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Prussia's Friedrich Wilhelm I dies at Potsdam May 31 at age 51 after a 27-year reign in which he has built up a standing army of 83,000—enormous for a country of 2.5 million. The complex and somewhat demented king is succeeded by his scholarly and Francophile 28-year-old son, whom he has considered effeminate and treated with uncomprehending contempt but who has married Elizabeth Christina of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel and will reign until 1786 as Friedrich (Frederick) II. The new king makes French the language of his court and establishes the knightly order Pour le Mérite, with a medal that will become known as the Blue Max; he sends an army to invade Silesia, precipitating a conflict with Austria that will continue for 15 of the next 23 years.
The Russian czarina Anna Ivanovna adopts her 8-week-old great-nephew October 5 and declares him her successor, making Count Biron regent for the infant czar Ivan VI (see 1730). She collapses at the table during one of her great banquets at St. Petersburg October 17 and dies at age 47 after a 10-year reign. Field Marshal Burkhard Christoph von Münnich, 57, enters the regent's bedroom at midnight November 19 and seizes the hated Biron, and a commission is appointed to try the regent (see 1741). The extravagant czarina has had the dining room of her winter palace at St. Petersburg lined with orange trees in bloom and offered her guests an endless array of delicacies.
The Holy Roman Emperor Karl VI dies at Vienna October 20 at age 55, the last of the Hapsburg line that began in 1516. His 23-year-old daughter Maria Theresa has recently become a mother and now becomes titular queen of Hungary and Bohemia as well as Austrian archduchess; she is crowned at Pressburg (Bratislava, which the Hungarians call Pozsny), disgruntled Hungarian noblemen take exception to crowning a woman as "king," and the king of Saxony, the elector of Bavaria, and Spain's Felipe V contest her right to succeed Karl. The War of the Austrian Succession will involve most of Europe's great powers in the next 8 years.
The Battle of Giria in Bengal April 9 ends with the defeat and death of the nabob Sarafraj Khan, who has reigned only 13 months. Alivardi Khan prevails and begins a reign as nabob that will continue until 1756 despite constant attacks by the Maratha and raids by Afghans.
Crucible steel is rediscovered by English clock and instrument maker Benjamin Huntsman, 36, at Doncaster, where he heats metal in small, enclosed earthenware cupolas that he calls crucibles, excludes air, and produces a superior steel; he will open a factory next year at Sheffield, and his crucible steel will make Sheffield steel as famous as was Damascus steel in antiquity, described by Aristotle in 334 B.C., used for centuries to make swordblades, employed in India, but lost over the ages (see Krupp, 1811; Sheffield plate, 1742).
Connecticut colony tinsmiths Edward and William Pattison at Berlin begin manufacturing tinware and selling it from house to house—the first colonial tin peddlers, or tinkers.
Swiss naturalist Abraham Trembley, 40, in Holland discovers the hydra, a freshwater polyp that combines both animal and plant characteristics. It can regenerate lost parts.
Elements of Astronomy (Eléments d'astronomique) and Astronomical Tables of the Sun, Moon, Planets, Fixed Stars, and Satellites of Jupiter and Saturn (Tables astronomiques du soleil, de la lune, des planètes, des étoiles fixes et des satellites de Jupiter et de Saturne) by Jacques Cassini includes the first tables of the orbital motions of Saturn's satellites. In his efforts to keep track of comets and eclipses, Cassini replaces the B.C./A.D. dating used by the Venerable Bede in 731 with a system of pluses and minuses, using 0 instead of 1 B.C. (2 B.C. becomes minus-1), but although he staunchly supports his late father's work in opposition to the gravitational theory of the late Sir Isaac Newton, Cassini is unable to reconcile his own observations with his father's theories.
Institutions de physique by French scholar Gabrielle-Emilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du Châtelet-Lomont, 34, displays the author's learning in mathematics and physics. As beautiful as she is learned, the marquise has been the mistress of Voltaire, now 46, since he came to live with her in a ménage à trois in 1734 and work at her husband's château of Cirey in Champagne. (The arrangement will continue for 16 years, until her death, and when she tries to break it off in order to devote herself to a new affair, Voltaire will forbid it, saying that it would be improper.)
Typhus epidemics take thousands of lives in the central German states and in Ireland.
Pope Clement XII dies at Rome February 6 at age 87 after a 10-year reign in which he has encouraged missionary work and forbidden Roman Catholics to belong to Masonic lodges on pain of excommunication. He is succeeded by the Bologna-born Prospero Lorenzo Cardinal Lambertini, 65, who will reign until 1758 as Benedict XIV.
Irish-born American Presbyterian clergyman Gilbert Tennent, 37, delivers what will be remembered as the "Nottingham Sermon" at his New Brunswick church in the New Jersey colony, blasting his opponents as hypocrites. Tennent's fiery exhortations to sinners to repent has led revivalist George Whitefield to call him "a son of thunder," but the sermon will lead next year to a schism in the Presbyterian Church. Tennent will move to Philadelphia in 1743, and he will tone down his language in an effort to mend the breach.
Bethlehem in the Pennsylvania colony is founded by followers of the German Pietist Nikolaus, graf von Zinzendorf, whose missionaries have failed in the Georgia colony and who will come to America himself next year (see 1735). He will establish theocratic communities also in the New York colony, but although John Wesley of the Methodist Church has been affiliated with the Moravians for the past 2 years, having met some of them aboard ship while en route to Georgia in the mid 1730s, the two churches now go their separate ways.
A network of post roads connects the American colonies from Charleston (Charlestown) to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Packet boats operate on regular schedules to link the major colonial ports (see Franklin, 1732).
Encyclopedist Ephraim Chambers dies at London May 15 at age 59 (approximate).
Fiction: Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded by English novelist Samuel Richardson, 51, who gains enormous popularity with his story in the form of correspondence of a servant who resists her master's seductions and winds up as his wife. Richardson's epistolary tale is by some estimations the first English novel (see Opera, 1760).
Poetry: The Ruins of Rome by John Dyer.
Painting: Captain Thomas Coram and Miss Mary Edwards by William Hogarth.
Theater: The Test (L'Epreuve) by Pierre de Marivaux 11/19 at the Théâtre Italien, Paris. Irish actress Margaret "Peg" Woffington, 20, makes her London debut at the Drury Lane Theatre in the role of Sylvia in the late George Farquhar's 1706 play The Recruiting Officer, winning every heart in the house with her lively beauty. She will remain at the Drury Lane until 1746, appear at Covent Garden until 1750, and then return to Dublin, where she will perform until 1754 (see 1756).
Oratorio: Elisabeth Duparc sings in a March performance at Covent Garden of G. F. Handel's 1732 work Esther.
Moravian Church members at Bethlehem in the Pennsylvania colony introduce the celebration of Christmas with such German customs as the visit from Saint Nicholas, or Santa Claus. In Puritan New England, Christmas remains a working day (see Cromwell, 1644).
Famine strikes Russia and France. French peasants are reduced to eating ferns and grassroots, but some survive by eating potatoes (see Parmentier, 1771).
The price of a four-pound loaf of bread rises to 20 sous at Paris, and 50 die in a prison riot protesting a cut in bread rations.
The unrestricted sale of gin and other cheap spirits reaches its peak in Britain. Some observers express fears that wholesale drunkenness is undermining the social fabric of the nation (see 1736; Hogarth, 1751).
The Royal Navy's rum ration is diluted with water on orders from Admiral Edward Vernon, nicknamed "Old Grog" because in foul weather he wears a cloak of grogram (later called grosgrain), a coarse fabric woven of silk and wool, stiffened with gum (see 1731). Grog will become a slang word for liquor, groggy for drunken dizziness.
Berlin in Frederick II's Prussia has a population of more than 220,000, up from 61,000 in 1712.
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