1837: Information and Much More from Answers.com
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Britain's William IV dies at Windsor Castle outside London June 20 at age 71 after a 7-year reign. The king's widow, Caroline Adelaide of Saxe-Coburg Meiningen, 44, is devastated (she married him in 1818 and is credited with having turned a middle-aged rake into a respectable [if dull] gentleman). William is succeeded by an 18-year-old niece, a granddaughter of George III, who will reign until 1901 as Queen Victoria. Mrs. Fitzherbert, mistress to the late George IV, has died with all the rites of Roman Catholicism Easter Monday at age 80.
Salic law forbids female succession in Hanover and that kingdom is separated from Britain. The Hanoverian crown passes to George III's eldest surviving son, the duke of Cumberland; he will reign until 1851 as Ernst August, and his son will reign as George V until Prussia annexes Hanover in 1866.
Novelist Benjamin Disraeli stands for election to Parliament as the Conservative candidate for Maidstone, Kent and wins the seat, having twice stood (and lost) as the independent radical candidate for High Wycombe and stood without success 2 years ago as Conservative candidate for Taunton. Having speculated wildly in South American mining shares in 1825, Disraeli lost so heavily that he was left deeply in debt and turned to writing as a way of resurrecting his fortunes, but although he will marry a rich widow in 1839 he will not be free of debt until well past middle age. Now 32, he champions the interests of landlords but is hooted down for his mannerisms and flamboyant dress when he makes his maiden speech; silenced, he says, "I will sit down now, but the time will come when you will hear me."
French forces in Algeria sign the Treaty of Tafna with the emir Abdul-Qadar (Abdulkader), who has gained support from Algerians incensed at the French use of violence (see 1836). General Bugeaud has returned to France; the treaty leaves the French with only a few ports, increases the territory controlled by Abdul-Qadar, and makes him master of the interior of Oran and the Titteri. Within 2 years Abdul-Qadar will have established an Algerian nation whose subjects will be taxed on an equal basis by an administration of officials on fixed salaries. Fielding an army of about 2,000 regulars, the emir will fortify interior towns, selling surplus crops to buy arms in Britain and elsewhere as his cavalry uses hit-and-run tactics to maintain pressure on the French (see 1841).
Japan's shōgun Ienari Tokugawa resigns at age 64 after a 44-year rule marked by widespread disturbances produced in part by Ienari's efforts to reform government and improve education. Ienari has had 40 mistresses, half of his 54 children have died in infancy, and he is succeeded by his son Ieyoshi, 45, who will rule until 1853 as sentiment grows for restoration of imperial power and demands increase that Japan open her ports to foreign trade.
Michigan enters the Union January 26 as the 26th state.
President Jackson recognizes the Republic of Texas on his last full day in office (March 3) after approval by Congress.
The Texas Rangers have their beginnings at Waco, where Anson Darnell, Starrett Smith, and Jacob Gross establish Fort Fisher.
Congress increases Supreme Court membership March 3 from seven justices to nine.
Chile's dictator Diego Portales dies by an assassin's hand while reviewing his troops at Valparaiso June 6 at age 43.
Uruguay's president Manuel Ceferino Oribe resigns in October, moves to Buenos Aires with his supporters, and receives a military commission from the Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas (see 1836; 1842).
A French-Canadian rebellion against British rule begins under the leadership of Louis (Joseph) Papineau, 51, and William Lyon Mackenzie, 42. Speaker of the legislative assembly of Lower Canada, Papineau is charged with high treason, escapes to the United States, and is declared a rebel after some riots and fighting in the Montreal area. Mackenzie attacks Toronto December 5, is repulsed, flees across the border December 13, seizes Navy Island in the Niagara River, and proclaims a provisional government, but he will be arrested in the United States early next year. The U.S. steamboat Caroline supplies the rebels, but Canadian troops who have crossed the Niagara River kill one of the passengers December 29, set the steamboat afire, and cast her adrift just above the falls (see Durham, 1838).
U.S. Army officers trick the Seminole leader Osceola into coming out of the Florida Everglades under a flag of truce October 21 and arrest him with several followers when he enters the compound at St. Augustine. The action of the commanding officer General Thomas S. Jesup brings public protest, but Osceola remains a prisoner; his braves are defeated December 25 at Okeechobee Swamp by Colonel Zachary Taylor, 53, who is called "Old Rough and Ready" and wins promotion to brigadier general. Osceola will die early next year at Fort Moultrie near Charleston, South Carolina, his tribesmen will use guerrilla tactics to continue their resistance, most of the Seminole will be exterminated in the next few years, but they will have killed more than 1,500 U.S. soldiers sent in to wipe them out (see Florida statehood, 1845).
East Hampton, New York-born educator Catharine E. (Esther) Beecher, 36, issues a pamphlet under the title "Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism with Reference to the Duty of American Females." A daughter of the Calvinist clergyman Lyman Beecher, president of the Lane Theological Seminary at Cincinnati, Beecher lost her fiancé when he died at sea.
Alton, Illinois, editor Elijah (Paris) Lovejoy, 34, receives a new press from the Anti-Slavery Society to replace the Alton Observer press that has been smashed by townspeople who favor slavery. An armed band of citizens approaches the warehouse where the new press is stored, a group of abolitionists stands guard to defend it, one of the citizens tries to set fire to the warehouse, Lovejoy dashes into the street, and he is shot dead November 7.
Boston abolitionist Wendell Phillips, 26, hears a proslavery speaker in a meeting at Faneuil Hall December 8 compare Elijah Lovejoy's murderers to the patriots of the Boston Tea Party of 1773. Phillips gave up his law career 2 years ago after seeing a Boston mob drag abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison half-naked through the streets at the end of a rope, he has never spoken in public before, but he rises in fury to denounce the previous speaker, points to portraits of John Adams and John Hancock on the wall, and says, "I thought those pictured lips would have broken into voice, to rebuke the recreant American, the slanderer of the dead," and his eloquence sways the meeting.
Caroline Norton persuades a friend in Parliament to introduce an Infant Custody Bill, the first piece of women's rights legislation ever brought before the House of Commons (see 1836). It proposes merely that judges consider the position of the mother in cases of separation and divorce, but Norton writes in an essay, "The Natural Claim of a Mother to the Custody of Her Children," "You may teach a child to hush his little voice to a whisper when he utters [his mother's] forbidden name . . . but nature's great instinct will remain nevertheless, strong and unchangeable. He will love and honor his mother, he will sometimes wonder at her absence, and sometimes pine for her return" (see 1838).
The city of Chicago is incorporated with former New York State legislator William Butler Ogden, 32, as its first mayor. One of the city's richest men, Ogden has made a fortune in real estate dealings and goes to work improving streets and building bridges to connect the city's three parts.
The Texas legislature incorporates the city of Houston June 5 and makes it the new republic's temporary capital (see 1836). The town is beset by disease and lawlessness, it has financial difficulties, and the capital will move to Austin in January 1839.
Navigator Jules-Sébastien-César Dumont d'Urville sails from Toulon in September on a voyage to the Antarctic, hoping to reach a point beyond the 74°15' South achieved by James Weddell in 1823 (see 1829). He will survey the Straits of Magellan, and his ships will reach the pack ice at 63°29' South, 44°47' West, but lacking proper equipment for penetrating the ice they will proceed for 300 miles to the east before heading west and visiting the South Orkney and South Shetland islands. Scurvy will force them to stop at Talcahuano, Chile, after they have discovered Joinville Island and Louis Philippe Land (see 1840).
Economic recession begins in Britain.
Economic recession begins in the United States following the failure in March of the New Orleans cotton brokerage Herman Briggs & Company. Inflated land values, speculation, and wildcat banking have contributed to the crisis, New York banks suspend specie (gold and silver) payments May 10, financial panic ensues, at least 800 banks suspend specie payment, 618 banks fail before the year is out (many have deceived bank inspectors as to the amount of gold backing their bank notes), specie disappears from circulation, employers pay workers in paper "shinplasters" of dubious value and often counterfeit, 39,000 Americans go bankrupt, $741 million is lost, and the recession reduces thousands to starvation (see 1839).
Bordeaux-born Boston merchant John Murray Forbes, now 24, returns to Boston with a fortune made working with his brother Robert in the opium trade at Guangzhou (Canton). His investments in real estate and sea-voyage ventures will multiply that fortune in the next 9 years. His brother Robert Bennet Forbes, now 32, returned to Boston in 1833, married early the following year, and prospered as consignee of China cargoes for Russell, Sturgis & Company, but the financial panic this year comes close to wiping him out, and he goes back to Guangzhou to recoup in opium trading (see 1838; Opium War, 1839).
New London, Connecticut-born merchants G. G. and S. Howland turn over their New York mercantile house to William E. (Edgar) Howland and their sister Susan's son William H. (Henry) Aspinwall, 29, whose seacaptain father died before the young man was born. Largest general trading, exporting, and importing firm in the city, it has built up a heavy trade with Mexico, Britain, and the Mediterranean countries, has a capitalization of $200,000, continues to prosper despite the panic, and will soon have a virtual monopoly on trade with Venezuela.
The recession forces every New England textile mill but one to close down. Nathaniel Stevens at North Andover, Massachusetts, expands production and works 76-hour weeks, paying above average wages of $4.50 per week plus $2 for board (see 1812; J. P. Stevens, 1899).
Frankfurt-am-Main banker August Schönberg, 20, hears of the financial panic in New York while en route to Havana to transact business for the younger Meyer Rothschild (see 1801). Schönberg completes his Cuban business, sends in his resignation to Frankfurt but offers to act as agent for the Rothschilds, sails for New York, rents a small office in Wall Street, anglicizes his name to Belmont, and although virtually without capital begins a business that will grow into a powerful banking house.
Social theorist Charles Fourier dies at Paris October 10 at age 65. Former French Army engineer Victor-Prosper Considérant, 39, resigned his captain's commission 6 years ago to devote his efforts to advancing Fourierism, which will lead to the founding in France and America of experimental "phalanxes" (falanges)—cooperative agricultural communities whose leaders bear responsibility for the welfare of individual members, whose roles will constantly change (see education [Brook Farm], 1841; religion [La Réunion], 1855)
Congress authorizes the issue of U.S. Treasury notes not to exceed $10 million October 12 in a move to ease the nation's financial crisis.
Tiffany & Company has its beginnings in a New York "Stationery and Fancy Goods Store" that opens September 18 near City Hall. Merchant Charles Lewis Tiffany, 25, has borrowed $1,000 from his father in Connecticut. Tiffany and his partner John B. Young stock Chinese bric-a-brac, pottery, and umbrellas as well as stationery. Total receipts for the first 3 days are $4.98, profits for the first week total 33¢, but the firm will grow to be one of the world's most prestigious jewelry retailers (see 1847).
U.S. whalers kill 6,767 sperm whales, a record that will not be surpassed until the next century when modern techniques will be used. Most of the whaling ships leave from New Bedford; New London; Hudson, New York; and Sag Harbor. Whale oil and natural gas continue to light the world's lamps.
Steam engine pioneer Arthur Woolf dies in Guernsey October 26 at age 70.
Bavaria's Ludwig I orders construction of a canal to link Bamberg on the Main River (a tributary of the Rhine) with Kellheim (a tributary of the Danube) (see Charlemagne, 793). The Ludwig Canal will operate for about 100 years but will be unable to compete with railroads (see 1992).
Completion of the Pennsylvania Canal spurs development of Pittsburgh.
The Michigan legislature authorizes a $5 million loan for the construction of three railroads across the state, and workers lay a few miles of track for the Michigan Southern plus a section of the Michigan Central between Detroit and Kalamazoo. The financial panic makes it impossible to borrow enough to complete the roads; New Hampshire-born Harvard Law School graduate James Frederick Joy, 26, moved to Detroit last year and urges that the roads be sold to a private company. Working with Auburn & Rochester Railroad superintendent John W. Brooks, Joy will persuade a group of New York and Boston investors to buy the Michigan Central from the state (see 1846).
The New York and Harlem Railroad reaches Harlem with its horsecars and develops the world's first steam tram (see 1834; 1839).
London's Euston Station opens July 20 with an enormous Doric arch and will serve as the city's main-line rail terminal (see Waterloo Station, 1848).
Paris hails the opening of its first railroad station: the Gare Saint Lazare near the Place de l'Europe serves the train that links Paris with Saint-Germain-en-Laye. It will be rebuilt between 1841 and 1843, expanded a decade later to serve passengers going to or coming from Normandy or Britain via Dieppe, and surrounded by a larger structure in the late 1880s.
Spain's Cuba colony opens its first railway to connect Havana with Guines, but Spain herself will not get a railway until 1848.
West Boylston, Massachusetts-born inventor Erastus B. (Brigham) Bigelow, 25, devises a power loom to weave lace (see Horrocks, 1813). The loom achieves great success. Bigelow realizes that its basic principles can be adapted to produce ginghams and other fabrics. He and an older brother will establish the Clinton Company next year to build and operate the power looms, and some of them will be adapted to manufacturing two-ply velvet carpets such as Brussels, tapestry, and Wilton (see Lister, 1845).
Recherches sur la Probabilité des Jugements by mathematician Siméon-Denis Poisson, now 56, establishes rules of probability based on the incidence of death from mule kicks in the French Army. Originally derived simply as an approximation to Bernouli's bionomial law, the Poisson distribution of large numbers will become fundamental to the analysis of problems of all sorts relating to the random occurrence of events in space or time.
"New Contributions to a Commentary on the Persepolitan Cuneiform Writing . . . " ("Neue Beiträge zur Erläuterung der persepolitanischen Keilschrift . . . ") by Georg Friedrich Grotefend, now 62, opens the way to a knowledge of life among early peoples of the Near East (see 1802; Layard, 1845; Rawlinson, 1846).
French physiologist René Joachim Henri Dutrochet, 61, establishes the essential importance of chlorophyll to photosynthesis (see Pelletier, Caventou, 1817).
A smallpox epidemic along the Missouri River kills 15,000 Native Americans, nearly wiping out the Arikara, Hidatsa, and Mandan.
A Massachusetts law takes effect April 30 providing for a state board of education to consist of the governor, lieutenant governor, and eight citizens appointed by the governor (see English High School, 1821). Political leader James G. Carter, 42, has framed the measure, but textile manufacturer Edmund Dwight uses his influence to have Franklin, Massachusetts-born state senate president Horace Mann, 39, appointed to the $1,000-per-year post of secretary; Mann visits public schools from Cape Cod to the Berkshires, finds that decentralization of free schools since 1789 has led to a decrease in financial support with sad consequences: about one-third of children in the state have no educational opportunities whatever, in many districts the school year is only 2 to 3 months, people of means have their children educated in private schools and academies, and 16 percent of children attend such schools rather than schoolhouses that are cold, dilapidated, and unsanitary, with untrained, underpaid teachers (male teachers average $185 per year, female teachers $65) and irrational teaching methods. Mann will organize meetings in every county to focus public attention on the need for reform (see normal school, 1839).
Boston's 8-year-old Perkins Institution for the Blind admits New Hampshire-born deaf-mute Laura Dewey Bridgman, 7, who came down with scarlet fever at age 2 and lost her sight and hearing. School director Samuel Gridley Howe, now 35, will teach the girl to use her sense of touch to learn the alphabet, preparing labels with raised letters and pasting them on keys, knives, spoons, and other common articles until she learns their names. She will gradually come to know the alphabet and 10 digits and will live at the school until her death in 1889, helping in her later years with household work and teaching.
Oberlin College opens at Oberlin, Ohio, and admits qualified blacks. Founded 4 years ago, its stated objectives included "the elevation of the female character, by bringing within reach of the misjudged and neglected sex all the instructive privileges which have hitherto unreasonably distinguished the leading sex from theirs." Four women are admitted on an equal basis beginning September 6, making Oberlin the first coeducational U.S. college, but female students, whose "literary" course is considered easier than that of the males, are required to wash the clothes of male students, clean their rooms, and serve them at meals. Females are not permitted to recite in public or work in the fields with the male students.
Mount Holyoke Female Seminary opens November 8 in a plain brick building at South Hadley, Massachusetts; it is the first U.S. college for women, although it will not institute collegiate standards for many years to come. Local educator Mary (Mason) Lyon, 40, proposes to give the best possible education to women of modest means. She has combed the countryside seeking contributions from women, who have given anywhere from 6¢ to a few hundred dollars (but more often have offered quilt scraps for students' sewing baskets or feathers for their pillows). Her goal is to make each student "a handmaid to the Gospel and an efficient auxiliary in the great task of renovating the world." Providing courses in botany, chemistry, composition, geography, geology, history, and logic, charging a tuition of $64, and requiring each student to do 1 hour's housework per day, she is so successful with her 80 students (116 by year's end) that she will have to turn away 400 applicants next year for lack of space. Catharine E. Beecher estimated 2 years ago that America needed 30,000 new teachers. "Because few men will enter a business that will not support a family," she wrote, "females must be trained and educated for this employment." She has given up teaching herself in order to promote "the duty of American women to their country," which is to go west and teach the children in frontier towns. Most U.S. schoolteachers are now men, but by the time Beecher dies in 1878 most will be women.
The world's first kindergarten opens at Blankenburg, Thuringia, under the direction of educator Friedrich Fröbel, now 55 (see 1826). It emphasizes play and self-activity as fundamental to a child's education, encouraging self-expression through the use of colored blocks, spheres, cylinders and various toys designed to stimulate learning through well-guided activities accompanied often by songs and music (see 1856; Peabody, 1860).
Hanover's century-old University of Göttingen expels seven professors (the Göttingen Seven, or Göttingen Sieben) who have engaged in a political protest against the king's abolition of the state's parliamentary constitution. Those dismissed include electrodynamics pioneer Wilhelm Weber, and the incident damages the university's reputation; it will regain its former prestige only late in the century when its Mathematical Institute gains worldwide prominence.
Lieut. Thomas F. (Fletcher) Waghorn, 37, Royal Navy, establishes an Overland Route for mail and passengers between Suez on the Mediterranean and Aden on the Red Sea. Having served as a volunteer in the Bengal Pilot Service, he volunteered late in 1832 to journey from London to India by way of Egypt as an experiment, it took him 4½ months, but the pasha of Egypt has befriended him, and he begins building a network of rest-houses, guides, river boats, horses, carriages, and camels (to carry mail and cargo) that make it possible to deliver the mail in 35 to 40 days. Drinking water and coal for the ships' boilers must be carried across the desert (see 1845; P & O, 1841).
The British Admiralty awards a sea-mail contract worth £29,600 to the Peninsular Steam Navigation Company founded 3 years ago by shipbroker Brodie McGhie Willcox and Arthur Anderson to run guns and ammunition for the support of Portugal's Maria II and the Spain's Bourbon monarchy when faced with civil unrest (see mail, 1836). The two have joined forces with Richard Bourne, whose family has had a contract to distribute overland mail by coach to Ireland and also has operated the Dublin and London Steam Packet Company. The company last year began weekly sailings to Madeira, advertising them "for the accommodation of Invalids," but the contract signed August 22 keeps it solvent. Her 933-ton ship Don Juan sails for Gibraltar September 1, she runs aground off Tarifa on her return voyage September 21 with partner Arthur Anderson aboard, he bargains with local fishermen in Spanish to have the ship's mail taken safely ashore, a squad of Royal Marines helps him save her cargo of £21,000 in bullion, but the ship is lost. She was only partly insured, and her loss costs the company £40,000. Mail for Egypt and India will go by steamship to Gibraltar and thence by government packet ships to Alexandria. The Crown will make an arrangement with Paris in 1839 to have it taken to Marseilles and overland from there to Alexandria, but the government will not trust the French to carry its diplomatic pouches (see transportation [P&O Line], 1840).
London printers James and Luke Graves Hansard publish statements made by the inspector of prisons, and he sues for libel (see 1828). The Hansard brothers claim the protection of privilege, but litigation will continue until Parliament enacts a statute in 1840 guaranteeing the security of printers.
"Post Office Reform: Its Importance and Practicality" by English schoolmaster Rowland Hill, 42, urges that Britain replace the system of charging for postage on the basis of distance and number of sheets with a uniform rate based on weight in which the sender pays in advance by buying "labels" to be affixed to each letter with "cement" (see 1635). Hill submits his pamphlet to Prime Minister Melbourne (see stamps, 1840).
The Pitman shorthand system devised by Englishman Isaac Pitman, 24, is the first scientific shorthand system. It is based on phonetics and employs lines, curves, and hooks with contractions and "grammalogues" for frequently occurring words (see Gregg, 1888).
Former musical instrument maker Charles Wheatstone of 1829 concertina fame and English electrical engineer William F. (Fothergill) Cooke, 31, patent a viable electric telegraph. Now 35 and a professor of experimental philosophy at Kings College, London, Wheatstone goes into partnership with Cook, and they give a public demonstration July 24, transmitting and receiving a message on a line that they have rigged up alongside the railroad between Euston and Camden. The high cost of their model makes production impractical, but chemist Edward Davey writes that "communications may be effected through, or under, water by enclosing the conductors in ropes well coated, or soaked, in an insulating and protecting varnish, such as melted caoutchouc [rubber]" (see Wheatstone, Cooke, 1845).
Samuel F. B. Morse gives a public demonstration of his electromagnetic telegraph (see 1832); Morristown, New Jersey-born technician Alfred (Lewis) Vail, 30, observes the demonstration, persuades Morse to take him on as a partner, and promises to finance U.S. and foreign patent applications; Morse is granted a U.S. patent September 23 with support from Dunstable, Massachusetts-born postmaster general Amos Kendall, now 48. Vail will be credited by some with perfecting a "Morse Code" that employs dots and dashes to represent letters in place of an earlier system that assigned numbers to letters (see 1842; Baudot, 1874).
The New Orleans Picayune begins publication with George Wilkins Kendall, 18, as editor. The Spanish picayune coin, still in circulation, is worth 6¼ cents.
The Baltimore Sun begins publication May 17. Founded by local printer Arunah S. Abell, it sells at 1¢ per copy.
Nonfiction: History of The French Revolution by Thomas Carlyle, 31, chief of relations with native states for the East India Company, whose manuscript was partly burned by the manservant of John Stuart Mill and then rewritten by Carlyle. Carlyle calls history "a distillation of rumour"; The History of the Popes in the 16th and 17th Centuries by German historian Leopold von Ranke, 42; The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic by Boston historian W. H. (William Hickling) Prescott, 41, who is completely blind as the result of an accident in his freshman year at Harvard (he entered at age 15) when he was struck in the eye by a crust of bread thrown by another student in the commons dining room. The three-volume work establishes Prescott's reputation, and he works with assistants on a history of Cortéz; Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petrae, and the Holy Land (two volumes) by Shrewsbury, New Jersey-born traveler John Lloyd Stephens, 31, who gave up his New York law practice 3 years ago and went abroad at the suggestion of his physician, who advised a sea voyage to treat Stephens's throat condition; Society in America by feminist English writer and critic Harriet Martineau, 35, who visited the United States from 1834 to 1836.
Ralph Waldo Emerson delivers a Harvard Phi Beta Kappa address, "The American Scholar," calling for intellectual independence from the past, from Europe, and from all obstacles to originality. He warns his listeners not to believe what they read simply because it appears in print.
Harvard graduate Henry David Thoreau, 19, delivers a commencement address that enlarges on Emerson's 1836 essay on "Nature," saying that man should not work for 6 days and rest on the seventh but rather should work 1 day and leave 6 free for the "sublime revelations of nature."
Fiction: The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club by Charles Dickens; The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer by Irish novelist Charles James Lever, 31; Le Curé de Village by Honoré de Balzac; Twice-Told Tales by Salem, Massachusetts-born fiction writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, 33.
Poetry: "Hymn, Sung at the Completion of the Concord Monument" by Ralph Waldo Emerson; "By the rude bridge that arched the flood,/ Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,/ Here once the embattled farmers stood,/ And fired the shot heard round the world" (see 1775); "A Song about Czar Ivan Vasilyevich, His Young Bodyguard, and the Valiant Merchant Kalashnikov" by Russian poet Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov, 22, who is transferred to a regiment in the Caucasus after writing an anti-court poem following the death of Pushkin.
Poet Aleksandr Pushkin is gutshot in a duel outside St. Petersburg January 27 with his brother-in-law Georges d'Anthès, an officer of the Horse Guards, whose lover is the Dutch ambassador and who has sullied the honor of Pushkin's wife, Natalia (née Goncharova), 24 (as well as Pushkin's own amour propre). Having challenged one person after another to a duel (he has gone deeply into debt and is suicidal), Pushkin dies of peritonitis at St. Petersburg 2 days later (February 10 New Style) at age 36; Count Giacomo Leopardi dies of cholera at Naples June 14 at age 38.
Painter Baron François Gérard dies at Paris January 11 at age 66; John Constable at London March 31 at 60.
Theater: The Clique, or the Helping Hand (La camaraderie, ou la Courte Echelle) by Eugène Scribe 6/19 at the Théâtre Français, Paris.
German playwright Georg Büchner dies of typhus at Zürich February 19 at age 23. Arrested 3 years ago for organizing a revolutionary secret society and publishing the pamphlet "Der Hessische Landbote," he has been lecturing on anatomy at the University of Zürich.
First performance: Requiem by Hector Berlioz 12/5 at the Church of Les Invalides, Paris.
The Knabe piano is introduced by German-born Baltimore piano maker William Knabe, 34, who apprenticed himself to master piano makers before coming to America 4 years ago and has opened a factory in partnership with fellow immigrant Henry Gaehle at 13 South Liberty Street, corner German Street, to build "pianos of quality for genteel people of means" (see Chickering, 1823). Using walnut core hammers, Royal George premium grade felt, and other quality materials, Knabe and Gaehle will create instruments with a rich, warm tone that will give them widespread popularity. Knabe will buy out Gaehle in 1854, and he will find his best market in the South (see 1864; Steinway, 1859).
The Bayswater hippodrome that opens June 3 in England is the world's first steeplechase racecourse.
France outlaws baccarat. The card game will not be legalized until 1907.
Procter & Gamble is founded at Cincinnati by English-born candle maker William Procter, 35, and his Irish-born soap-boiler brother-in-law James Gamble, 34, who have started making and peddling candles April 12, formalized their business relationship August 22 by pledging $3,596.47, and sign a formal partnership agreement October 31. The partners have married sisters whose father, Alexander Norris, has persuaded them to go into business together. They sell their candles and soap in the streets and to the Ohio River trade, and they gross $50,000 their first year despite competition from local soap and candle factories and from housewives who make their own soap from grease, fat, and clean wood ashes boiled in backyard kettles. The new company will adopt a trademark in 1851 showing a moon and 13 stars based on the 13 original American colonies, by 1859 the company will employ 80 people and have sales of $1 million (see Ivory Soap, 1879).
Britain ends use of the pillory as punishment for perjury.
Architect Sir John Soane dies at London January 20 at age 83. The house he built for himself in 1813 at 13 Lincoln's Inn Field will become Sir John Soane's Museum.
London completes the Thames Embankment.
London's Buckingham Palace will be the royal residence of the new queen, Victoria, and her successors. Originally a mansion built in 1704 for the duke of Buckingham, purchased by George III for his wife in 1761, and rebuilt in 1825 by the late John Nash for George IV, it was completed last year in a Palladian-style reconstruction but the late William IV disliked the palace (see 1856).
A January 22 earthquake in southern Syria leaves thousands dead.
Work begins in May on an aqueduct to carry water 41 miles to New York City from the Croton River in northern Westchester (see fire, 1835). Farmers have resisted, but the state legislature at Albany has given the city the right to condemn land for the aqueduct, West Point engineering professor Major David B. Douglass has initiated its design and placement, and by next year some 4,000 men will be working on the project. The City Water Commission will replace Douglass in 1839 with John Bloomfield Jervis of Rome, New York, an engineer with more hands-on experience, who will see the project through to completion, paying laborers—most of them Irish immigrants—75¢ to $1 per 10-hour day to build a 270-foot long dam, 50 feet high, that creates a 400-acre lake six miles above the junction of the Croton and Hudson rivers with a storage capacity of about 660 million gallons. By January 1841 Jervis will have completed about 32 miles of the waterway, including a massive 88-foot-long double stone arch bridge across the Sing Sing Kill in downtown Ossining and a brick-lined tube consisting of 12 tunnels, each 8½ feet high and 7½ feet wide, with an aggregate length of 4,406 feet (see 1842).
Buildings and paved streets occupy only one-sixth of Manhattan Island; the rest remains planted in farms and gardens.
A self-polishing steel plow fashioned by Vermont-born blacksmith John Deere, 32, at Grand Detour, Illinois, can break the heavy sod of the Illinois and Iowa prairie. Deere chisels the teeth off a discarded circular saw blade of Sheffield steel, creates a plow with the proper moldboard curve for breaking the sod, and saves farmers from having to pull their plows out of furrows for repeated cleaning with wooden paddles. The Deere plow will permit efficient farming in vast areas that have defied earlier efforts (see 1839).
The first steam-powered threshing machine is patented by Winthrop, Maryland, inventors John A. Pitts and Hiram Abial Pitts, whose device separates grain from its straw and chaff with far less effort than was heretofore required (see Meikle, 1786; Case, 1843).
The shakeout of land speculators in the economic depression makes more U.S. farmland available for real farmers.
One third of all New Yorkers who subsist by manual labor are unemployed in the financial crisis and at least 10,000 are made dependent on almshouses, which are unable to prevent many from starving to death.
Famine strikes Japan, but the Tokugawa shōgun Ieyushi refuses to open storehouses at Osaka to the starving people. A February riot led by the former police officer Heihachiro Oshio ends with 40 percent of Osaka in ashes. The riots spread throughout Japan, but the shōgun resists appeals to ease tax burdens on farmers who have little or no cash crop (see 1833).
Charles Dickens describes widespread hunger among Britain's urban poor in early installments of his novel Oliver Twist. "Please, sir, I want some more," says young Oliver, as the Industrial Revolution's dislocation of society creates problems in English agriculture and for displaced poor.
Scottish chemist Andrew Ure, 59, dismisses the idea that Britain's factory children may have rickets for lack of sunlight. Gaslight is more progressive and quite as healthy, says Ure (see energy [Gas Light and Coke], 1819; Steenbock, 1923).
Treatise on Bread and Breadmaking by Sylvester Graham inveighs against refined wheat flour. Graham societies spring up and Graham hotels (many of them once temperance hotels) open in some U.S. cities as thousands of Americans follow vegetarian diets, eating day-old whole-grain bread, oatmeal gruel, beans and boiled rice prepared without salt (Graham says condiments may inflame a thirst for alcohol) and cold puddings (see 1829).
Some 1,200 U.S. automated flour mills produce 2 million bushels of flour in the area west of the Alleghenies, with more millions being milled by millers on the eastern seaboard who have been licensed to use the 1790 Oliver Evans patent or who infringe on it.
Tetley Tea is introduced at Huddersfield, England, where local merchants Joseph and Edward Tetley open a shop under the name Tetley Brothers—Dealers in Tea. The two have peddled their tea from a packhorse across the Yorkshire moors.
Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce is introduced by English chemists (pharmacists) John Wheeley Lea and William Perrins, who opened a shop at 68 Broad Street, Worcester, in 1823 and have sold groceries as well as pharmaceuticals. Their zesty sauce—containing vinegar, molasses, sugar, anchovies, onions, tamarinds, salt, garlic, cloves, chili peppers, asafoetida (a member of the fennel family used in the ancient world for its alleged contraceptive powers), and salt—has been mixed to a recipe obtained 2 years ago from a Lord Sandys, formerly governor of Bengal, and aged for 2 years until palatable.
Delmonico's Restaurant reopens at the corner of William and Beaver Streets in New York (see 1836). The city's great fire destroyed the original William Street restaurant 2 years ago, and the new place is far more splendid (it has a three-story main dining room, private dining rooms, lounge, and ballroom, and it will be replaced in 1890 by an eight-story building whose dining and banquet rooms will be more splendid still). John and Peter's nephew Lorenzo Delmonico, now 24, goes to the market early each morning to select the freshest produce, freshest seafood, and best cuts of meat; he imports European cooks and recipes for the establishment, which will popularize green vegetables, salads, and ices (see 1845).
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