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Britain's prime minister Lord Liverpool suffers a paralytic stroke in February and resigns February 17 after nearly 15 years in office. Now 61, he is succeeded by George Canning, who forms a government in April, but Prime Minister Canning dies at the Chiswick home of the duke of Devonshire August 8 at age 56, and a new cabinet is formed under the chancellor of the exchequer Frederick John Robinson, 44, Viscount Goderich, who will serve until January of next year.
The Algerian dey (governor) Hussein angrily strikes the French consul in April; the French begin a blockade of the Ottoman regency, whose dey is selected by the Janissaries who help him run the government (see 1830).
Irish-born Philhellenic British soldier Sir Richard Church, 42, goes to Greece in March to help in the fight for independence (see 1825); Greek rebels appoint him commander in chief of their forces in April and elect Ioánnis Kapodistrías provisional president, Kapodistrías resigns from the Russian foreign service to tour the Continent in quest of financial and diplomatic support, but Ottoman forces enter Athens June 5 and force the defenders on the Acropolis to capitulate. The Treaty of London July 6 allies Britain, France, and Russia in a pledge to support the Greeks against the Turks if the Ottoman sultan Mahmud II will not accept an armistice in the conflict that has been going on since 1821. Mahmud rejects the allied demands for a truce August 16, and a large Egyptian fleet with transports lands at Navarino September 8, but the Greek ship Karteria under the command of former Royal Navy officer Frank A. Hastings sinks seven Turkish ships in the Bay of Salona off the Gulf of Corinth, using four 68-pound guns that fire red-hot shells using a method devised by Hastings. British, French, and Russian squadrons destroy most of the Egyptian and Turkish fleet October 20 in the Battle of Navarino near Pylos (see 1828).
A Russian army defeats the Persians October 1 and acquires the entire plain of Erivan on the northern Armenian plateau (see 1826; 1828).
Pennsylvania-born soldier of fortune Josiah Harlan, 28, arrives at Kabul with a mob of Afghans, Muslims, Hindus, and Akali Sikhs. Having come to Asia 5 years ago and joined the East India Company as a surgeon despite his lack of any medical training, Harlan has approached the deposed Afghan king Shah Shujah al-Moolk at the border town of Ludhiana and offered to lead a rebellion against the usurper Dost Mohammed (see 1826). Shah Shujah has readily agreed, but Harlan finds Dost Mohammed an engaging conversationalist, the khan offers him the governorship of Gujurat, and Harlan will remain in the region for 15 years, putting aside his Quaker religion as he engages in endless intrigue (see Fiction, 1888).
Former Indian Colonial Service officer Lord William Bentinck wins appointment as governor general of India and governor of Bengal, having rejected reappointment to his old post as governor of Madras in 1819 (see 1806). Now 52, he has orders to straighten out the finances of the country, whose government operates at a deficit of some £1.5 million; Lord Bentinck will arrive in India next year and soon turn the deficit into a surplus of about £1.5 million as he sets about instituting social as well as administrative reforms in an administration that will continue until 1835 (see human rights, 1829).
The young Laotian king Anouvong (Chao Anou) of Vientiane leads three armies against the Siamese capital Bangkok (see 1826). He has been under the misapprehension that the British were also about to attack Siam, but they have no such intentions. The Siamese retaliate against Vien Chan; they raze and plunder Vientiane, taking thousands of prisoners back to central Siam; and Anouvong takes refuge in Vietnam (see 1828).
Peru secedes from Simón Bolívar's Gran Colombia January 26 and declares her independence, charging Bolívar with tyranny. The United States extended diplomatic recognition to Peru 9 months ago.
The Battle of Ituzaingó February 20 gives the Brazilian forces of Pedro I a victory over Argentine and Uruguayan troops (see 1825). But the war ends in a stalemate as British diplomats negotiate a settlement (see 1828).
Former U.S. senator (and three-time Federalist Party presidential candidate) Rufus King dies at Jamaica, New York, April 29 at age 72, having favored an orderly emancipation of slaves, with the proceeds of public-land sales being used to compensate slaveholders. He declined to run again in 1825, was appointed (for a second time) U.S. ambassador to Britain, but returned in June of that year and retired.
New York State abolishes slavery July 4. The Hudson River Valley at one time had more slaves per capita than North Carolina, and slaves have accounted for as much as 20 percent of the population in parts of Brooklyn, where they have been used to produce corn, squash, beans, and tobacco.
Ottawa has its beginnings in the Bytown settlement founded at Chaudière Falls on Canada's Ottawa River (see 1800; 1867).
The city of Guelph is founded by novelist John Galt in Upper Canada (later Ontario). Galt came to Canada last year on a commercial venture and has opened a road through the forest between Lake Erie and Lake Huron.
Colonel Henry Leavenworth, U.S. Army, leaves St. Louis in April and sails up the Missouri River with orders to build a fort on the east bank of that river, where the Lewis & Clark expedition camped in early July 1802 en route to the Pacific. He finds the east bank to be a flood plain and erects a stockade on the west bank, in what is officially "Indian territory," where Fort Leavenworth will serve as the main base for exploring the Great Salt Lake and the Columbia River.
Jedediah Strong Smith blazes the first trail from southern California north to Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River but loses most of his men to Indian attackers (see 1826; 1830).
The Cocos (Keeling) Islands in the eastern Indian Ocean are settled by Scottish colonist John Clunies-Ross and his family, who begin developing the islands' coconut groves. The islands will become a British possession in 1857, but a royal grant to George Clunies-Ross will recognize the family's control in 1886, George's son Sidney will discover large phosphate of lime deposits in the mid-1890s, and although the family will sell its mining interests in 1948 it will maintain its control until late 1972, when the Australian government will take over.
Scottish explorer Hugh Clapperton proceeds through what later will be northern Nigeria on a second expedition to find the source of the Niger River but dies of dysentery near Sokoto in April at age 28, leaving his 23-year-old Cornish assistant Richard L. (Lemon) Lander to carry on. Lander continues southeast to Kano and returns to the coast through Yoruba tribal lands (see 1830).
Russian explorer Ferdinand P. Wrangel completes a second circumnavigation of the world (see 1824). Now 28, he has led a 2½-year expedition in the sloop Krotky.
French engineer Benoit Fourneyron, 25, devises the world's first waterwheel turbine. More powerful than a waterwheel alone, it differs from a waterwheel in that the water flows under pressure from the hub toward the rim. More than 100 of Fourneyron's turbines will be built after he demonstrates an experimental 50-horsepower unit, but lack of adequate materials and technology will stymie his efforts to develop a steam turbine (see Parsons, 1884).
The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad has its beginnings in a charter granted February 27 to Baltimore bankers George Brown, 40, and Philip Evan Thomas to build a 380-mile railway to the west that will compete with the 2-year-old Erie Canal, which is diverting traffic from the port of Baltimore (see Quincy, Mass., granite quarry railroad, 1826). The first railway to be chartered and built in America, it is to be used for cars that can be drawn by horses or propelled by sails (see 1828).
The Mauch Chunk gravity railroad goes into service near Carbondale, Pennsylvania, in May with nine miles of track.
London's Hammersmith Bridge opens to traffic—the world's first suspension bridge of stone and metal. It will be replaced by a new span in 1887.
English draper George Hudson, 27, inherits £30,000 and invests it in shares of the North Midland Railway. He will help obtain passage of a parliamentary act to raise money for construction of the York and North Midland Railway, become chairman of the railroad and lord mayor York, bring the railroad to York in 1839, and make the city a rail hub. By 1844 the "railway king" will control more than 1,000 miles of railway, and he will win election to Parliament in 1845 (but see 1850).
Cincinnati gains new commercial importance with the completion of the Miami Canal (see exploration, 1790). By 1830 the city will have a population of 25,000, and the "Queen City of the West" will be second only to New Orleans.
Benjamin Wright resigns as chief engineer of the Delaware & Hudson Canal, and his assistant John B. Jervis takes over at a salary of $4,000 per year (see 1825). The western terminus of the new canal in Pennsylvania is given the name Honesdale in honor of investor Philip Hone, who has acquired interests in the coal fields of the region and been the chief proponent of the canal, but the 16-mile railroad needed to bring coal from Carbondale to Honesdale presents a problem: no such railroad has ever been built in America, and Jervis has to draw up specifications for all its components, including inclined planes and stationary engines for the steep ascents and a system of rotating sails to slow the trains down on their descent (see 1830).
Merchant-philanthropist Thomas Eddy dies at New York September 16 at age 69, having played a major role in developing the Erie Canal.
The 11-mile Terneuzen-Ghent Canal opens to give the city of Ghent shipping access to the Dutch town of Terneuzen on the Scheldt Estuary.
The screw propeller for ships is invented by Austrian engineer Joseph Ressel, 34. Scottish engineer Robert Wilson, 24, makes the same invention independently (see 1832).
A sailing ship crosses from New Orleans to Liverpool in the record time of 26 days.
New York's first public transit facility begins operations. Entrepreneur Abraham Bower runs a 12-seat horse-drawn bus (he calls it an "accommodation"), but the city's population of 200,000 depends chiefly on private carts and carriages for transportation (see 1832).
Sandwich glass is introduced at Sandwich, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod by Deming Jarves, now 36, who has improved on a crude pressing machine patented late last year by Enoch Robinson and Henry Whitney of the Boston Crown Glass Company (see 1817; Bakewell's machine, 1825). Jarves has severed connections with Boston Crown Glass and started the Boston and Sandwich Glass Company, which has a monopoly on glass compounded with red lead. It decorates its products with intricate, lacy patterns that cannot be achieved by cutting or engraving. Jarves will leave the company in 1858 to establish the Cape Cod Glass Company nearby, he will take his son John into the business and try to break the Sandwich company by introducing a competitive wage scale, but the Sandwich company will continue production until 1888.
German chemist Friedrich Wöhler, 27, isolates metallic aluminum from clay (see 1855; Davy, 1807; Hall, 1886).
Physicist Georg Simon Ohm formulates the law that current flowing through an electrical conductor is proportional to the voltage across it and inversely proportional to its resistance (I = E/R; Ohm, 1825). This will be called Ohm's Law, and the practical unit of electrical resistance will be called the ohm to honor Ohm's discovery of the relationship between the strength (or intensity) of an unvarying electrical current (the electromotive force) and the resistance of a circuit (see Ampère, 1820). Ohm's pamphlet The Galvanic Circuit Investigated Mathematically (Die galvanische Kette, mathematisch bearbeitel) summarizes his findings but meets with such a negative response that he resigns his position as professor at the Jesuits' College at Cologne and in 1833 will become professor at Nuremberg's Polytechnic School.
Albany, New York-born physicist Joseph Henry, 29, builds an electromagnet that can lift 14 pounds and then uses a second layer of insulated wire overlapping the first layer to build an electromagnet that can lift 28 pounds. Henry will build an electromagnet for Yale's Benjamin Silliman that can lift 2,880 pounds (see 1831; Sturgeon, 1823; Faraday, 1821; communications [telegraphy], 1831).
Mathematician-astronomer Pierre Simon, marquis de Laplace, dies at Paris March 5 at age 77, having appropriated many of the ideas of his rival Adrien-Marie Legendre, now 74, with little acknowledgement; physicist Alessandro Volta dies at his native Como, outside Milan, March 5 at age 82; physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel of tuberculosis at Ville-d'Avry outside Paris July 14 at age 39.
Bright's disease gets its name from a description by London physician Richard Bright, 38, of Guy's Hospital in the first diagnosis of a kidney disease by the presence of albumin in the urine. The condition is also characterized by an elevated blood pressure and will be found to include a number of separate diseases, including acute and chronic nephritis.
Edinburgh surgeon Robert Knox pays £7 10s November 29 for a corpse to use at his school of anatomy. An elderly pensioner has died at a local lodging house, Tanner's Close, and the Irish-born keeper of the house, one William Hare, has conspired with newly-arrived, Irish-born drifter William Burke, 35, to sell the man's body rather than bury it, a violation of the law. Their success launches the two men on a new career, and in the next 11 months they will entice more than a dozen people into the lodging house, get them drunk, smother them to death, and sell the corpses for medical education (see 1828).
English astronomer Frederick William Herschel, 35, invents contact lenses (his father discovered the planet Uranus in 1781) (see 1888; photography, 1840).
Disciples of Christ is founded by Irish-born evangelist Alexander Campbell, 39, who believes in the imminent Second Coming. He practices baptism by immersion and crusades against the evils of drink.
The Cantonist Edict issued September 7 by Russia's Nicholas I conscripts all male Jews aged 12 to 18. Youths of 18 and older have been subject to conscription for 25-year enlistments since the 17th century, but the intent of what will be called the Cantonist Decrees is to encourage Jews to renounce their faith. Eldest sons are exempt; many Jewish boys will be adopted by families without sons and given new names to keep them from being conscripted and forced to renounce their religion.
Educational reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi dies at Brugg February 17 at age 81, having pioneered teaching methods designed to strengthen a student's innate abilities.
The University of Toronto has its beginnings in a charter granted March 15 by Britain's George IV for the establishment of King's College in Ontario.
The first free school for infants opens at New York under the direction of Joanne Bethune, now 57, to relieve working-class parents from some of the burdens of child care. Bethune is a disciple of the late Swiss educator Johann Pestalozzi, and her school is open to children of 18 months to 5 years of age (it is soon followed by eight other such schools).
The Freeman's Journal that begins publication March 16 at 5 Varick Street, New York, is the first U.S. black newspaper. The city's white press largely favors slavery, which is abolished in the state July 4, but the new black paper denounces slavery and urges free blacks to seek education and practice thrift. It has been started by Delaware-born clergyman Samuel E. (Eli) Cornish, 31, who has founded the first U.S. black Presbyterian church, and Jamaica-born Bowdoin College graduate John B. (Brown) Russworm, 26, who writes, "We wish to plead our own case. Too long have others spoken for us. Too long has the public been deceived by misrepresentations in things which concern us deeply." Russwurm will move to Liberia and publish the Liberia Herald at Monrovia (see Liberia, 1822; 1842).
The Evening Standard has its beginnings in the Standard published at London May 21 (see Beaverbrook, 1916).
The Journal of Commerce begins publication September 1 at New York. The semi-religious publication has been started by silk and textile merchant Arthur Tappan, 40, and portrait artist Samuel F. B. Morse (see telegraph, 1832). Tappan's brother Lewis will go into partnership with him next year as a silk jobber, take over Arthur's interest in the new paper, and sell it in 1831 to David Hale and Gerard Hallock.
The Youth's Companion begins publication at Boston under the direction of Nathaniel Parker Willis, 21. The magazine will continue until 1929.
The Dixon Ticonderoga pencil has its beginnings in a firm founded by Marblehead, Massachusetts, entrepreneur Joseph Dixon to produce graphite crucibles used to melt metal in manufacturing processes. What later will be the Joseph Dixon Crucible Company produces "lead" pencils as a sideline (see Osgood, 1814), but merchants consider them inferior to imported European pencils. Dixon's pencils will not have any commercial success, and his company will not produce satisfactory pencils until the 1870s, but by the turn of the century it will be supplying as many as one third of all the pencils used in America (see Eberhard Faber, 1861; Dixon Ticonderoga, 1913).
Fiction: The Prairie by James Fenimore Cooper; The O'Briens and the O'Flahertys by Sydney Morgan.
Poetry: Buch der Lieder by Heinrich Heine contains poems that will serve as lyrics for numerous composers. Heine will be famous for such lines as "The Romans would never have found time to conquer the world if they had been obliged first to learn Latin"; The Shepherd's Calendar; with Village Stories, and Other Poems by John Clare.
Poet-artist William Blake dies at London August 12 at age 69.
Painting: Death of Sardanapalus by Eugène Delacroix; The Milkmaid of Bordeaux and Don Juan Bautista de Muguiro by Francisco de Goya; Chain Pier, Brighton by John Constable. Charles Willson Peale dies at Philadelphia February 22 at age 85; painter-caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson at London August 22 at 70.
Theater: Cromwell by French novelist-poet-playwright Victor Marie Hugo, 25, who was granted a royal annuity 5 years ago for his Odes et poesies diverses and married Adèle Foucher; Marriage for Money (Le mariage d'argent) by Eugène Scribe 12/3 at the Théâtre Française, Paris.
First performance: Overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream by German composer (Jakob Ludwig) Felix Mendelssohn (-Bartholdy), 18, 2/17 at Stettin.
Ludwig van Beethoven dies at Vienna March 26 at age 56 of what later will be diagnosed as lead poisoning. He has been virtually stone deaf for the past 9 years.
New Orleans has its first Mardi Gras celebration in February. Students from Paris introduce the Shrove Tuesday event.
The "congreve" invented by English chemist (pharmacist) John Walker, 28, of Stockton-on-Tees is the first friction match and will be widely used to light kitchen fires and stoves. Later to be called the "lucifer," its head is made of potash, sugar, and gum arabic, and it must be drawn swiftly through a piece of folded sandpaper to ignite (see 1836).
Brigade de la Sureté founder Eugène François Vidocq resigns rather than hunt down alleged conspirators against the paranoiac king Charles X (see 1809). Vidocq was pardoned by the late Louis XVII 10 years ago and has pioneered in efficient criminal prosecution, compiling massive dossiers on felons with records of their aliases, modus operandi, and such. Now 52, he joins with his mother and mistress in starting a paper and cardboard factory outside Paris, employing ex-convicts; the venture will fail in 1830, and Vidocq will return as chief of the fledgling police detective department (but see 1832).
The Paris Exchange is completed in the style of Rome's Temple of Vespasian after 19 years of construction.
Munich's Allerheiligen (Hofkirche) is completed to neo-Byzantine designs by architect Leo von Klenze, 43.
Britain's George IV establishes a uniform standard for an acre of land, setting the measurement for an imperial (or statute) acre at 43,560 square feet (1/640th of a square mile). The standard is to apply throughout the United Kingdom, but parts of Scotland and Ireland will continue to use somewhat different measures. Most of Europe will measure land in hectares (1 hectare = 2.47 acres).
The John Morrell meat-packing firm has its beginnings at Bradford, Yorkshire, where local woolcomber George Morrell sees a bargeload of oranges in the local canal, buys the fruit with an £80 bequest left to his wife by an uncle, and sells the oranges at a profit in the streets of Bradford. Morrell starts a business in produce, butter, eggs, cheese, bacon, and hams (see 1842).
Buitoni macaroni has its beginnings in the Italian hill town of San Sepolcro, where Gutilia Buitoni opens a pasta factory. She pawned her gold jewelry a few years ago, rented a roadside stand for one lira per month, sold her homemade pasta, and started a family business to help provide for her many children. Her barber husband, Giovanbattista, helped out, but she was soon well aware that the pasta which she made from soft-grain wheat was inferior to what she could make with semolina flour from durum wheat (semolina di grano duro). Gutilia organized a 40-mule caravan to bring back such wheat from Abruzzi in the south (see 1842).
Ballantine's Scotch is introduced by a distillery started at Dumbarton by Scotsman George Ballantine.
The coffee percolator invented by a Frenchman permits the brewing water to pass continually over the coffee grounds. It will continue to be used long after the invention of drip methods that produce far superior brews (see Melitta Betz, 1908).
Delmonico's Restaurant has its beginnings in a café and pastry shop opened in lower Manhattan by Swiss wine merchant Giovanni Del-Monico and his older brother Pietro, who has run a pastry shop at Bern. Giovanni, who came to America aboard a trading ship from the West Indies, opened a small wine shop near the Battery 2 years ago, buying by the cask and selling by the bottle. Patrons of the new shop purchase cakes, ices, and wine, which they either take home or consume on the premises, sitting at plain pine tables where they are impressed by the clean aprons and good manners of the brothers Del-Monico (see 1832).
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