1843: Information and Much More from Answers.com
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The Spanish regent General Baldomero Espartero is forced into exile in July after an uprising backed by the former regent, Maria Cristina (see 1842). Generals Ramón Narváez and Francisco Serrano lead the revolt with help from Leopoldo O'Donnell, 34 (a descendant of the O'Donnells who left Ireland after the Battle of the Boyne in 1690), Espartero flees to England, and he is succeeded by the moderate leader Manuel Narváez, who announces plans to reinstate the monarchy with full powers.
Queen Victoria visits France in September and meets with King Louis Philippe.
Greece's Otto I dismisses his Bavarian administrators in September following a revolt led by Colonel Dimitríos Kallérgis, 40, with support from Sir Richard Church, now 59 (see 1841; Church, 1829). The king yields to popular demand for a new, more liberal constitution that will be adopted next year with a provision specifying that the king's eventual successor must be Greek Orthodox. Kallérgis will be exiled in 1845 (but see 1848).
Prime Minister Wellington pours 35,000 British troops into Ireland following a 41-to-15 vote in the Dublin corporation favoring repeal of the union with Britain. Independence agitator Daniel O'Connell, now 68, has brought up the issue, but lawyer Isaac Butt, 29, opposes O'Connell's efforts, and the Young Ireland Party has lost patience with O'Connell's tactics; it proclaims a great meeting to be held at Clontarf October 8 but O'Connell issues a counter-proclamation that calls off the meeting (see 1844).
India's Muslim emirs of Sind refuse to surrender their independence to the East India Company (see 1842); the British commander Sir Charles Napier provokes Anglo-Sind hostilities, he attacks a Baluch army February 17, and his 2,800 men defeat more than 20,000 Baluchs in the Battle of Miani, an engagement that sees generals fighting alongside private soldiers. The Battle of Hyderabad in March destroys the army of the Sind emirs; the humor magazine Punch says that Napier has sent home the one-word dispatch Peccari ("I have sinned," a pun that conveyed his boast, "I have Sind").
Maori natives kill New Zealand settlers in the Massacre of Wairau, antiforeign outbreaks in the north follow the massacre, and a 5-year Maori War begins over land rights (see 1841). Colonial administrator George Grey, 31, has served since 1840 as governor of South Australia, his advocacy of quick assimilation of the natives has impressed his superiors in the British Colonial Office at London, and they appoint him governor of New Zealand, where he establishes peace and begins a study of Maori culture (see home rule, 1852).
Britain makes Natal a British colony following repulsion of the Boers, who have allegedly exploited the natives and who in many cases move north across the Vaal River into Transvaal (see 1835; 1836).
Britain separates the Gambia from Sierra Leone and makes it a separate crown colony (see 1807).
Manuel Oribe lays siege to Montevideo following withdrawal of French forces that have supported Uruguay's president José Fructuoso Rivera (see 1842). The siege will continue for 8 years (see 1852).
Haitians oust their president Jean-Pierre Boyer, who flees to Jamaica after a 25-year regime in which his huge and thoroughly corrupt army and civil service have preyed on the rural population, the gap has grown between blacks in the countryside and mulattoes, and the economy has failed to revive. Boyer will settle at Paris, and of the 20 other rulers who will try to govern Haiti in the next 72 years 16 will be overthrown by revolution or assassinated (see Soulouque, 1847).
Former U.S. Navy commander Isaac Hull dies at Philadelphia February 13 at age 69, saying, "I strike my flag"; former U.S. Navy commander David Porter dies at Constantinople March 3 at age 63. He was named minister to the Ottoman Empire in 1839; former U.S. secretary of war John Armstrong dies at his Red Hook, New York, home April 1 at age 84, having lived in disgrace since the burning of Washington, D.C., by the British in 1814.
The U.S.S. Princeton commissioned at Philadelphia in September is the U.S. Navy's first steam-powered warship with a screw propeller (see Smith, 1836). Princeton, N.J.-born War of 1812 veteran Robert F. (Field) Stockton, 48, has been building ships for the navy, seen that paddle wheels could easily be damaged by enemy gunfire, equipped the Princeton with a six-bladed screw 14 feet (4.3 meters) in diameter, ordered three tubular boilers designed by Swedish-born New York mechanical engineer John Ericsson, 40, to give his 164-foot ship reliable steam power to supplement her sails, and wins a race October 20 against I. K. Brunel's 5-year-old steamer S.S. Great Western (see 1844; Royal Navy, 1845; Stockton, 1846).
Hawaiian independence gains recognition November 28 in a convention between Britain and France, who promise not to annex the Sandwich Islands. They have been ruled since 1825 by Kamehameha III (Kauikeaouli), now 30, who obtained U.S. recognition last year and seeks closer U.S. relations.
Former Boston schoolteacher Dorothea (Lynde) Dix, 41, reveals inhumane treatment of mental patients. She has seen disturbed people imprisoned with criminals and left unclothed, regardless of age or sex, in cold, dark, unsanitary facilities where they are chained to the walls in some cases and often flogged. Her detailed, documented report to the Massachusetts legislature encounters public apathy, but the legislators are moved to enlarge the Worcester insane asylum, and Dix will spend the next 40 years persuading lawmakers and foreign officials to build 32 new hospitals and restaff existing facilities with intelligent, well-trained personnel.
Some 1,000 Americans settle Columbia River Valley territory that Britain claims on the basis of explorations by Francis Drake in 1579 and explorations by James Cook in 1788. Many of the settlers have come west on the Oregon Trail in a wagon train led by missionary Marcus Whitman (see 1836; 1842; Portland, 1845).
Victoria, British Columbia, has its beginnings in the Hudson's Bay Company fur-trading post Fort Camosun; it will be renamed Fort Victoria and beginning in 1848 become the administrative center of the British Columbia colony.
Atlanta, Georgia, receives the name Marthasville after Martha Atlanta Thomson, daughter of Governor Wilson Lumpkin, 60, to replace the name Terminus used since 1837 to identify the termination point of J. E. Thomson's Western and Atlantic Railroad. Situated at 1,050 feet above sea level, the town will be renamed Atlanta in 1847.
Explorer-mathematician Joseph N. Nicollet dies at Washington, D.C., September 11 at age 57. His "Report Intended to Illustrate a Map of the Hydrographical Basin of the Upper Mississippi" is published by the government soon afterward.
The Guangzhou (Canton) tea and opium merchant Wu Ping-Chien known to Westerners as Houqua dies at age 74 (approximate), having invested in new technologies elsewhere in the world (including U.S. railroads) and made himself by some accounts the richest man in the world.
Shanghai opens to foreign trade November 17 under terms of last year's Treaty of Nanjing. A diplomatic treaty signed October 8 has determined the rights of British consuls and nationals on Chinese territory; opium trader William Jardine has died of a long and painful disease in England at age 57 (his partner, James Matheson will survive until 1878), but other merchants arriving at Shanghai receive 140 acres of muddy shoreland north of the walled city for use as the British Settlement, and laborers (coolies) go to work driving piles into the ground for foundations on which to build houses that will not be flooded at high tide. The merchants meanwhile live in tents on the northern banks of the Whangpu River and prepare to endure bitter cold winters and steaming summers.
Social agitator Feargus O'Connor, now 49, urges creation of a Chartist cooperative land association that will free Britain's working people from the tyranny of the factory and the Poor Law (see Plug Plot, 1842). Tried and convicted at York in 1840 for publishing seditious libels in his Northern Star, O'Connor was sentenced to 18 months' imprisonment, continued to edit the weekly from his prison cell, took control of the National Charter Association upon his release in August 1841, wrote vicious attacks against other Chartist leaders (William Lovett found him difficult to work with and left the party), but won acquittal on a technicality last year when tried for participating in the Plug Plot riots. O'Connor says that settling people on the land will take surplus labor off the market and force manufacturers to offer higher factory wages (see Land Plan, 1845).
English social reformer George J. (Jacob) Holyoake, 26, tells weavers at Rochdale, "Anybody can see that the little money you get is half-wasted, because you cannot spend it to advantage. The worst food comes to the poor, which their poverty makes them buy and their necessity makes them eat. Their stomachs are the waste-basket of the State. It is their lot to swallow all the adulterations on the market" (see cooperative society, 1844; Engels, 1845).
Internal combustion engine inventor and steamboat pioneer Samuel Morey dies at Fairlee, Vermont, April 17 at age 80, having obtained 20 patents.
The S.S. Great Britain launched July 19 by I. K. Brunel is the first of the large iron-hulled screw-propeller steamships that will dominate the transatlantic trade. Brunel had originally planned to use gigantic paddle wheels, but the steam hammer patented last year by James Nasmyth has enabled him to use a propeller powered by a drive shaft. His six-masted, single-screw, 3,270-ton vessel is 322 feet in length overall and carries a crew of 130 including 30 stewards; her dining room seats 360, she is the first propeller-driven ship (and first iron ship) to cross the Atlantic, and beginning in 1850 she will make 32 voyages in a 26-year career of carrying emigrants to Australia. She will serve as a cargo vessel from 1882 to 1883, and thereafter as a floating warehouse until she is scuttled in 1937.
John Pearsall lands some 300 stems of Cuban red bananas at New York and sells them at 25¢ per "finger" wholesale (see 1830). Now a New York commission merchant, Pearsall will go bankrupt within a few years when a shipment of 3,000 stems arrives in too ripe a state to be sold (see Baker, 1870).
The Howe Sewing Machine invented by Boston machine shop apprentice Elias Howe, Jr., 27, uses two threads to make a stitch that is interlocked by a shuttle. Howe is not familiar with Walter Hunt's machine of 1832 (see 1846).
Stanley's Bolt Manufactory is founded at New Britain, Connecticut, by Frederick Trent Stanley, who purchases a one-cylinder, high-pressure steam engine from a company that has gone out of business and uses it to manufacture bolts, T-hinges, and wrought-iron straps. After obtaining a patent for the first hinge with ball bearings, Stanley and his brother William will retire in the 1860s, one William Hart will take over the company, and his simple idea of packaging installation screws along with the firm's hinges will help make Stanley a leader in the tool and hardware industry (see Bailey plane, 1869).
Scottish physicist-engineer William John MacQuorn Rankine, 23, does basic work in metal fatigue that launches him on a major career.
Physicist James P. Joule publishes his value for the amount of work required to produce a unit of heat (see 1840). He has used four increasingly accurate methods of determining what will be called the mechanical equivalent of heat, and by using different materials he has established that heat is a form of energy regardless of what substance is heated (see Joule-Thomson effect, 1852).
German Egyptologist Karl R. (Richard) Lepsius, 32, leads a scientific expedition to Egypt and the Sudan with financial backing from Prussia's Friedrich Wilhelm IV. In the next 2 years he will find evidence of pyramids dating from about 3000 B.C., measure the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings for the first time, study 130 oblong burial structures (mastabas) dating to the Old Kingdom, and find (at Tell el Amarna, called Akhetaton in ancient times) the first evidence delineating the character of the religious reformer Ikhnaton (Amenhotep IV).
Boston physician Oliver Wendell Holmes of 1830 "Old Ironsides" fame publishes an indignant paper on the contagiousness of childbed (puerperal) fever. Now 33, Holmes has quit private practice to teach medicine at Harvard (see 1847; Semmelweiss, 1848).
Yellow fever sweeps the Mississippi Valley, killing 13,000.
Homeopathy founder Samuel Hahnemann dies at Paris July 2 at age 88.
Medical missionary David Livingstone, now 30, marries Mary Moffat, daughter of Scottish missionary Robert Moffat, 48, and will set out next year to discover the source of the Nile. Moffat has been in Africa since 1815 and has made Kuruman in Bechuanaland a center of Christianity, his book Labours and Scenes in South Africa was published last year, but Livingstone has found that most of his converts soon revert to polygamy (partly for economic reasons) and he is horrified by the continuing slave trade in Africa (see exploration, 1855).
Congress appropriates $30,000 to enable Samuel F. B. Morse to build an experimental electric telegraph line between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore (see 1837). A nativist who opposes immigration and "Jesuit plots," Morse obtains help from Ithaca, New York, miller Ezra Cornell, 36, and Rochester, New York, banker-businessman Hiram Sibley, also 36, and proceeds to construct the world's first long-distance telegraph line (see 1844).
A patent issued May 27 to London electric clock inventor Alexander Bain and a lieutenant in the Royal Navy covers an electrochemical method they have invented for uses that include printing information at different locations (see technology, 1840). Even the most skilled telegraphers can transmit messages at a rate of only a few words per minute, so Bain has built a device that transmits pictures or printed words by telegraph wire between Edinburgh and Glasgow, using a system of clocks that remain precisely synchronized. To send a picture, he makes a copy of it in copper, etches away everything but the lines he wants, and arranges for a metal stylus to swing across the image; each time the stylus touches copper it makes contact and sends a pulse along the wire, the stylus is attached to a clock pendulum, a stylus at the receiving end is attached to another pendulum, it translates blips in the current into black marks, and by running across a sheet of electro-sensitive paper it scans the image line by line until it has built up a reproduction of the picture that was transmitted (see 1862; Electric Telegraph Co., 1846).
The typewriter patented by East Brookfield, Massachusetts-born Worcester firearms manufacturer Charles Thurber, 40, is a hand-printing "chirographer" with a cylinder that moves horizontally and contains a device for letter spacing, but although it produces a clean, clear copy the machine is intolerably slow (see Sholes, 1867).
Journalist and freethinker Richard Carlile dies at London February 20 at age 52, having spent 9 years and 4 months in prison for such offenses as sedition and refusing to pay church rates.
L'Illustration begins weekly publication in March at Paris, where it will continue until 1943. Like the Illustrated London News that was started last year, it employs crudely reproduced photographs.
The democratic newspaper La Réforme begins publication August 26 at Paris.
The Economist begins publication at London September 2 under the aegis of economist James Wilson, 38, who campaigns for free trade, lamenting "that while wealth and capital have been rapidly increasing, while science and art have been working the most surprising miracles in aid of the human family . . . the great material interests of the higher and middle classes, and the physical condition of the labouring and industrial classes, are more and more marked by characters of uncertainty and insecurity."
London's (Sunday) News of the World begins publication October 1. It is the city's first 3d paper, and dealers initially refuse to carry such a low-priced journal, but circulation of John Browne Bell's weekly will reach 12,971 copies per week within a year and grow to 6 million per week as the News of the World becomes the world's highest circulation paper (see Carr family, 1891).
Bath-born London public records keeper Henry Cole, 35, sends out the world's first Christmas cards. He has commissioned his artist friend John Calcott Horsley, 26, to design a triptych with the message, "A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to You." Lithographed in dark sepia on stiff cardboard measuring 5 1/8 inches by 3¼ inches and hand colored, the card has a center panel showing a family celebration with everybody (including the children) drinking a toast, while the side panels show the poor being given food and clothing. An edition of 1,000 cards is put on sale at London (see Prang, 1875; Christmas trees, 1848).
Nonfiction: Either-Or (Euten-Eller) by Danish philosopher Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, 30, who repudiates the objective philosophy of the Absolute propounded by the late German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel and reaches instead a religion of acceptance and suffering based on faith, knowledge, thought, and reality that will be called "existentialism." Holding that religion is an individual matter, Kierkegaard denounces the theology and practice of the state Church; "The Proper Sphere of Government" (pamphlet) by English sociologist-philosopher Herbert Spencer, 23, is a collection of letters published last year in the Nonconformist arguing that governments do more harm than good when they exceed their role of upholding natural rights; History of the Conquest of Mexico by W. H. Prescott.
Lexicographer Noah Webster dies at New Haven, Connecticut, May 28 at age 84.
Fiction: The Prose Romances of Edgar A. Poe; "The Gold Bug" by Poe appears in the Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper; "The Pit and the Pendulum" by Poe appears in The Gift; "The Black Cat" by Poe appears in the August 19 Philadelphia United States Saturday Post; "The Birthmark" by Nathaniel Hawthorne is a cautionary tale of a philosopher-scientist who treats his wife with a powerful elixir to remove a mark on her cheek and "correct what Nature left imperfect." The treatment has fatal results; "Carmen" by French novelist Prosper Mérimée, 40, whose short story of a Spanish cigarette factory girl will be the basis of an 1875 opera; A Christmas Carol in Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas by Charles Dickens, whose Ebenezer Scrooge of Scrooge & Marley shares roast goose with his clerk, Bob Cratchit, and the whole Cratchit family: "God bless us, every one," says Tiny Tim (illustrations by John Leech).
Poetry: "The Song of the Shirt" by Thomas Hood appears in Punch, protesting against sweated labor.
Poet Robert Southey dies at Keswick March 21 at age 68, having been poet laureate since 1813; Friedrich Hölderlin dies at Tübingen, Germany, June 7 at age 73, having been insane for the most part since 1806 and living in a carpenter's home.
Painting: The Sun of Venice Going to Sea by J. M. W. Turner; The Two Sisters by Théodore Chassériau; Painter in His Studio by Ernest Meissonier.
Modern Painters by London-born art critic John Ruskin, 24, defends J. M. W. Turner as it meditates on landscape, art history, and commentary on recent exhibitions. A wine merchant's son, Ruskin has traveled widely with his father on the Continent and been privately tutored; mixing philosophy and esthetics, his book is marked by a Victorian moral imperative and establishes him as an influential critic. It is the first of a five-volume treatise whose final volume will appear in 1860.
John James Audubon travels up the Missouri River to Fort Union at the mouth of the Yellowstone River to sketch wild animals. Now 58, Audubon completed his bird paintings in 1839. Washington Allston dies at Cambridgeport, Mass., July 9 at age 63; Jonathan Trumbull at New York November 10 at age 87.
Scottish landscape painter David Octavius Hill, 41, enlists the help of chemist-photographer Robert Adamson, 22, to record the features of several hundred delegates to the founding convention of the Free Church of Scotland with a view to using them in a large commemorative painting. Adamson has been making calotype portraits for the past year, prominent Scots come to observe the proceedings and have their portraits made, Hill and Adamson will go on to photograph views of Edinburgh, and they will also work in small fishing villages before Adamson's premature death early in 1848 ends the partnership.
Barnum's American Museum opens at New York January 1 with exhibits and performances staged by showman P. T. Barnum (see Tom Thumb, 1842). He has taken over Scudder's Museum and changed its name (the word museum is used mostly to appease clergymen who oppose theatrical performances).
Opera: Der Fliegende Hollander (The Flying Dutchman) 1/2 at Dresden's Hoftheater, with music by Richard Wagner; Don Pasquale 1/4 at the Théâtre des Italiens, Paris, with music by Gaetano Donizetti; A Midsummer Night's Dream 10/14 at Potsdam's Neues Palais, with music by Felix Mendelssohn that includes a "Wedding March" that will be used in a British royal wedding in 1858 and remain popular for generations; The Bohemian Girl 11/27 at London's Drury Lane Theatre, with music by Dublin-born composer Michael (William) Balfe, 37, lyrics by Alfred Dunn, arias that include "I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls," "The Heart Bow'd Down," and "Then You'll Remember Me."
First performances: Das Paradies und die Peri by Robert Schumann 12/4 at Leipzig's Gewandhaus; Frédéric Chopin continues his 5-year-old liaison with George Sand, but he has tuberculosis of the larynx.
Boston piano maker Jonas Chickering obtains a patent for the first practical application of the one-piece solid casting for both grand and upright pianos (see 1823); in 1850 he will develop the first overstrung bass scale, and along with the one-piece iron frame it will become standard with all pianos (see 1853; Steinway, 1859).
Popular songs: "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean" ("Columbia the Land of the Brave") by U.S. songwriter Thomas à Becket; "Stop Dat Knockin' at My Door" by U.S. songwriter A. F. Winnemore; "The Old Granite State" with lyrics by Jesse Hutchinson to the revivalist hymn "The Old Church Yard" (The Hutchinson Family singers introduce the new song at a temperance meeting in New York's Broadway Temple).
"Star Spangled Banner" lyricist Francis Scott Key dies at Baltimore January 11 at age 63.
The Virginia Minstrels give the first full-scale minstrel show 2/6 at New York's Bowery Amphitheater and are the first of the "Negro Minstrel" troupes that will dominate U.S. musical entertainment for most of the century (see Rice's "Jim Crow," 1832). Directed by Ohio-born entertainer-songwriter Daniel Decatur Emmett, 28, the minstrels are gaudily costumed black-faced white performers who sit in a semicircle of chairs, exchange jokes based on the popular white imagination of Southern black folklore, and sing songs that include Emmett's "Old Dan Tucker." The minstrel show will be the one form of American entertainment with any direct relation to American life (see "Dixie," 1859).
The first known written reference to ice hockey appears in a novel (The Attaché, or Sam Slick in England) by Windsor, Nova Scotia, author Thomas Chandler Haliburton, who speaks of boys from the Kings Edgehill School "racin', yelpin', hollerin' and whoopin' like mad with pleasure, at the playground, with games at base in the fields or hurley on the long pond of ice" behind the school in 1800. Local lore will claim that MicMac tribesmen skated on bone blades as early as the 17th century and British colonial troops stationed at nearby Halifax picked up the game (see 1875).
Skiing for sport has its beginnings at Tromsø, Norway (see 1906).
Paris has 468 vespasiennes—open-air pay toilet stalls cleansed by running water (see 1568). Named for the Roman emperor who imposed a tax on public latrines, the toilets have been installed as part of a huge urban renewal program begun in the 1830s, and by the end of the century Paris will have 1,600 of them for men, 112 for women, and there will also be underground toilets where visitors will pay small fees to cleaner-guardians known as "Dame Pipi" (see 1980).
Cigarettes appear on a list of tobacco products controlled by a French government monopoly. It is the first known reference to the paper-wrapped miniature cigars that have been rolled in Cuba since the late 18th century (see 1856).
Paris police arrest detective Eugène François Vidocq once again on charges relating to a conviction that dates to his youth and confiscate his records (see 1832). Now 68, he is barred as an ex-convict from leaving the city, and although the chief prosecutor rescinds his arrest order his legal fees have cost him dearly; he closes his private detective agency after 11 years in business.
Scottish-born murderer Daniel M'Naughten (or McNaughten) goes on trial at London for the murder of Edward Drummond, private secretary to Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, whom he has killed by accident (he had intended to assassinate Peel). The House of Lords finds him not guilty by reason of insanity, laying down what will be enshrined in law as the M'Naghten Rules: a) every man is presumed sane until the contrary is proved; b) it must be clearly proved that at the time he committed a criminal act the accused was in a mental state that prevented him from knowing the nature of his act or that he was doing wrong.
A statue of the late Lord Nelson is hoisted atop a column erected in the center of London's new Trafalgar Square, completed 2 years ago in an urban redevelopment program that has cleared out some of the squalid courts and cheap cookshops that had given the area the name Porridge Island.
Scottish settlers in New Zealand strip millions of acres of forests to create sheep pastures. Deforestation for the country's burgeoning wool industry will lead to ruinous land erosion.
Landscape gardener John Claudius Loudon dies of a chronic lung infection at London December 14 at age 60. Having decreed that country mansions should be encircled by "the smoothness of green turf" (see lawn mower, 1830), he will be remembered as the father of modern gardening.
The Rothamsted Experimental Station established at his native Rothamsted, St. Albans, by English agriculturist John Bennet Lawes, 29, with Yorkshire-born chemist (Joseph) Henry Gilbert, 26, is the world's first organized station of its kind. Lawes received a patent last year on a process for treating phosphate rock to produce superphosphate fertilizer, set up a factory at Deptford Creek to manufacture it, and has pioneered the artificial fertilizer industry. The two men will continue their association for half a century, performing experiments on crop and animal nutrition.
The Chartist Cooperative Land Association advocated by Feargus O'Connor will, he says, encourage intensive "spade husbandry" that will double the soil's productivity.
The J. I. Case threshing machine is introduced by former Oswego County, New York, farmer Jerome Increase Case, 24, who last year came west with six of the best threshing machines that he could buy, sold five to prairie farmers, used the sixth to thresh wheat for farmers in Wisconsin Territory, learned from experience the deficiencies of existing machines, and used money earned while learning to develop a superior machine. Case will build a factory at Racine, Wisconsin, and develop a sales organization that will make J. I. Case the world's largest thresher producer and a major manufacturer of farm steam engines, tractors, and other farm equipment (see 1837; 1908).
The price of pepper drops to less than 3¢/lb. New Englanders have imported it from Sumatra since 1805 (see 1873).
Krug champagne has its beginnings in a vineyard established outside Reims by Mainz-born vintner Johann-Joseph Krug, who has worked for other champagne houses, developed special blending skills, and made champagne cuvées for others. Krug will remain a family business into the 21st century, maintaining a reputation for quality by continuing to age its champagnes for at least 6 years in small oak casks, selling fewer than 50,000 cases per year at most, and releasing only product made from grapes grown in vintage years.
Japan's capital city of Edo has a population of 1.8 million and is second in size only to London (see 1801), but the nation's total population of nearly 30 million is controlled by infanticide (the Japanese call it mabiki, using an agricultural term that means "thinning out"). Hundreds of thousands of second- and third-born sons are killed each year, but daughters are generally spared since they can be married off, sold as servants or prostitutes, or sent off to become geishas (professional entertainers).
1841 1842 1843 1844 1845 1846 1847 1848 1849 1850
Archaeology
Paul Émile Botta [b. Turin, Italy, 1805, d. Achères, France, 1879] excavates Assyrian sculptures from a mound near Khorsabad (Iraq), the site of an ancient Assyrian city. See also 1845 Archaeology.
Astronomy
John William Draper takes the first daguerreotype of the solar spectrum. See also 1840 Astronomy; 1849 Astronomy.
In October John Couch Adams [b. Laneast, England, June 5, 1819, d. Cambridge, England, January 21, 1892] calculates the position of what we now call the planet Neptune from irregularities in the orbit of Uranus. See also 1828 Astronomy; 1845 Astronomy.
Heinrich Schwabe discovers a 10-year (later corrected to 11-year) period in the number and activity of sunspots. See also 1825 Astronomy; 1852 Astronomy.
Communication
William Hallowes Miller develops new standard measures for England, replacing the ones destroyed in the fire of the Houses of Parliament in 1834. See also 1824 Communication.
Charles Thurber [b. East Brookfield, Massachusetts, January 2, 1803, d. Nashua, New Hampshire, November 7, 1886] of Worcester, Massachusetts, patents a form of typewriter in which the letters mounted on a wheel can be actuated by pressing directly on the letter. See also 1833 Communication; 1850 Communication.
Computers
Ada Lovelace's Notes relating her experience with Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine are published. See also 1826 Computers; 1853 Computers. (See biography.)
Construction
Marc Isambard Brunel builds the first tunnel under the Thames in London, which opens on March 25. It took 18 years to complete the tunnel, which collapsed several times. Only open to pedestrians, the tunnel is closed 20 years later, and reopened another 20 years later for trains of the London Underground system. See also 1811 Construction.
Energy
Joseph Fowle of Boston develops the first drill powered by compressed air to be used in building tunnels. Within ten years similar drills will be used in mining. See also 1858 Communication.
Materials
The steamship Great Britain, designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, is built largely from wrought iron produced by the puddling process. It is the first oceangoing iron steamer and the first to use a propeller. Despite the fact that it will lay on a beach unpainted for many years, it will still be in good condition in 1988 and the ship will be salvaged and restored as a tourist attraction early in the 21st century. See also 1784 Materials.
Mathematics
While walking with his wife along the Royal Canal, Sir William Rowan Hamilton suddenly realizes that he can create a mathematical system that is not commutative (one in which ab does not necessarily equal ba). He is so struck with the idea that he carves this into a pillar of a bridge. This insight leads to the development of quaternions, a mathematical system similar to vectors. See also 1844 Mathematics.
Joseph Liouville announces to the French Academy of Sciences on July 4 that he has found a remarkable proof among the papers of Evariste Galois, who died 11 years earlier in a duel. It is the foundation of group theory. See also 1833 Mathematics.
English mathematician Arthur Cayley [b. Richmond, England, August 16, 1821, d. Cambridge, England, January 26, 1895] introduces "geometry of n dimensions," using determinants. See also 1683 Mathematics; 1851 Mathematics.
Medicine & health
Author and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes [b. Cambridge, Massachusetts, August 29, 1809, d. Boston, October 7, 1894] advises doctors to prevent spreading puerperal fever (a common disease of mothers after childbirth at the time) by washing their hands and wearing clean clothes. See also 1847 Medicine & health.
Emil Heinrich du Bois-Reymond [b. Berlin, November 7, 1818, d. Berlin, December 26, 1896] demonstrates that electricity is used by the nervous system to communicate between different parts of the body. See also 1840 Medicine & health; 1861 Medicine & health.
Physics
Charles Wheatstone develops his Wheatstone bridge, a sensitive device for measuring electrical resistance, and the shunt for electric current, a device that enables a galvanometer to measure larger electrical currents by removing a definite amount of current from its path. See also 1840 Physics; 1878 Tools.
James Prescott Joule determines the mechanical equivalent of heat by measuring the rise in temperature produced in water by stirring it. See also 1840 Physics.
Tools
Lucien Vidie [b. Nantes, France, 1805, d. Paris, 1866] invents the aneroid barometer, which uses expansion and contraction of an evacuated metal tube to detect changes in air pressure. Unlike previous barometers, the aneroid type indicates atmospheric pressure using a dial and pointer. See also 1643 Tools.
Transportation
George Cayley designs the first aircraft designed to take off vertically, using four propellers, which would then swivel forward for level flight. This craft was never built. See also 1804 Transportation; 1853 Transportation.
The clipper ship is introduced by ship designers in the United States. This type of sailing ship is streamlined and designed for the fast transport of goods. See also 1785 Transportation.