1859: Information and Much More from Answers.com
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Napoleon III warns the Austrian ambassador January 1, thus leaking the secret of his alliance with Count Cavour (see 1858). Piedmont calls up reserves March 9, Austria mobilizes April 7, Piedmont rejects an Austrian ultimatum April 23 to demobilize within 3 days, and Cavour has the provocation that he has desired. Austria invades Piedmont April 29, but General Franz Gyulai's slow advance gives France time to mobilize.
France declares war on Austria May 12 pursuant to her 1858 alliance, the Piedmontese defeat Austrian forces May 30 at Palestro after peaceful revolutions have driven out the rulers of Tuscany, Modena, and Parma. Piedmont's Victor Emmanuel II appoints historian-statesman Luigi C. Farini dictator of Modena, and he establishes a league of central states (Modena, Parma, Romagna, and Tuscany) for mutual protection (the league will vote for annexation by Piedmont next year). French and Piedmontese forces cross the Ticino into Lombardy, and they engage the Austrians June 4 in the Battle of Magenta 14 miles west of Milan; Marshal MacMahon has 49,517 troops, the Austrians under General Count Eduard von Clam-Gallas have 53,183, but Italian general Manfredo Fanti, 51, helps MacMahon carry the day, which ends with the French and Piedmontese having lost 4,000 killed and wounded plus 600 missing while the Austrians have lost 5,700 killed and wounded, 4,500 missing. Clam-Gallas withdraws, and Napoleon III enters Milan in triumph with Piedmont's Victor Emmanuel II at his side.
The 10-hour Battle of Solferino in northern Italy June 24 pits an Austrian army of 151 infantry battalions, 52 cavalry battalions, and 451 guns under the personal command of the emperor Franz Josef against a Franco-Italian army of 217 infantry battalions, 88 cavalry battalions, and 320 guns under the command of Napoleon III and Victor Emmanuel II. General Achille (-François) Bazaine, 48, captures Solferino but the outcome is indecisive; the French and Piedmontese lose 2,491 killed, 12,512 wounded, 2,292 missing and taken prisoner, while the Austrians lose 3,000 killed, 10,807 wounded, 8,638 missing or taken prisoner. Both sides suffer cruelly, and the carnage is sickening (see medicine, 1862).
Prince Metternich dies at Vienna July 11 at age 86 and the emperor Franz Josef meets with Napoleon III that day at Villafranca to make peace. Franz Josef is short of funds and faced with revolution in Hungary, Napoleon has become alarmed at all the bloodshed and at the revolutions that have been fomented by nationalists in the papal legations of Bologna, Ferrara, and Ravenna as well as in Tuscany, Modena, and Parma. The two emperors come to an agreement that Lombardy is to be ceded to France, which cedes it in turn to Piedmont in exchange for Nice and Savoy, the Italian princes are returned to their thrones, but Italians had hoped that Austria would have to give up Venetia and are disappointed (see Garibaldi, 1860).
Former British prime minister Frederick J. Robinson, 1st earl of Ripon, dies at Putney, Surrey, January 28 at age 76.
The king of the Two Sicilies Ferdinand II dies in his still incomplete palace at Caserta May 22 at age 49 after a 19-year reign in which he has won the epithet "King Bomba" by having Messina and Palermo bombarded to enforce his reactionary control. Opposed even be fellow reactionaries (Britain and France withdrew 3 years ago to protest his inhuman treatment of at least 15,000 political prisoners), he is succeeded by his son Francesco, 13, who will reign for less than 2 years.
Sweden's Oskar I dies July 8 at age 60 after a 15-year reign. He is succeeded by his 33-year-old son, who will reign until 1872 as Karl XV.
Russian forces in the north Caucasus take the Chechen-Dagestan fortress of Vedeno by storm in April, forcing the Sufi imam Shamil and several hundred of his followers to take refuge on Mount Gunib, where they are surrounded (see 1857). With his men exhausted and completely outnumbered, Shamil surrenders September 6 (August 25 Old Style) and is taken to St. Petersburg as the Russians complete their subjugation of the Caucasus. Shamil will be exiled to Kaluga, south of Moscow.
Sepoy Mutiny leader Tantia Topi is betrayed and executed April 18 at age 39 (approximate) (see 1858). Rebel leader Nana Sahib is driven into Nepal and dies there at age 38 (year approximate).
Saigon falls to French forces under the command of Vice Admiral Charles Rigault de Genouilly (see 1858). He takes the Vietnamese city February 17 with help from Spanish troops, but General Nguyen Tri Phuong, 53, puts up a stout defense at Tourane (later Da Nang); Rigault de Genouilly cannot force the Vietnamese to surrender, loses men to disease, runs short of supplies, and asks to be relieved October 20. Nguyen has become one of Vietnam's most powerful ministers, partly by arranging the marriage of one of his daughters to the young emperor Tu Duc, and has joined with Tu Duc in working to keep the country closed to Western technology (which has made made it vulnerable to conquest; see 1861).
Chinese authorities refuse to let the Western powers set up legations at Beijing (Peking) (see 1858); their refusal inititates a second phase of the Second Opium War, and London gives Sir James Hope Grant of Sepoy Rebellion fame commmand of British land forces in an Anglo-French expedition against China (see 1860).
St. Petersburg sends Russian diplomat Nikolai, Graf Ignatiev to Beijing (Peking) on a mission to conclude a treaty defining the eastern Sino-Russian border (see 1857). His initial efforts are unsuccessful (but see 1860).
Queensland in Australia is separated from New South Wales and becomes a separate colony with its capital at Brisbane (see 1901).
A Haitian military coup led by General Fabre Geffrard deposes the emperor Faustin I (Faustin-Elie Soulouque), who has reigned since 1849 and tried on several occasions to conquer the neighboring Dominican Republic. Fausti escapes, goes into exile, and will die abroad in August 1867 at age 85 (approximate). Geffrard will make efforts to reduce repression, encourage educated mulattoes to join his government, and establish foreign respect for Haiti (see 1915).
Oregon enters the Union February 14 as the 33rd state.
Rep. Daniel E. Sickles murders the son of "Star Spangled Banner" composer Francis Scott Key at Washington, D.C., February 27 for what he calls "improper attentions" to his beautiful young wife, Teresa. Now 39, Sickles has been notoriously unfaithful, Teresa has begun an affair with the handsome widower Philip Barton Key, who serves as U.S. attorney for Washington, he has been pointed out to Sickles across the street from the congressman's house in Lafayette Square, Sickles shoots him three times at point-blank range and is arrested, he goes on trial in early April with eight lawyers to represent him, and they make a case against Teresa and Key, pleading temporary insanity, a novel defense at the time; the jury deliberates for 1 hour April 26 and returns a verdict of not guilty.
Former secretary of state Richard Rush of 1817 Rush-Bagot Treaty fame dies at his native Philadelphia July 30 at age 78; former House Speaker Lynn Boyd is elected lieutenant governor of Kentucky but dies at Paducah December 17 at age 59; former Republic of Texas president Mirabeau B. Lamar dies of a heart attack at his Richmond, Texas, plantation December 19 at age 61, having returned in September from his post as U.S. minister to Costa Rica and Nicaragua.
President Buchanan orders that New Mexico Territory lands occupied by the confederated bands of Pima and Maricopa tribes near the Gila River be surveyed and set apart as a reservation under terms of a February 28 act of Congress. The reservation is not to exceed 100 square miles, and $10,000 is to be given to the tribes for tools and to cover the expenses of the land survey (the 64,000-acre reservation will be enlarged to 145,000 acres in 1869).
The U.S. Supreme Court upholds the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 March 7 in the case of Ableman v. Booth, reversing the 1854 Wisconsin court decision which called the act unconstitutional (see Dred Scott, 1857). A federal court had convicted abolitionist Wisconsin newspaper editor Sherman Booth of assisting a runaway slave and sentenced him to prison, he was released on a writ of habeas corpus, U.S. District Marshal Ableman obtained a writ of error from the Supreme Court, and the opinion of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney denying the right of state courts to interfere in federal cases is handed down without dissent.
Georgia prohibits the post-mortem manumission of slaves by last will and testament. The state legislature votes to let free blacks be sold into slavery if they have been indicted as vagrants.
Physician-abolitionist Martin R. Delany, now 47, leads an exploration party to West Africa with a view to studying the Niger Delta as a location for settlement of U.S. blacks (see Douglass, 1847). One of the first blacks admitted to Harvard Medical School, Delany became a leading Pittsburgh physician but moved to Canada 3 years ago in protest against the treatment of blacks like himself in the United States.
John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, Virginia, October 16 stirs passions throughout the country. Abolitionist Brown of 1856 Pottawatomie Massacre fame leads 13 whites and five blacks into Harper's Ferry, they seize the town and its federal arsenal as a signal for a general slave insurrection that will establish a new state as a refuge for blacks, but Frederick Douglas has refused to join in the action, which defies the entire U.S. Army. Federal troops under Colonel Robert E. Lee, supported by U.S. Marines, overpower Brown October 18 after 10 of his men have been killed in a 36-hour standoff (the dead include his two sons); abolitionist Gerrit Smith, now 62, has given Brown a farm in upstate New York and supplied him with funds from time time without knowing that it would be used to mount a raid on a federal arsenal (Smith becomes temporarily insane and is confined for a few weeks in a Utica asylum); Brown, now 59, is convicted of treason and hanged along with seven of his followers December 2 at Charlestown, but "his truth" will go marching on (in the words of a popular song).
Elizabeth Cady Stanton inherits $50,000 from her father and founds the National Woman's Suffrage Association (NWSA) May 15 with help from feminists who include Matilda Joslyn Gage, now 33 (see 1848; 1860).
New regulations issued by the Austro-Hungarian regime establish full freedom of trade for Vienna, whose inner ramparts were torn down 2 years ago. The city's drinking-water supply has been improved by tapping springs, shipping on the Danube has been regulated, and the city's economy will grow in the next few years, as will its population.
French schoolteacher Julie Daubié, 35, wins first prize in a contest given by the Académie Impérial and the Lyons Chamber of Commerce on how to improve women's salaries. Daubié's winning paper, "The Impoverished Woman by an Impoverished One," examines the reasons for women's inability to support themselves, explores every field of work open to women, shows the inequality of salaries paid to men and women doing the same work, discusses the apprenticeships available only to young men, and denounces with acerbic wit the exploitive practices, injustices, and lack of humanity that she has found among employers. The paper will not be published until 1866.
The Society for Promoting Employment of Women is founded by Jessie Boucherett and Adelaide Proctor to expand opportunities for British women in areas from bookkeeping to shoemaking.
Last year's gold strike in the Colorado Rockies of Kansas Territory brings 100,000 prospectors determined to reach "Pike's Peak or bust."
The Comstock Lode discovered June 11 on Mt. Davidson in Washoe, Nevada, is a vast deposit of silver and gold that will yield $145 million worth of ore in the next 11 years. Prospectors Peter O'Reilly and Patrick McLaughlin have found pay dirt on property claimed by Canadian-born prospector Henry (Tompkins Paige) Comstock, 39, who has been in the area for 3 years, but a sticky blue mud impedes mining operations until it is assayed and turns out to be three-fourths silver, one-fourth gold, and worth $4,700 per ton of ore (see 1872). Comstock sells his claim for almost nothing, but others make fortunes, including Missouri-born prospector George Hearst, 39, who has had little luck in California. He pays $450 for a half-interest in a mine believed by its owner, Alvah Gould, to be worthless and a few hundred dollars more for a one-sixth interest in the Ophir mine, which will prove to be the richest in the Comstock Lode, and in the Gould and Curry mine, which will be the second richest. George Hearst becomes a millionaire overnight, joins with a partner to buy the Ontario mine in Utah Territory and will go on to acquire other partners and other mining properties, including the Homestake mine in Dakota Territory, the Anaconda copper mine in Montana Territory, and additional properties in Chile, Peru, and Mexico (see communications [William Randolph Hearst], 1887).
Prussian-born mining engineer Adolph (Heinrich Joseph) Sutro, 29, sets up a small mill at East Dayton, Nevada, for reducing ores by an improved process of amalgamation. But the 110° F. temperatures of the Comstock Lode's 1,500-foot-deep shafts make it hard for miners to work, many die from the heat and foul air, and Sutro sees the need for a tunnel that would permit fresh air to be pumped into the mines and water to be drained from them. Sutro arrived at San Francisco from New York in November 1851 aboard the S.S. California and has engaged in small trade; he will propose his tunnel in April of next year, scoffers will dismiss the idea as unfeasible, but Sutro will find financial backing and persevere (see Sutro Tunnel 1878).
Boston lawyer Rufus Choate dies at Halifax, Nova Scotia, July 13 at age 59 while en route to Europe.
Equitable Life Assurance Society is founded at New York by Catskill, New York-born entrepreneur Henry B. (Baldwin) Hyde, 25, who hangs a 30-foot sign across the front of a building where he has rented a one-room office with borrowed desks and chairs. Formerly a cashier for Mutual Life Insurance, Hyde has been sacked for proposing the establishment of a company that will insure lives for more than $10,000, and 2 days later he has rented space above his former employer's offices, whose sign is completely dwarfed by the new Equitable sign. By January of next year Hyde will have raised the $100,000 deposit required by the state comptroller for life insurance companies; by the end of next year he will have 229 agents, all of whom he has personally selected and trained (see 1862).
R. G. Dun Company is founded at New York by Robert Graham Dun, 33, who purchases the financial rating service B. Douglass and Company (see 1854) and begins publishing the Mercantile Agency's Reference Book (see Bradstreet, 1855; Dun and Bradstreet, 1933).
Petroleum production begins at Titusville, Pennsylvania, giving the world a new source of energy and reducing demand for the whale oil, coal gas, and lard now used in lamps (see Baku, 1823). Former New Haven & Hartford Railroad conductor "Colonel" Edwin L. (Laurentine) Drake, 40, has been sent to Titusville in Pennsylvania's Venange County by New York banker James Townsend at the urging of his associate George Bissell, who has heard reports that salt mines in the area are being contaminated by petroleum (see 1854). Using salt-well drilling equipment to dig into oil-bearing strata, Drake strikes oil August 28, and his 70-foot well is soon producing 400 gallons per day (2,000 barrels per year, each worth $20) to begin the first commercial exploitation of petroleum in the United States and inaugurate a new era of kerosene lamps and stoves (see Gestner, 1855). The discovery of oil at Titusville will spur mechanization of U.S. agriculture, and paraffin wax (a byproduct of kerosene produced from petroleum) will be used to seal Mason jars used for preserving foods (see Mason, 1858). Fire destroys Drake's well in the fall, but the Cleveland Leader reports November 18 that "the oil springs of northern Pennsylvania [are] attracting considerable speculation" and that there is "quite a rush to the oleaginous locations" (see Andrews, 1860).
Electric home lighting gets its first U.S. demonstration. Salem, Massachusetts, inventor Moses G. (Gerrish) Farmer, 39, lights two incandescent lamps on his mantelpiece with platinum strip filaments powered by a wet-cell voltaic battery (see Edison, 1879).
French physicist Gaston Planté, 25, invents the first practical electric storage battery, or accumulator (see Daniell, 1836; Leclanche's dry-cell battery, 1867).
Suez Canal construction begins April 25 (see 1854). Ferdinand de Lesseps has financed the sea-level waterway between the Mediterranean and Red seas chiefly by selling stock to French investors, but he has sold a 44 percent interest for nearly $20 million to Egypt's khedive Mohammed Said. Some 30,000 Egyptian forced laborers start work at wages above prevailing rates and will be augmented by Arab, French, Italian, and Greek workers before hand labor is largely replaced beginning in 1863 by mechanical equipment brought from Europe to dig out nearly 2 cubic meters of earth each month (see 1869).
The ship Pomona goes down in the North Atlantic April 27, drowning all 400 aboard.
About 120 passsengers for the Peninsular & Orient steamship Emeu leave Suez for Aden November 20 with a caravan of 3,000 camels carrying mail and 716 chests of provisions, using the Overland Route established by the late Thomas Waghorn in 1837. The passengers ride across the desert in small two-wheeled spring carts, each holding six people and pulled by four horses; the £6 fare includes free carriage of baggage by camel. The 84-mile journey takes 16 to 24 hours including stopovers, and although cheaper transportation on donkeys or camels is available, going that way takes 20 to 30 hours.
The British clipper ship Falcon begins a new method of shipbuilding. Much smaller than the American clipper ships but longer lasting and more economical to operate, the Falcon is made of wooden planking on iron frames.
Engineer-inventor Isambard Kingdom Brunel dies at his London home in Westminster September 15 at age 53, having worn himself out building some of Britain's most noteworthy ships, rail lines, bridges, tunnels, viaducts, and wharves (he has been unable to delegate authority); engineer Robert Stephenson dies at London October 12 at age 55, having built the six-arch iron Tyne River bridge (using James Nasmyth's steam hammer to drive the foundations) and the long-span Britannia Bridge across the Menai Strait in North Wales.
The Italian states still have only 1,759 kilometers of railway track (see 1839).
The Chicago and North Western Railway is incorporated following a takeover of the assets of the bankrupt Columbus, Hocking Valley and Toledo Railway, which are merged with the 4-year-old Chicago, St. Paul, and Fond du Lac, with former Chicago mayor William B. Ogden as president (see 1864).
The Louisville & Nashville Railroad completes 187 miles of track between the two cities October 27 and scheduled train service begins a few days later (see 1850). Work on the line had languished, but former secretary of the treasury James Guthrie, now 62, has spent the last 2 years promoting and financing the L&N, which has cost $7,221,204.91 but will be profitable almost from the start. It will have 269 miles of track by 1861, will reach Memphis in late 1865, and within 80 years will be operating more than 5,000 miles of track in 13 states of the South, with 60 percent of its traffic coming from bituminous coal mines in Kentucky, Virginia, Alabama, and Illinois.
Montréal's Victoria Bridge opens in December to span the St. Lawrence River and enable the 7-year-old Grand Trunk Railway's trains to reach Portland, Maine, during the long winter season. Work on the $6.6 million bridge has required as many as 3,040 men, 144 horses, four locomotive engines, six steamboats, and 72 barges, and workmen discovered the remains of 6,000 Irish immigrants who had died of typhus en route to, or soon after arriving in, Canada from 1847 to 1848. Inaugural ceremonies for the bridge will be held next summer, with Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, making his first visit to a British colony.
Brink's Express has its origins in a Chicago horse-and-wagon service started by a Vermonter who in 1891 will begin moving bank funds and payroll money to launch a business that will grow into the leading U.S. armored-truck money-transport company (see robbery, 1950).
Clock manufacturer Seth Thomas dies at Plymouth Hollow, Connecticut, January 29 at age 73, leaving his business to his son and namesake; sewing machine inventor Walter Hunt dies at New York June 8 at age 62 before the first payment from Isaac M. Singer falls due, having derived little benefit from his Globe stove, fountain pen, breech-loading rifle, paper collar, safety pin, or other inventions.
Diebold Inc. has its beginnings in a safe and bank-vault manufacturing company founded at Cincinnati by German-born inventor Charles Diebold, whose firm will have patents on at least 67 different safes by 1870 (see 1872; Mosler, 1867).
British-ruled India gets her first power looms, which some women see as a threat to their livelihood.
On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Species in the Struggle for Life by Charles Darwin creates a furor by flying in the face of fundamentalist religion and refuting the Lamarckian notion that acquired traits can be inherited (see Lamarck, 1809). Darwin has been reluctant to publish his work, but Alfred Russel Wallace has forced his hand (see 1858), and he has gone ahead with the blessing of scientists who include geologist Sir Charles Lyell, botanist Sir Joseph Hooker, and biologist T. H. Huxley (see 1860). Harvard botanist Asa Gray has been corresponding with Darwin and is prominent among those supporting him (Gray himself publishes a study of Japanese botany and its relation to that of North America, winning worldwide acclaim for his scientific research).
Naturalist-explorer Alexander, Baron von Humboldt, dies at his native Berlin May 6 at age 88.
Archaeologists working in northern France's Somme Valley gravel quarries turn up fossilized animal remains, early flint handaxes, and other evidence to support the idea of a long-term evolutionary process.
The spectrum analysis elaborated by German physicist Gustav R. (Robert) Kirchhoff, 35, and R. W. Bunsen of 1850 Bunsen burner fame will permit the discovery of new elements (see Mendeléev, 1870). They show that when light passes through a gas or any heated material only certain wavelengths are absorbed and emitted; since each pure substance has its own characteristic spectrum, analyzing the spectrum of emissions reveals the material's chemical composition.
Louis Pasteur disproves the chemical theory of fermentation that has been advanced by the German chemist Baron von Liebig (see 1857; "spontaneous generation" refutation, 1860). Pasteur's daughter Jan dies of typhoid fever in September.
Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, 28, sets forth a law describing the statistical distribution of velocities among the energies of the molecules in a gas (see Boltzmann, 1871).
"On the Number of Prime in a Given Magnitude" ("Uber die Anzahle der Primzahlen unter einer gegebenern Grosse") by mathematician Bernhard Riemann gives a partial description of the asymptomatic frequency of prime numbers (positive integral numbers, e.g., 2, 3, 5, etc.) (see 1854).
"Treatise on Gout and Rheumatic Gout" by London physician Alfred B. (Baring) Garrod, 40, shows that Galen in the 2nd century was wrong in blaming gout on overindulgence. (The word derives from the Latin gutta, meaning drop, and describes a flow of matter from the vital organs to the extremities.) A staff doctor at University College hospital, Garrod identified the crystals found in gout with uric acid 11 years ago; he says in his treatise that the painful affliction is caused by "defective" excretion of uric acid in the blood, and can be controlled by avoiding foods high in purine and using drugs such as colchicine (see Franklin, 1785).
German graduate student Albert Niemann, 25, at the University of Gottingen isolates the alkaloid cocaine from coca leaves brought home from Peru by Austrian explorer Karl (Ritter) von Scherzer, 38. It will be used to dull the pain of toothaches and in some patent medicines, but physicians show little interest in the drug's potential for anesthesia (see 1884).
The Society for Promoting Employment of Women includes nursing as a desirable career for women, largely through the efforts of Florence Nightingale, but it does not recommend midwifery as suitable, even though Nightingale wants to see the status of midwives improved.
British surgeon Isaac Baker Brown, 47, advocates clitoridectomy—surgical removal of the skin hood above the clitoris—for the relief of nervous or sexual disorders. Brown will be expelled from the London Obstetrical Society in 1866 for reviving the practice and will die in 1873, but U.S. practitioners will perform the procedure from 1867 until well after the turn of the century, despite attacks by the American medical profession on "female castration."
Britain's House of Commons gets its first Jewish member as Lionel Rothschild, now 41, takes his seat. He has been elected and reelected since 1847 but has been unable to sit in the Commons until the introduction of a new oath omitting the words "on the true faith of a Christian." His son Nathan will be the first Jewish peer in the House of Lords (see commerce, 1815).
The Islamic theologian as-Sanusi (Sidi Muhammad Ibn ali As-sanusi Al-mujahiri Al-hasani Al-idrisi) dies at Jaghbub in Cyrenaica (later Libya) September 7 at age 72 (approximate), having founded the militant mystical movement (the Sanusiyah) that will play a major role in Libyan political affairs.
New York's Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art opens its first building at Astor Place and Fourth Avenue (see Cooper Institute, 1857).
Telegraphy promoter Samuel F. B. Morse agrees to the formation of the North American Telegraph Association as a near-monopoly (see 1844). His onetime partner Alfred Vail has died in poverty at his native Morristown, New Jersey January 18 at age 51 (see Western Union, 1856; 1866).
The Irish Times begins publication March 29 at 4 Lower Abbey Street, Dublin. Founded by Lawrence Knox, 23, it appears Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays until June 8, when it becomes a daily, and within a few months has a circulation of 8,000; Know will own the paper until his death in 1873, by the turn of the century it will have the largest circulation of any paper in Ireland, and it will continue into the 21st century, long outliving the other four papers launched this year at Dublin.
German painter and poet Wilhelm Busch, 27, pioneers the modern comic strip with comic sketches for the comic weekly Fliegende Blätter that will soon include Max und Moritz," "Der heilige Antonius von Padua," Die fromme Helene," "Hans Huckebein," "Dideldum!," and "Herr und Frau Knopp."
Rocky Mountain News begins publication during a snowstorm April 23 at Cherry Creek in what will soon be Montana Territory (see politics, 1864). Ohio-born surveyor William H. (Newton) Byers, 28, has arrived 3 days earlier from Omaha with Thomas Gibson, printer John L. Dailey, and wagonload of supplies that included a used printing press, ink, various printing supplies, and type set for the four-page paper's two inside pages. Beating out rival John Merrick by 20 minutes to produce the town's first paper, Byers will use butcher paper, wrapping paper, and anything else he can find before securing a reliable source of newsprint and will remain publisher and editor until 1879, championing the cause of Colorado, encouraging agriculture, and financing a railroad despite bribery, death threats, floods, and kidnapping.
Peking Syllabary by London-born diplomat Thomas F. (Francis) Wade, 41, offers a romanization of Chinese ideographs. Sent to China by the British Army in 1842, Wade studied the language and became an official interpreter (see Giles, 1872).
Nonfiction: Moral and Critical Essays (Essais de morale et de critique) by Ernest Renan, whose work has been published in the Revue des Deux Mondes and the Journal des Débats. Renan denounces the materialism and intolerance of the Second Empire, advocating an historical, humanistic approach to religion and urging intellectuals to resist tyranny by becoming "bastions of the spirit"; Self-Help by Scottish journalist-turned railway administrator Samuel Smiles, 46, who has been zealous in his advocacy of material progress based on free trade and individual enterprise. Having studied medicine at Edinburgh and qualified as a physician at age 19, when he and his 11 siblings were left fatherless, he gave up his practice, moved to Leeds, edited the reformist Leeds Times from 1838 to 1842, favored practical applications of utilitarian doctrines espoused by Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, went into railroad administration in 1845, and 2 years ago published a life of the railroad pioneer George Stephenson; The Narrative of the Earl of Elgin's Mission to China and Japan by Laurence Oliphant; Confidences d'un prestidigatateur by illusionist Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, now 53.
Author Bettina von Arnim dies at Berlin January 20 at age 73; historian W. H. Prescott suffers a stroke and dies at his Beacon Hill, Boston, home January 28 at age 62; historian-statesman Alexis de Tocqueville dies at Cannes April 16 at age 53; writer Thomas De Quincey at Edinburgh December 8 at age 74; jurist-author John Austin at Weybridge, Surrey, in December at age 69; writer-statesman Thomas Babington Macaulay at Holly Lodge, Kensington, December 28 at age 59 (he is buried in Westminster Abbey).
Fiction: A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, whose novel of the French Revolution begins, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times"; Adam Bede by George Eliot gives its author her first wide success; The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by English novelist George Meredith, 31; Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov, whose protagonist devotes his life to doing absolutely nothing; "Audiberte" (story) by Alphonse Daudet; Him (Lui) by Louise Colet is based on her 8-year liaison with Gustave Flaubert, from whom she has become estranged (the novel creates a sensation); Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, In a Two-Story White House, North, Showing that Slavery's Shadows Fall Even There by New Hampshire writer Harriet E. Wilson (née Adams) is a fictionalized account of her life that some will call the first novel published by a black American.
Washington Irving dies at his Sunnyside country home on the Hudson River November 28 at age 76; philologist-folklorist Wilhelm C. Grimm at Berlin December 16 at age 73, survived by his older brother Jacob.
Poetry: The Idylls of the King by Alfred Tennyson is the first in a series of volumes that Tennyson will complete in 1885, bringing Arthurian legend to life with verses about Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, the Lady of Shalott, the Holy Grail, and the towers of fabled Camelot (see Malory, 1471; Caxton, 1484); The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám of Naishapur by English poet-translator Edward Fitzgerald, 50, who puts into graceful English quatrains the rhymed verse of the Persian astronomer-poet who died in 1131: "A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,/ A jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread-and Thou/ Beside me, singing in the Wilderness/ Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!" "And much as wine has played the Infidel,/ And robbed me of my Robe of Honor—Well,/ I often wonder what the Vintners buy/ One half so precious as the stuff they sell"; "The Moving Finger writes; and having writ,/ Moves on; nor all thy Piety nor Wit/ Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line/ Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it"; Mireio by French Provençal poet Frédric Mistral, 29; "The Children's Hour" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow begins, "Between the dark and the daylight,/ When the night is beginning to lower,/ Comes a pause in the day's occupations/ That is known as the Children's Hour."
Poet Leigh Hunt dies at Putney August 28 at age 74.
Juvenile: Ben Sylvester's Word by Charlotte M. Yonge.
Painting: The Absinth Drinker by French painter Edouard Manet, 27; The Angelus by Jean-François Millet; All Souls Day by William Adolphe Bouguereau; Le Bain Turc by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, now 79; Battle of Solferino by Ernest Meissonier; At the Piano by Lowell, Massachusetts-born painter-etcher James Abbott McNeill Whistler, 25, who lived in Russia during his teens while his father directed construction of a railroad for Czar Nicholas I, was forced to leave West Point at age 19 for failing chemistry, has lived abroad since age 21, and now settles at London; Heart of the Andes by Frederick Edwin Church; Bernese Alps by German painter Albert Bierstadt, 29.
Sculpture: Checkers up at the Farm by Massachusetts machinist-sculptor John Rogers, 29, who has been asked to provide a piece for a local charity fair. He goes to New York later in the year and creates a sensation with his piece The Slave Auction, and when dealers tell him that it cannot be offered for sale lest it offend Southern customers, Rogers sells copies of it door to door along with other works.
Florence's Bargello opens as a museum of medieval and Renaissance sculpture.
Theater: The Thunderstorm (Groza) by Aleksandr Ostrovsky 11/16 at Moscow's Maly Theater, with Prov Sadovsky; The Octaroon, or Life in Louisiana by Dion Boucicault 12/5 at New York's Winter Garden Theater. Boucicault has adapted the 1856 novel The Quadroon by Mayne Reid to create his melodrama.
French tightrope walker Charles Blondin (Jean François Gravelet), 35, crosses Niagara Falls on a tightrope June 30.
The world's first flying trapeze circus act is performed November 12 at the Cirque Napoléon in Paris by Jules Léotard, 21, who has practiced at his father's gymnasium in Toulouse. Safety nets will not be introduced until 1871, and Léotard meanwhile will use a pile of mattresses to cushion possible falls. The song "That Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze" will be written about Léotard, and his name will be applied to the tights worn by acrobats and dancers.
Opera: The Masked Ball (Un Ballo in Maschera) 2/17 at Rome's Teatro Apollo, with music by Giuseppe Verdi; Faust 3/19 at the Théâtre Lyrique, Paris, with music by French composer Charles Gounod, 41, to a libretto based on the Goethe tragedy. Spanish-born Italian soprano Adelina (née Adela Juana Maria) Patti, 16, makes her debut 11/24 at New York's Academy of Music singing the title role in Donizetti's 1835 opera Lucia di Lammermoor.
First performances: Serenade for Orchestra No. 1 in D major by Johannes Brahms 3/28 at Hamburg; Concerto No. 1 for Pianoforte and Orchestra by Brahms 7/22 at Hanover.
Hymns: "Ave Maria" ("Hail Mary") by Charles Gounod, who has based it on Johann Sebastian Bach's first prelude in The Well-Tempered Clavichord of 1722; "Nearer My God to Thee" by Boston musician Lowell Mason, 67, lyrics by the late Sarah Adams, who wrote them in 1840 or 1841.
Popular songs: "Dixie" ("I Wish I Was in Dixie's Land") by Ohio-born performer Daniel Decatur Emmet, 43, of the blackface troupe Bryant's Minstrels is performed for the first time 4/4 at Mechanics Hall, 472 Broadway. The song meets with immediate success among lower Manhattan's working-class audiences, most of whom support the Southern cause. Emmet may well have learned the song from Ben and Lew Snowden, the sons of freed slaves, who have been performing with their family in rural Ohio (see 1861); "La Paloma" by Spanish songwriter Sebastian Yradier, 50.
The Steinway piano developed by German-born New York piano maker Henry Steinway, Jr. is the first piano with a single cast-metal plate. Steinway is the son of Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg, now 62 (see 1853). The men of the New York family apprenticed themselves to various piano makers, one of whom, Henry Pirsson, had produced a double-grand pianoforte with keyboards facing each other. The Steinways will take pride in their workmanship, shaping and fitting hundreds of pieces by hand for each instrument and following a precise and patient procedure which involves drying wood for a year and applying several coats of varnish to the case, with long intervals between each coat, but what will make Steinway & Sons world famous is the fuller, warmer tone of their pianos, made possible by the cast-metal plate, which is strong enough to withstand the pull of strings that have been combined with an overstrung scale both to save space and to produce a much larger tone than that of earlier grand pianos.
The first intercollegiate baseball game July 1 ends after 26 innings with an Amherst College team defeating a Williams team 73 to 32 on the grounds of the Maplewood Female Institute at Pittsfield, Massachusetts (see 1845; Cincinnati Red Stockings, 1869).
The Cachar Polo Club founded by British colonial officers stationed in Assam, India, is the world's first polo club.
U.S. heavyweight champion John "Old Smoke" Morrissey relinquishes his title April 4 and retires from the ring, making John C. Heenan the official champion (see 1858; 1860).
The German toy-making firm Gebrüder Marklin & Cie. begins production in Swabia. Its dolls, miniature baby carriages, toy cookstoves, toy steamboats, toy trains, toy horses and carriages, and other playthings will become famous worldwide.
Rep. Daniel Edgar Sickles, 33 (R. N.Y.), wins acquittal in the murder of Francis Barton Key, son of the late lawyer who wrote the words to "The Star Spangled Banner." The younger Key was carrying on an affair with the congressman's attractive wife, Theresa; Sickles shot him dead, and his defense of temporary insanity has prevailed.
San Antonio's Menger Hotel is established under the direction of German-born brewer William Menger, who has built a three-story hostelry for the Texas cowtown.
Boston's Public Garden is established on 108 acres of filled land owned by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (see Swan Boats, 1877).
The first Central Park transverse road opens, connecting New York's Fifth Avenue at 79th Street to Eighth Avenue (later Central Park West) at 81st (see 1858). The plan submitted by F. L. Olmsted and Calvert Vaux called for sunken transverse roads at 65th, 79th, 85th, and 97th streets, and the deliberately winding 65th Street transverse, blasted out of solid rock, has sidewalks for pedestrians running parallel to carriage drives and bridle paths.
The New York State Legislature authorizes acquisition of land for Brooklyn's Prospect Park (see Central Park, 1858).
Australian landowner Thomas Austin imports two dozen English rabbits to provide shooting for sport. In 6 years Austin will have shot about 200,000 on his own estate but killed scarcely half the rabbits on his property, and since five of the fast-multiplying animals consume more grass than one sheep, the rabbits will quickly become a major problem for sheep raisers (see myxomatosis, 1951).
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