1752
1751 1752 1753 1754 1755 1756 1757 1758 1759 1760
Contents: political eventscommerce energy science medicine literature music everyday life architecture, real estate environment agriculture food and drink |
Lahore falls to Afghanistan's Ahmad Shah Durrani after a 4-month siege (see 1749; 1754).
The Mon king Binnya Dala of Pegu captures the Burmese capital of Ava in April, ending Burma's Toungoo dynasty, but a village headman who claims descent from a 15th century Burmese king organizes a resistance movement, establishes a new capital at Moksobomyo, and next year will recapture Ava. Aloung P'Houra, 42, leads his Burmese forces in an invasion of the Laotian kingdom of Luang Prabang, whose ruler has sided with Siam and the Mon king against Burma (see 1753; Siam, 1767; Laos, 1778).
The Sudanese sultan Abu al-Qasim of Darfur falls in battle while fighting Funj forces commanded by General Abu al-Kaylak.
The Logstown Treaty June 13 cedes Iroquois and Delaware lands south of the Ohio River to the Virginia colony and permits the 3-year-old Ohio Company to build a fort and to settle on lands west of the Alleghenies (see Treaty of Lancaster, 1744; French 1753).
James E. Oglethorpe and his fellow trustees surrender their charter, and Georgia becomes a royal province.
France's Louis XV orders that grain surpluses be stored as a reserve against famine, but government grain buying drives up bread prices. Thousands of Frenchmen are reduced to starvation and suspicions arise that Louis is making millions of francs in profit from grain speculations (see 1768).
George Washington inherits his brother's Mount Vernon plantation in the Virginia colony and works to improve its agricultural practices, building a grist mill to produce flour from his own wheat that will be shipped in barrels from his own cooperage. Now 20, Washington will build two more mills, and his "superfine flour" will go to markets as far distant as the West Indies as he becomes the largest flour producer in the colonies, giving him a large cash income that will enable him to buy good real estate and thus hedge against inflation as colonial currencies depreciate.
The Philadelphia Contributionship for the Insurance of Homes from Loss by Fire is founded by Benjamin Franklin and a group of his friends for mutual protection.
Public street lighting begins in Philadelphia. New York and Boston continue to light streets by placing a lamp in the window of every seventh house, but Philadelphia installs globe lamps imported from London.
Benjamin Franklin flies a kite during a thunderstorm at Philadelphia in June and demonstrates that lightning is an electrical phenomenon and not a "thunderbolt" sent by an angry God (see 1571). The kite has a wire conductor, a key dangles at the end of its wet twine string, and by standing in a doorway Franklin keeps a silk handkerchief insulator dry to avoid being electrocuted (see Aepinus, 1759).
Pope Benedict XIV appoints Maria Agnesi to fill the chair of mathematics at the University of Bologna but she declines, preferring to remain at Milan (see 1748; 1799).
Observations on the Diseases of the Army by British Army medical officer John Pringle, 45, will lead to some reforms and to rules of hygiene that will reduce the toll of typhus, identified by Pringle with "gaol fever" and "hospital fever." Recognizing the various forms of dysentery as one disease, Pringle recommends avoiding marshes, establishing adequate latrines, and providing proper ventilation. He suggests that wartime hospitals be given mutual protection by belligerents (see Red Cross, 1864) and will be credited with coining the term influenza.
The Manchester Royal Infirmary is founded.
Naturalist René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, now 69, proves that digestion is at least partially a chemical process (see 1712). He places food inside tiny perforated metal cylinders and feeds these to hawks; when he recovers the cylinders and finds that the food inside is partially digested he destroys the prevailing belief that the stomach digests food simply by grinding it physically (see Beaumont, 1822).
Nonfiction: Letters on the Study and Use of History and Reflections Concerning Innate Moral Principles by the late Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke.
Fiction: The Female Quixote, or The Adventures of Arabella by English novelist-poet Charlotte Ramsay Lennox, 32.
Poetry: "On the Prospects of Planting Arts and Learning In America" by philosopher George Berkeley, now 68, who lived in the Rhode Island colony from 1728 to 1731: "Westward the course of empire takes its way"; Poems by English poet Christopher Smart, 30.
Composer Johann Christoph Pepusch dies at London July 20 at age 85, having written seven operas and four ballad operas.
Britain and her colonies adopt the Gregorian calendar of 1582 (the difference between the Old Style Julian calendar of 46 B.C. and the Gregorian calendar has grown to 11 days). Thursday, September 14, follows Wednesday, September 2, by decree of Parliament, the change confuses bill collectors, rumors spread that salaried employees are losing 11 days' pay and that everybody is losing 11 days of his life, London landlords complain that they are being cheated out of rent money and cry, "Give us back our 11 days," and there are riots to protest the calendar change. The Parliamentary decree moves the first day of next year and all subsequent years from March 25 to January 1 (see Rome, 153 B.C.).
Construction begins at Caserta January 20 (36th birthday of the Bourbon kong Carlos VII of Naples) on an immense royal palace intended to rival Versailles. Carlos has engaged Neapolitan architect Luigi Vanvitelli, 51, to design the vast structure and its gardens (see 1773).
London's Mansion House is completed by architect George Dance, 52, after 13 years of construction.
A French royal château at Choisy is completed to designs by Jacques Ange Gabriel, 54, who succeeded his late father as first architect to Louis XV in 1742, designed enlargements to Fontainebleau in 1749, completed a château at Compiègne last year, and begins work on the Ecole Militaire at Paris.
Philadelphia's Liberty Bell for the belfry of the new Pennsylvania State House replaces a bell cast at London's Whitechapel Bell Foundry that has cracked soon after arrival. Cast by local foundrymen John Pass and John Stow of a bronze alloy (70 percent copper, 25 percent tin, and the other 5 percent a combination of other metals), the new 2,080-pound bell bears the same biblical inscription (from Leviticus 25:10) as the original. It cracks slightly while being tested, will crack again in July, 1835, and ring no more thereafter. The bell will be used next year to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Penn's Charter: "PROCLAIM LIBERTY THROUGHOUT ALL THE LAND UNTO ALL THE INHABITANTS THEREOF LEV. XXV VSX / BY ORDER OF THE ASSEMBLY OF THE PROVINCE OF PENNSYLVANIA FOR THE STATE HOUSE IN PHILADA."
Moscow has a fire that destroys some 18,000 houses.
The lightning rod (or lightning conductor) reinvented by Benjamin Franklin (similar rods were used in ancient times by Minoans and Egyptians) is a pointed iron conductor that will save countless houses and churches from being set afire in electrical storms. Franklin does not apply for a patent (see 1751; 1760).
The Gardener's Dictionary by Philip Miller, 61, expresses doubts about eating tomatoes. Miller is "Gardener to the Worshipful Company of Apothecaries at their Botanick Garden in Chelsea."
The first Irish whisky distillery is founded by distiller William Jameson.
1751 1752 1753 1754 1755 1756 1757 1758 1759 1760
