resemblance to the color of the flower of the fuchsia) from coal tar. It is quickly copied by French dyers, who name it the following year after the French defeat the Italians at the battle of Magenta. By 1860 it is being made in Germany as well. See also 1856 Materials.
Mathematics
Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency and Hospital Administration of the British Army by Florence Nightingale [b. Florence (Italy), May 12, 1820, d. London, August 13, 1910] contains numerous innovative statistical diagrams, including polar-area charts, which Nightingale invents. In a polar-area chart, each statistic is represented by the area of a wedge in a circular diagram.
Scottish lawyer Alexander Henry Rhind [b. 1833, d. 1863] purchases the Egyptian papyrus subsequently known as the Rhind papyrus. It proves to be one of the two main keys to understanding Egyptian mathematics. See also 1650 bce Mathematics.
Augustus de Morgan formulates de Morgan's laws, two important laws in set theory. As originally stated they refer to sets as aggregates, saying that the contrary of an aggregate is the compound of the contraries of the aggregates and also the contrary of a compound is the aggregate of the contraries of the components. In terms of set theory, this states that the complement of the union of two sets is the intersection of the complements of the sets, while the complement of the intersection of two sets is the union of their complements. See also 1847 Mathematics; 1889 Mathematics.
Arthur Cayley develops the algebra of matrices in the context of the theory of invariant transformations. See also 1850 Mathematics; 1872 Mathematics.
Medicine & health
Rudolph Virchow in Die Cellularpathologie ("cellular pathology") describes methods and objectives of pathology and demonstrates that cell theory applies to diseased as well as healthy tissue. He propounds the theory that disease is caused when cells refuse to cooperate with other cells, which is true of some diseases, such as cancer and lupus, but not true of infectious diseases. See also 1855 Biology; 1876 Medicine & health.
German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt [b. Neckerau, Germany, August 16, 1832, d. Leipzig, Germany, August 31, 1920] begins publication of Beuträge der Sinneswahrnehmungen ("contribution to the theory of sensory perception"), which will be completed in 1862. It becomes one of the founding works of experimental psychology. See also 1873 Medicine & health.
Franciscus Cornelis Donders [b. Tilburg, Netherlands, May 27, 1818, d. Utrecht, Netherlands, March 24, 1889] discovers that farsightedness can be caused by too-shallow eyeballs. See also 1801 Medicine & health.
The first practical powered dental drill, driven by a foot pedal, is constructed. See also 1790 Medicine & health; 1872 Medicine & health.
Physics
Julius Plücker shows that cathode rays bend under the influence of a magnet, suggesting that they are connected with charge in some way; this is an early step along the path that will lead in 1897 to the discovery that cathode rays are composed of electrons. See also 1845 Physics.
Tools
Théophile Guibal [b. Toulouse, France, 1813, d. Paris, 1888] invents the propeller fan, first used to refresh air in mines.
Germain Sommeiller [b. Bonneville, France, February 15, 1815, d. Bonneville, July 11, 1871] invents the pneumatic drill, which is used for the excavation of the Mont Cenis Tunnel. See also 1832 Tools; 1870 Transportation.
Transportation
Isambard Brunel launches the Great Eastern on January 31. Driven with both paddle wheels and a propeller, with a displacement of 22,500 tons, it remains the largest ship in service during the 19th century--210 m (693 ft) long and capable of carrying 4000 passengers. In 1866 it serves in laying the first transatlantic cable, but then is retired from active service, although exhibited to the public. It is scrapped in 1888. See also 1843 Transportation.
The first aerial photograph is taken from the balloon Nadir as it flies over Paris. See also 1794 Transportation.