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The Portuguese prince Miguel leads an insurrection against his father, João VI, by appealing to absolutist forces; he nearly succeeds April 30 but the king's foreign ministers restore João to power and send Miguel into exile at Vienna in June.
France's Louis XVIII dies at Paris September 16 at age 68 after a 10-year reign that was interrupted for 100 days in 1815. The obese monarch has been suffering from diabetes and arthritis in the feet and spinal column that together have kept him confined to a wheelchair. His 66-year-old brother inherits the throne and will reign until 1830 as Charles X.
Greek forces at Mitylene nearly annihilate an Ottoman army in October as the Greeks mourn the loss of Lord Byron, who has died at Missolonghi in April (see 1823). He has provided financial backing to British naval officer Frank A. (Abney) Hastings, 30, and the London Greek Committee to purchase six steam-powered warships, but only one of them will be completed. Cashiered from the Royal Navy in 1820 for a breach of discipline, Hastings joined the Greeks in their rebellion (see 1827).
Ashanti tribesmen defeat a Fanti detachment January 21 at Essamako, outnumbering the Fanti 10,000 to 500 (see 1822). The Ashanti capture the British governor Sir Charles M'Carthy, cut off his head, and will use his skull as a royal drinking cup at Kumasi (Coomassie), but their king Osai Tutu Kwadwo (Quamina) is killed (see 1826).
Lesotho's king Moshoeshoe I allows tribes fleeing Zulu expansionism to settle on his high plateaus on condition that they help defend his realm (see 1838).
An Anglo-Burmese War begins February 24 as the British governor general of India William Pitt, 50, Lord Amherst, declares war on Burma, whose forces have captured the island of Shahpuri in violation of the East India Company's territorial rights (see 1795). Rangoon falls to the British May 11.
Former New South Wales governor Lachlan Macquarie travels from his Hebrides estate to London in quest of a pension he had been promised but suffers an acute inflammation of the kidneys, bladder, and urinary tract; he dies July 1 at age 63.
Hawaii's Kamehameha II and his wife die of measles July 14 on a visit to Britain (see 1819; 1825).
Dutch diplomats waive all claims to Singapore in a treaty signed in March (see 1823), Britain acquires Malacca from the Dutch August 3, and the sultan of Johor and the Temenggong waive their rights in return for cash payments and guaranteed pensions. Singapore's resident officer John Crawfurd obtains trading rights in Malaya, and Singapore becomes a British colony. Its population has grown since 1819 from 150 to nearly 10,000 (see Straits Settlements, 1826).
Siam's Chakkri king Phuttthaloetla Naphalai (Rama II) dies at Bangkok July 21 at age 56 after a 15-year reign in which relations with the West have been reopened. A gifted poet himself, he has encouraged the great poet Sunthon Phu. Rama II leaves a realm of nearly 200,000 square miles to his son Phra Nang Klao, 37, who will reign until 1851 and be remembered as Rama III (see 1827).
Brazil's Pedro I dismisses his prime minister José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva, whose liberal principles have brought him into opposition with the emperor's Portuguese advisers at the constituent assembly. Andrada is forced into exile in France but will return in 1829 and become tutor to the emperor's children until forced into retirement by political intrigue. A council of state appointed by Pedro drafts a constitution that provides for a strong centralized government and will remain substantially unchanged until 1889 (but see Acto Adicional of 1834). It refers to the emperor as the "mediative power" ("poder moderador") and empowers him to appoint members of the upper house of Parliament for life, convene and dissolve the lower house (whose members are elected by popular vote), and veto parliamentary acts, although his veto can be overridden if the Parliament reenacts the measures in three successive sessions. Pedro's mistress Domitila de Castro gives birth in May to her first child by the emperor, whose brother has tried to overthrow their father back in Portugal and who continues himself to sleep with his wife, Leopoldina, while flaunting his infidelities (see 1822). He will bestow titles and lands on Domitila and make her a lady-in-waiting to Leopoldina next year (see 1826).
Mexico's first president takes office in the person of former guerrilla leader Guadalupe Victoria (originally Manuel Félix Fernández), 38, who attended law school before dropping out to join the independence movement and becoming a lieutenant of General Santa Anna. A constitution establishes a federal republic with a centralized government in the Federal District at Mexico City. Former Mexican emperor Agostin de Iturbide returns from Europe and is apprehended July 15; unaware until now that congress has decreed his death, he is executed by a firing squad at Padilla July 19 at age 40. A colonization law put through at the persuasion of Haden Edwards, Stephen F. Austin, and others allows settlement of Mexico's Tejas province by Anglos; Edwards receives a grant in the Nacogdoches area with permission to bring in 800 families but agrees to honor prexisting grants and believes that Austin has received more desirable land (see Fisher, 1829).
The United Provinces of Central America adopts a constitution and become the Federated Republic of Central America (see 1823). Its president beginning next year will be Manuel Arce (see 1829).
South American liberation forces under Simón Bolívar and José de Sucre move into the Andean highlands of Charcas and defeat a Spanish force August 24 at the Battle of Junin (see 1822). The Battle of Ayacucho December 9 gives José de Sucre and his 5,800 men a triumph over 9,300 Spanish royalists. The 13,000 royalists who remain in Peru are forced to withdraw (see 1825).
Former Continental Army general Rufus Putnam dies at Marietta, Ohio, May 4 at age 86; Ohio land speculator Jonathan Dayton at his native Elizabeth, New Jersey, October 9 at age 63.
The U.S. presidential election in November ends with no candidate having a majority in the Electoral College, although John Calhoun is elected vice president (see Twelfth Amendment, 1804). Andrew Jackson receives 99 electoral votes, John Quincy Adams 81, William H. Crawford 41, Henry Clay 37 (see 1825).
Parliament strengthens its 1807 law against slave trading: it enacts new legislation stating that any British subject found to be trading slaves is guilty of "felony, piracy, and robbery, and should suffer death without benefit of clergy," but the trade continues nonetheless (see 1850).
Fanny Wright makes a second voyage to America, following in the wake of the marquis de Lafayette, and joins him on visits to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. She champions women's rights and free public schools in America (see 1821; 1825).
Reformer Robert Owen promotes abolition of slavery, women's liberation, and free progressive education (see 1814). He purchases New Harmony, Indiana, from the German Lutheran Rappite millenialists of the Harmonie Society, who founded it 10 years ago. Owen is starting communes in England, Ireland, Mexico, and the United States, all of them doomed to fail (see 1825); his New Harmony will be the first of many American communes.
Indiana settlers attack an Indian village and massacre two braves, three squaws, and four children. The settlers claim that "killing an Indian serves a better purpose than killing a deer," but the conscience of the white community is aroused, four of the killers are hanged, and tension grows between whites and Indians on the frontier.
The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) is founded at London (see 1866).
Jedediah Strong Smith of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company discovers South Pass through the Rocky Mountains into the Great Basin (see 1822). His party includes Irish-born frontiersman-fur trader Thomas Fitzpatrick, 25 (see 1826).
Virginia-born fur trader Charles Bent, 24, explores the Upper Arkansas River with his 15-year-old brother William and Ceran de Hault de Lassus de St. Vrain, 22, who will begin next year to engage in the overland trade with Santa Fe (see commerce, 1831).
Russian explorer Ferdinand Petrovich Wrangel, 27, completes a 5-year expedition in which he has mapped the northeastern coast of Siberia. Wrangel sailed around the world in his early 20s with Vasily M. Golovnin aboard the sloop Kamchatka, and a 2,800-square-mile island off the Siberian coast will be named after him even though he has not set foot on it and has relied on accounts of local natives to determine the location of what many believe to be part of the polar mainland (see De Long, 1879).
A tariff act adopted by Congress May 22 raises rates above their 1816 levels as a protective measure for America's infant industry (see 1828).
Russell & Company is founded at Guangzhou (Canton) by Middletown, Connecticut-born merchant Samuel (Wadsworth) Russell, 35, who has started his trading company with encouragement from John Perkins Cushing and will gain a dominant position in the China trade, bringing furs, Hawaiian sandalwood, Turkish opium, and silver into China and exchanging them for silks, porcelain, hand-woven cotton (British and U.S. gentlemen wear knee breeches of Chinese cotton), fireworks, licorice, and tea (see Perkins, Heard, 1830; Jardine, Matheson, 1832).
Rhode Island textile manufacturer William Sprague turns his original Cranston mill into a bleaching, dyeing, and printing works that he uses to produce calico fabrics called "indigo blues" (see 1821). His machines print in only two colors, but he will use wood blocks to add other colors by hand.
Women weavers at Pawtucket, Rhode Island, join with men May 29 in the first joint strike by U.S. men and women.
British workers gain the right to organize June 21 as Parliament repeals the Combination Acts of 1799 to 1800 at the urging of radical M.P. Joseph Hume, 47, who has been persuaded by reformer Francis Place, the contraception advocate (but see 1825).
Italian-born London stockbroker Moses Haim Montefiore, 40, retires with a fortune and will devote most of the next 60 years to philanthropic endeavors.
Political economist Tench Coxe dies at his native Philadelphia July 16 at age 69.
The landmark Supreme Court decision handed down March 2 in the case of Gibbons v. Ogden frees U.S. rivers from monopoly control. Steamboat operator Thomas Gibbons holds a monopoly originally granted by the New York State legislature to Robert Fulton and Robert Livingston. He has sued New Jersey steamboat operator Aaron Ogden, 68, who runs a ferry service between New York and Elizabethtown. Gibbons has retained Daniel Webster to plead his case. Chief Justice John Marshall rules that the monopoly granted by New York violates the interstate commerce clause in the Constitution, and the ruling opens U.S. waterways to all steamboats that can comply with regulations designed to keep boilers from exploding.
A Road Survey Act passed by Congress April 30 authorizes the 22-year-old Army Corps of Engineers to survey possible road and canal routes. The corps embarks on a career of building harbors, damming and channeling rivers, and generally developing waterways and other civil projects under terms of the River and Harbor Act signed by President Monroe May 24. The primary mission of the corps will be providing support for military operations, but it will play a significant role in developing U.S. waterways and highways, often at the expense of the environment.
Vermont's first covered bridge spans the Missisquoi River at Highgate Falls (see Philadelphia, 1805). Scores of such bridges throughout the state will follow the arch truss bridge at Highgate Falls.
Land grants to the Wabash and Erie Canal Company will total 826,300 acres in the next 10 years (work on the Wabash and Erie will start in 1832). Land grants to other private canal companies will total more than 4.2 million acres in the next 42 years (see Miami, 1827; Chesapeake and Ohio, 1828; Louisville and Portland, 1830; Cleveland to Portsmouth, 1832).
The portland cement patented by English bricklayer Joseph Aspdin, 45, of Leeds is impervious to water, as durable as the cement made from volcanic ash and calcium carbonate used for Roman aqueducts in ancient times, and actually gains in strength as it ages (see Vitruvius, 23 B.C.; transportation [White], 1820). Aspdin has mixed limestone with clay, heated the mixture to a high temperature in a kiln, then ground the burned and dessicated product into a fine powder to which he has added water, initiating a chemical process (hydration) in which the water bonds with compounds of calcium, silicon, aluminum, and iron. He calls it "portland cement" because its color reminds him of the limestone quarried on the Isle of Portland (see White, 1820; reinforced concrete, 1849).
British engineers devise a method for producing gas-transmission pipes by pressure butt-welding heated, curved strips of steel (see U.S., 1832).
Bristol, Connecticut, carpenter-turned-clockmaker Chauncey Jerome, 31, designs a bronze looking-glass clock and establishes a company that will soon have branches in Virginia and South Carolina as the clock gains wide popularity (see Seth Thomas, 1810). Employed by a Plymouth, Connecticut, clockmaker 8 years ago, Jerome later went into business for himself, peddling his wooden clocks from farmhouse to farmhouse (see 1838).
Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire (Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu) by Paris-born physicist (Nicolas Léonard) Sadi Carnot, 28, states a principle that will be expressed as the second law of thermodynamics by William Thomson (Lord Kelvin). It is a major advance in the understanding of how heat can be used to drive engines (see Clausius, 1850; Thomson, 1851). In some engines, says Carnot, a water-cooled condenser provides the cold element, while others vent their steam into the atmosphere. For the latter, the cooler element of the cycle is provided by the great volume of the atmosphere, and in the ideal "Carnot cycle" there is no heat loss through equipment, all of the heat being converted into motion. Heat used to produce motion can be regenerated by that same motion, making the cycle reversible.
Jöns Jakob Berzelius isolates silicon in amorphous form, purifying it through repeated washings. Second most abundant element in the Earth's crust, the metalloid occurs in clay, feldspar, granite, quartz, and sand, usually as silicon dioxide (silica) and silicates; it will be used in bricks, glass, ceramics, certain steels, and abrasives, and being less reactive than its chemical analog carbon will find wide use as a semiconductor in the latter half of the 20th century.
The Geological Society of London elects Cambridge geologist William Buckland, 40, of Corpus Christi College president and he announces that he has discovered fossil bones of a giant reptile at Stonefields (see Mantell, 1822) Buckland calls it Megalosaurus (great lizard) and writes the first full description of what later will be called a dinosaur (see Mantell, 1825).
U.S. missionaries in the Sandwich Islands gain support from Hawaii's high chiefess Kapiolani (see 1820). She hikes nearly 100 miles in December to the 4,000-foot peak of Mauna Loa on the big island (Hawaii), descends 500 feet into the Kilauea Volcano's crater, and—ignoring the pleas of her husband—defies the steaming, hissing lake of red-hot lava, saying, "I fear not Pele" (the pagan god still worshipped by most Hawaiians). (When she is found to have breast cancer in the 1840s, Kapiolani will undergo a mastectomy without anesthesia.)
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, founded at Troy, New York, is the first U.S. engineering and technical school.
The Cherokee scholar Sequoya perfects a Cherokee language alphabet with 85 letters borrowed from the Roman alphabet that bear no relation to their sounds in English but along with other letters represent all the vowel and consonant sounds in the Cherokee language. Now 54, Sequoya has taken the name George Guess from a U.S. trader whom he believes to be his father; his "talking leaf" will make his people the first literate Indian tribe and literacy will spread so rapidly that the Cherokee Phoenix will begin publication in 1828—the first Native American newspaper (see "Trail of Tears," 1838).
English inventor William Church improves on the double printing press devised 6 years ago by Friedrich Koenig and Andreas Bauer; he adds grippers to the cylinders, permitting them to pick up a sheet of paper, hold it, and then automatically release it, but the flatbed press remains slow and newspapers remain costly (see Hoe, 1829).
Nonfiction: Boxiana, or Sketches of ancient and modern pugilism; from the days of the renowned Broughton and Slack by Pierce Egan, now 52, who calls bare-knuckle boxing "the sweet science" and begins publication of the monthly journal Life in London.
Fiction: Quentin Durward, Peveril of the Peak, Redgauntlet, and St. Ronan's Wall by Sir Walter Scott, who says in Redgauntlet, "Honour is sometimes found among thieves"; Hobomok: A Tale of Early Times by Massachusetts writer Lydia Maria Francis, 22, depicts consensual marriage between a white woman and an Indian.
Poetry: Ode to Niagara Falls by José Maria Heredia.
Lord Byron dies of marsh fever at Missolonghi April 19 at age 36 while helping the Greeks in their fight for independence.
Painting: Scenes from the Massacres at Chios by Eugène Delacroix; Leandro Fernandez de Moratin by Francisco de Goya; Marquis de Lafayette by Thomas Sully; The Leper's House and The Lock by John Constable. Théodore Géricault dies at Paris January 26 at 32.
Opera: Spanish mezzo soprano Grace Vallemaria (Felicia) García, 17, makes her London debut 6/17 at the King's Theatre singing the role of Rosina in the 1816 Rossini opera Il Barbiere de Seviglia; voyages to America with her despotic father, Manuel García, and the family; opens the New York season 11/29 at the Park Theater singing the same role; but next year will marry Eugène Malibran, a French merchant, in order to free herself from her father's demands.
First performances: Mass in D major (Missa Solemnis) by Ludwig van Beethoven 3/26 at St. Petersburg; Symphony No. 9 in D minor (Choral) by Ludwig van Beethoven 5/7 at Vienna with Henrietta Sontag. Now 53, Beethoven includes the late Friedrich von Schiller's "Ode to Joy" but is so profoundly deaf that he must be turned around at the end to see that the audience is applauding.
Montreal's Gothic parish Church of Notre Dame is completed south of the Place d'Armes to replace a structure dating to 1672.
The Rappites at New Harmony, Indiana, have built prefabricated houses and barns of poplar and walnut timbers fitted by mortise-and-tenon joints and sided with wood or bricks.
Shakers build the first round barn at their Hancock, New York, community (see 1784). It has a silo at its center with stalls and stanchions radiating outward to save steps in feeding the livestock. In years to come the round barn will be widely adopted by Midwestern dairy farmers.
Work by the U.S. Corps of Engineers will help farmers and ranchers get their products to market.
The Rhode Island red hen is produced at Little Compton, Rhode Island, by a sea captain who has crossbred several domestic poultry breeds with an assortment of exotic fowl brought from the Orient. The Rhode Island red will be famous for its brown eggs, which New Englanders will prefer to white eggs that may not come from local hens and may therefore not be as fresh.
Britannia metal begins to replace pewter in U.S. tableware following work by Taunton, Massachusetts, goldsmith Isaac Babbitt, 25, who makes the first such metal in the United States (it has been known in Britain simply as "white metal"). A lead-free alloy of tin (80 to 90 percent), copper, and antimony, it is harder than pewter, better suited to stamping and spinning, and can be polished to a shiny whiteness not obtainable with pewter. Babbitt hires craftsmen who include Henry G. Reed and Charles E. Barton. They will take over when he runs into financial difficulties. The firm of Reed & Barton will begin making sterling silverware following discoveries of the precious metal out west in the 1870s. Production of Britannia metal will continue into the 1920s, and the privately-owned company will continue making flatware into the 21st century (see technology [Babbitt's metal], 1839).
The first commercial Italian pasta factory is started at Imperia on the Italian Riviera by Paolo B. Agnese, whose family will continue the business for more than 150 years.
Colby cheese has its beginnings in a Vermont factory started at Healdville by local dairyman Alfred Crowley, whose family will make the cheese for more than 170 years. A variation of cheddar, Colby is softer and more openly textured but less long-lasting than cheddar since it contains more moisture.
Cadbury's Chocolate has its beginnings in an English tea and coffee shop opened March 4 by Birmingham Quaker John Cadbury, 23, who has served an apprenticeship at Leeds and worked for bonded tea houses at London. Given a sum of money by his father and told to sink or swim, Cadbury starts his business next door to his father's draper's shop, will install Birmingham's first plate glass window, employ a Chinese person to preside over his tea counter, and experiment with grinding cocoa beans, using a mortar and pestle. By 1841 Cadbury's product list will include 15 kinds of drinking and eating chocolate and 10 forms of cocoa, including Grenada, Spanish, Broma, and Trinidad (see Cadbury Brothers, 1847).
The name Baker Chocolate Company is adopted by the 60-year-old Hannon Chocolate Company, now operated by Walter Baker, a grandson of James, who advertises his products as far west as Ohio and Indiana (see 1779).
The Royal Navy reduces its daily rum ration from half a pint to a quarter pint, and tea becomes part of the daily ration (see 1740; 1850).
The Glenlivet started by Scottish entrepreneur George Smith, 32, is the first licensed Scotch whisky distillery (see 1823). Smith's heretofore illicit distillery on his farm at Upper Drumin is in the Highlands' most notorious smuggling district; the duke of Gordon has encouraged him to apply for a distilling license, and although Smith is initially regarded as a blackleg and must go about fully armed lest he be murdered and although licensed distilleries established later in this decade will be burnt by smugglers, smuggling will fade by the mid-1830s and Smith will continue producing his malt whisky until his death in 1871 (see Coffee's still, 1830).
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