1851 1852 1853 1854 1855 1856 1857 1858 1859 1860
Political unrest in Europe over Turkish occupation of holy places in Palestine brings Russia, France, and Britain to the brink of war. Czar Nicholas I allegedly calls Turkey the "sick man of Europe," suggesting to the British ambassador Sir Hamilton Seymour in January that it is time for Britain and Russia to reach an accord on dividing up the Ottoman Empire (see 1849). "We have on our hands a sick man, a very sick man. It will be a great misfortune, I tell you frankly, if, one of these days, he should happen to die before the necessary arrangements can be made." Sir Hamilton replies that the patient may recover; what he requires may be a physician, not a surgeon. Russia's foreign minister Karl Robert Vasilyevich, Graf Nesselrode, now 72, tries to prolong negotiations in an effort to avert war, but the indecision of Britain's prime minister George Hamilton-Gordon, Viscount Gordon of Aberdeen, over conflicts of interest in the Middle East hampers peacekeeping efforts by his foreign secretary George Villiers, 4th earl of Clarendon, now 52 (see 1854).
The French emperor Napoleon III is married at Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris, January 30 to the Spanish beauty Eugénie, 26, second daughter of Don Cipriano, count of Teba, whose wife is of Scottish descent). Now 44, Napoleon has failed to win the hand of a Vasa or Hohenzollern.
Portugal's Maria II (Maria de Gloria) dies November 15 at age 34 after a 27-year reign marked by insurrections in 1846 and 1851 and interrupted by a 5-year civil war during which the queen lived in England. Her son Pedro de Alcantara, now 16, will assume power in 1855 after a 3-year regency by his father and reign as Pedro V until his death in 1861.
Prussia's reactionary former chief minister Joseph von Radowitz dies at Berlin December 25 at age 56.
Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry, 59, U.S. Navy, arrives in Edo Bay July 8 with more than 1,000 men aboard seven black ships, including the steam frigates Mississippi and Susquehanna (see Biddle, 1846). Dispatched in November by President Fillmore with a request for a trade agreement, the Newport, Rhode Island-born commodore demands the treaty "as a matter of right, and not . . . as a favor"; he departs July 16, leaving word that he will return in the spring for a favorable reply. Japan has isolated herself from the world for 2 centuries; many people recognize that the policy has put the country at a disadvantage (vaccination for smallpox was introduced only 4 years ago); but while they are receptive to opening up to the world, others oppose any change. Japan's shōgun Ieyoshi Tokugawa dies July 23 at age 61 after a 16-year reign; he is succeeded by his 29-year-old brother Iesada, who is in delicate health, will live only until 1858, but will open two ports to trade next year in order to end a civil war precipitated by the demands of Commodore Perry (see 1854).
A Russian fleet arrives at Nagasaki August 8 aiming to open trade relations and resolve boundaries in the Kuriles and Sakhalin.
Burma's king Pagan dies after a 7-year reign and is succeeded by his 39-year-old brother Mindon, who will reign until 1878. The new king immediately sues for peace in the Second Anglo-Burmese War, Britain annexes Pegu, and Mindon is obliged to accept a much-reduced realm, but although cut off from some of Burma's richest teak and rice-growing regions he embarks on an enlightened reign in which he will build Mandalay and make it the Burmese capital in 1857.
"The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked," writes Karl Marx July 22 in the New York Tribune. "Did they not, in India, to borrow an expression from that great robber, Lord Clive himself, resort to atrocious extortion, when simple corruption could not keep pace with their rapacity? While they prated in Europe about the inviolable sanctity of the national debt, did they not confiscate in India the dividends of the rajahs, who had invested their savings in the Company's own funds?" Gen. Sir Charles J. Napier dies at Portsmouth August 29 at age 71; he left India in February 1851 after a quarrel with Lord Dalhousie.
Nanjing (Nanking) falls to Chinese insurgent forces as they move northward to the Yangzi (Yangtse) River basin in the continuing Taiping Rebellion (see 1851). Confucian scholar Zeng Guofan (Tseng Kuo-fan), 41, has joined the local defense force early in the year in his native Hunan Province and will assume growing responsibility in opposing the rebels. Manchu troops sent by the emperor Xianfeng (Hsien-feng) prove corrupt and ineffective, Shanghai falls September 7, and the rebels prepare to march on Beijing (Peking). Bandits in Anhuei, North Jiangsu (Kiangsu), and Shandong (Shantung) provinces organize the peasantry of northern China and begin a 15-year Nian Rebellion, plundering villages as imperial troops withdraw to cope with the Taiping rebels; the emperor relies increasingly on volunteer militias (see 1860).
President Pierce and his vice president William Rufus de Vane King take their oaths of office March 4, but King then returns to his plantation near Cahaba, Alabama, and dies there of tuberculosis April 18 at age 67. Pierce appoints Mexican War hero Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, now 44, his secretary of war in a move to conciliate the South.
Argentina's Buenos Aires Province secedes under the leadership of Bartolomé Mitre (see 1852). A new federal constitution modeled on that of the United States gains approval from all the other provinces and goes into effect May 25, but it gives the city a minimal role in national affairs, its citizens refuse to accept it, and although Buenos Aires will not become a member until 1859 Justo José de Urquiza will remain Argentina's president until 1860 (see 1859).
Mexican voters return reactionary forces to power; among the many prominent liberals who go into exile in December is lawyer Benito (Pablo) Juárez, 47, who will live in semipoverty at New Orleans until June 1855. Former president Anastasio Bustamante has died at San Miguel de Allende February 6 at age 72.
The Gadsden Purchase treaty signed with Mexico December 30 permits the United States to annex a tract of land extending for nearly 30,000 square miles south of the Gila River. Mexico receives a mere $10 million under terms of the treaty, which has been negotiated by U.S. Minister James Gadsden, now 65, following repudiation by the Senate of an earlier treaty, whose terms provided for payment of $15 million for some 19 million acres. Northerners had objected that the new territory might be used by planters to extend slavery, but some land has been required for a southern railroad route to California. Mexican dictator Antonio López de Santa Anna comes under pressure for having agreed to the sale of Mexican territory; now 59, Santa Anna's lavish spending has made him widely unpopular, as have his frequent, extended absences from the capital and his womanizing (he has sired dozens of illegitimate children by various mistresses and married a 15-year-old girl shortly after the death of his first wife) (see 1854).
Transportation of British convicts to Tasmania ends after a half-century in which some 67,000 convicts have been landed on the island that is now definitively renamed Tasmania instead of Van Diemen's Land (see 1642).
The Massachusetts Constitutional Convention receives a petition to permit woman suffrage. The appeal comes from the wife of educator and social reformer Amos B. Alcott and 73 other women (see Lucy Stone, 1850; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1860).
Frontiersman Thomas Fitzpatrick negotiates another settlement with the Comanche and Kiowa at Fort Atkinson, Kansas.
Pioneer and Indian fighter Bland W. Ballard dies at his Shelbyville, Kentucky, home September 5 at age 93.
A second Grinnell-financed Arctic expedition goes north in May under the leadership of explorer-physician Elisha Kent Kane, whose book The U.S. Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin is a bestseller (see 1850). Equipped with help from a $10,000 grant by London merchant banker and philanthropist George Peabody, Kane's brig Advance passes through Smith Sound into waters that will become known as the Kent Basin, and spends the winter on the west coast of Greenland as hopes persist that a Northwest Passage will be found between the Atlantic and Pacific (see 1854).
English industrialist Titus Salt begins moving his 3,500 textile workers from Bradford three miles away to the new model town of Saltaire that he has been building on the Aire River in West Yorkshire since 1850 (see 1842). His mill at the center is the largest and most modern in Europe, he has placed much of its shafting machinery underground to reduce noise, its chimneys are fitted with Rodda Smoke Burners to reduce air pollution, and in the next few years Salt will build 834 houses (so that workers will not have to walk from Bradford), a public meeting hall, a washhouse, and a Congregational church.
London bankers Samuel Montagu, 21, and his brother and brother-in-law found a firm and foreign exchange that will become the world's leading gold trader. The family name Samuel has been changed to Montagu by royal license, and the new firm will make London the clearing house of the international money market.
The London banking firm N. M. Rothschild buys the Royal Mint Refinery to handle new gold from Australia and will continue to operate it until it closes in 1968 (see fixing, 1919).
Brunswick, Hanover, and Oldenburg join the German Zollverein, bringing all non-Austrian states into the customs union founded in 1833 (see 1867).
South African prospector Pieter Jacob Marais finds alluvial gold in the Jukskei River north of what later will be Johannesburg but the amount discovered is minimal (see 1886).
A slave woman in Brazil's Minas Gerais state finds an unblemished 262-carat diamond in the Begagem River. A white stone with a rosy glow, it is the largest diamond ever found in Brazil, will be cut into a 129-carat gem, and will be called the Star of the South (the woman receives her freedom and a pension in reward for her discovery).
France's Napoleon III gives orders in March for a great Universal Exhibition to be held at Paris in 1855.
President Pierce opens the first U.S. world's fair July 14 in a Crystal Palace modeled on the one used for the 1851 London Great Exhibition. Located to the west of the holding reservoir on New York's Fifth Avenue between 40th and 42nd streets, the structure designed by architects Georg J. B. Carstensen and Charles Gildemeister is in the shape of a Greek cross with a dome in the center. It houses an "Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations," with more than 4,000 exhibitors, most of them American, but temperatures reach 100° F., as many as 230 New Yorkers die of heat in one day, and although paid attendance increases in September as the weather cools and eventually exceeds 1 million, its sponsors are stuck with debts of about $300,000 when the fair closes November 1. Space will be leased out for various events in the next few years (but see fire, 1858).
The New York Clearing House that opens October 11 at 14 Wall Street is the first U.S. bank clearing house; 52 commercial banks have created the non-profit entity to facilitate daily settling of demand obligations in the first U.S. organization of its kind; 38 banks use the facility on its first day, and total clearings for the day amount to nearly $2 million.
The Continental Insurance Company is founded by a group of 12 New Yorkers who open offices in the basement of 6 Wall Street to offer fire insurance. Its initial capital is $500,000 and its first president is former mayor William V. Brady.
Merchant Samuel S. Howland dies at New York February 9 at age 62, leaving a fortune estimated at $1 million; businessman and insurance pioneer William Bard dies on Staten Island October 17 at age 75; metals-trading magnate Anson Greene Phelps of Phelps, Dodge at New York November 30 at age 72.
New York's Lord & Taylor moves into a new building at the corner of Grand and Christie streets with a large central rotunda, cathedral windows, and carpeting (see 1838). Cofounder G. W. Taylor retired last year to England (see 1860).
Congress appropriates $150,000 March 3 for a survey of the most practicable transcontinental U.S. railroad routes to be made under the direction of the War Department (see Whitney, 1844); the legislators authorize a U.S. Corps of Topographical Engineers to conduct a Pacific Railroad Survey; the engineers will study nearly every potential rail route in the west (see Central Pacific, 1861; Union Pacific, 1862).
The derailment of a Boston & Maine passenger train traveling at a speed of 40 miles per hour January 5 kills three people, including the 11-year-old son (and sole surviving child) of President-elect Franklin Pierce, who is crushed to death before the eyes of his father and mother while en route to Washington, D.C.; the Pennsylvania Railroad adds a second train to accommodate an influx of immigrants March 4 and it hits the Pennsy's first train, killing seven; the engineer of a New York, New Haven & Hartford train fails to observe a signal at South Norwalk, Connecticut, May 6, a drawbridge has been raised to permit passage of a ship, the train's passengers include 30 physicians returning from an American Medical Association meeting in New York, and the 43 people crushed to death include five of the physicians. More Americans are killed in train accidents this year than in the previous 25 years combined.
The first train ever seen at Toronto leaves a platform at the corner of Simcoe and Front streets May 16 and steams 30 miles to Mackell's Corner (see Grand Trunk Railway, 1852). Built at the James Good foundry at Queen and Yonge streets, it departs from a wooden shed opposite the Queen's Hotel in Front Street and covers the distance in 5 hours (the same trip by horse and carriage would take the better part of 2 days). Local engineer Sandford Fleming has earlier in the year worked with architect Frederick Cumberland to devise a radical plan for improving Toronto's riverfront. The Grand Trunk amalgamates with the St. Lawrence & Atlantic Railroad, leases that road's five-foot-six-inch-gauge line to Portland, Maine, in order to gain access to a year-round seaport, and adopts the St. Lawrence & Atlantic's gauge for all its lines (it will switch to "standard" four-foot eight-and-a-half-inch gauge in 1873). The Grand Trunk will start work next year on a bridge over the St. Lawrence (see 1859), take over other railroads, and reach west to Chicago by 1880 (see Union Station, 1855; Grand Trunk Pacific, 1903).
The New York Central is created by a consolidation of 10 short-line railroads between Albany and Buffalo into the first major U.S. rail combine, but gauge standards change at the New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio state borders, and the city of Erie, Pennsylvania, (formerly Presque Isle) tears up rails of identical gauge in order to force trains to stop at Erie (see Britain, 1846; Vanderbilt, 1867).
A railroad from Philadelphia reaches the shore of Absecon, New Jersey, which will become famous as Atlantic City (see boardwalk, 1896).
Territory acquired in the Gadsden Treaty includes the best railroad route from Texas to California. The treaty also gives the United States right of transit across the Isthmus of Tehauntepec.
India's first railway line opens to link Bombay with Thana 20 miles away. English engineer James J. (John) Berkley, 34, has built the line and will complete the Bombay(Mumbai)-Calcutta-Madras-Nagpur line in 1856.
Parliament authorizes construction of a 3.75-mile London underground railway between Farringdon Street and Bishop's Road, Paddington. The idea for such a subway was first proposed 10 years ago by city solicitor Charles Pearson as part of an urban improvement plan following the completion of the Thames Tunnel (see 1863).
New York has 683 horse-drawn omnibuses, up from 255 in 1846, and carry more than 100,000 passengers per day. The city begins to replace its circular cobblestones with so-called Belgian blocks that provide better footing for horses and stand up better to the wear of iron-rimmed wagon wheels (see 1876).
The Boston-built clipper ship Northern Light makes a record 76-day 6-hour voyage from San Francisco to Boston.
The Great Republic launched by Donald McKay is the world's largest sailing ship but is too big to be a commercial success. The 4,555-ton four-masted barque has patent double topsails and a 15-horsepower steam engine on deck to handle her yards and work her pumps.
I. K. Brunel begins construction of the S.S. Great Eastern (see 1843). Initially called S.S. Leviathan, the 18,000-ton passenger steamer will employ paddle wheels as well as a propeller; she is 700 feet long and 85 feet wide, making her slightly larger than the Great Republic, but she will be no more successful commercially (see 1860).
The British single-screw steamship S.S. Himalaya goes into service. A 4,690-ton ship, 340 feet in length overall, it will remain in service for more than 70 years.
The Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O Line) begins service between Southampton and Australia via Cape Town (see 1841).
The first international marine conference opens at Brussels with Virginia-born hydrographer Matthew F. (Fontaine) Maury, U.S. Navy, representing the United States. Now 47, Maury joined the navy as a midshipman at age 19, circumnavigated the world between 1826 and 1830, was promoted to lieutenant in 1836, but rendered unfit for active service by a stagecoach accident 3 years later. Given charge of the Depot of Charts and Instruments (later the U.S. Naval Observatory and Hydrographic Office) in 1842, Maury gathered information on maritime winds and currents by distributing among U.S. seacaptains specially prepared logbooks from which he produced pilot charts that enabled ships to shorten their voyages. The conferees at Brussels give Maury access to European seacaptains, enabling him to chart the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, and will lead to the establishment of an International Hydrographic Bureau (see transportation, 1855).
The emigrant ship Annie Jane founders off the coast of Scotland September 29; 348 passengers and crewmen are lost.
Shipping magnate Cornelius van Derbilt acknowledges that he is worth $11 million and that his fortune brings him an annual return of 25 percent (see 1850; 1858).
The first manned heavier-than-air flying machine soars 500 yards across a valley carrying the terrified coachman of English engineer Sir George Cayley, 79, in a large glider (see Stringfellow, Henson, 1851). Cayley defined the problem of heavier-than-air flight in his 1809 paper "On Aerial Navigation" (he will also be credited with the invention of the caterpillar tractor tread; see agriculture [Holt], 1911; Montgomery, 1883).
Pocket watches are produced in quantity for the first time by the American Horological Company of Waltham, Massachusetts, founded by former clockmaker Edward Howard, 39, and his friend Aaron Denison with backing from financier Samuel Curtis. The development of railroads with regular schedules has produced a demand for watches, Howard and Denison have come up with the idea of using automated equipment and interchangeable parts rather than making watches individually by hand. Their company will fail in 1857 (it will be reorgnized under Denison and later become the Waltham Watch Co.), but although more than 30 watch factories will spring from the Waltham works, mass production will not begin for 40 years and wristwatches will not appear for 54 (see Ingersoll, 1892).
Samuel Colt opens a Hartford, Connecticut, armory with 1,400 machine tools that will revolutionize the manufacture of small arms (see 1846; 1871). The United States Review predicts that within half a century "machinery will perform all work—automata will direct them. The only tasks of the human race will be to make love, study, and be happy." Meanwhile, drudgery remains a way of life for all but a tiny percentage of the world's men and women.
Brown and Sharpe Manufacturing Company has its beginnings in a firm founded by inventor Joseph R. Brown of 1850 linear dividing engine fame in partnership with Lucian Sharpe. Brown has developed a vernier caliper that can read to thousands of an inch and applied vernier methods to the protractor (see gear cutter, 1855).
Bausch & Lomb Optical Company is founded at Rochester, New York, by German-born lens grinders John Jacob Bausch, 23, and Henry Lomb, 28, whose firm will become the leading producers of microscopes, binoculars, field glasses, and the like.
Physicist J. B. L. Foucault demonstrates that the speed of light slows down in water (see 1852); his measurement of the speed of light is almost precisely accurate.
Mathematician Christian Andreas Doppler dies of tuberculosis at Venice March 17 at age 49; Language scholar Georg Friedrich Grotefend dies at Hannover December 15 at age 78, having made the first major breakthrough in deciphering ancient Persian cuneiform script.
Alsatian chemist Karl Frederick Gerhardt, 37, at Montpelier University produces acetyl salycilic acid, but his procedure is impossibly tedious and time-consuming (see 1763; 1835; Hoffmann, 1897; Aspirin, 1899).
French surgeon Antoine Jean Desormeaux, 38, uses endoscopy for the first time on a patient, employing the "Lichtleiter" devised by Philipp Bozzini in 1806 that has been used until now only on corpses. Desormeaux will use an open tube in 1867 to examine the gastrourinary tract, combining alcohol and turpentine as fuel for a flame that generates a brighter and more focused beam of light (see Kussmaul, 1868; Nitze, 1879).
Leipzig gynecologist (Karl Siegmund) Franz Credé, 34, develops a method for expressing the placenta in childbirth by massaging the uterus for 15 to 30 minutes after delivery, beginning gently and gradually increasing the amount of compression until the placenta is expelled naturally.
London physician John Snow, now 40, traces a local cholera epidemic to a busy public pump in Broad (later Broadwick) Street, in Soho, whose water supply is contaminated by the cesspool of a tenement in which a cholera patient resides (see 1849; water purification, 1829). Asked how the epidemic can be stopped, Snow replies, "Remove the pump handle" (see Snow, 1847).
U.S. Army surgeon William Beaumont dies at St. Louis April 25 at age 67, having been the first to study human digestion in its actual process.
A yellow fever epidemic at New Orleans kills 7,848.
Washington University is founded at St. Louis through a renaming of the Bellefontaine Medical College (see medicine, 1910).
Massachusetts-born Congregational minister Henry Durant, 50, arrives in California May 1, meets at Nevada City May 10 with other Congregationalists, and joins with them in formulating a plan to establish an academy at Contra Costa (later Oakland) under his direction (he has previously been head of the Dummer Academy at Byfield, Mass.). The academy opens in June with three pupils in a former fandango house that Durant has rented for $150 per month, payable in gold coin in advance (see College of California, 1855).
Parliament repeals Britain's duty on advertisements, spurring the growth of newspapers (seeDaily Telegraph, 1855).
British engineer Charles T. (Tilston) Bright, 21, of the Anglo-Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company lays the first undersea telegraph line between Portpatrick, Scotland, and Donaghadee, Ireland. R. S. Newall & Company has manufactured the metal wire, laid a Holyhead-Howth cable, and now lays cables under the Firth of Forth and beneath the English Channel between Dover and Ostend (see 1851; Black Sea cable, 1854). Bright and his brother Edward obtained a patent last year encompassing 24 separate inventions, most notably a system for determining the location of faults in a line so that they may be repaired on a cost-effective basis (see 1856).
Nonfiction: The Stones of Venice by critic John Ruskin, now 34, whose three-volume study explains the development of Gothic architecture and its beauty in terms of the moral virtue of the medieval society that produced it, attacking "the pestilent art of the Renaissance" that arose, he says, from an immoral society. Ruskin was married 4 years ago to the Scottish beauty Euphemia "Effie" Gray, now 24, but he found her pubic hair aesthetically repellent, demeaned her, and repeatedly compromised her by leaving her alone in their cottage with the pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais, also 24, whom she will marry next year after her unhappy match is annulled. "The only history worth reading," Ruskin writes, "is that written at the time of which it treats, the history of what was done and seen, heard out of the mouths of the men who did and saw"; The Age of Constantine the Great (Die Zeit Konstantins des Grossen) by Swiss art and culture historian Jacob (Christopher) Burckhardt, 35, who has studied at Berlin under Leopold von Ranke.
Fiction: Bleak House by Charles Dickens with illustrations by "Phiz"; Peg Woffington by Charles Reade (he has adapted last year's play Masks and Faces at the suggestion of actress Laura Seymour, who will be his housekeeper beginning next year); Cranford and Ruth by Mrs. Gaskell; Villette by Currer Bell (Charlotte Brontë), who will marry Arthur Bell Nichols, her father's curate, next year but will die in 1855; "Bartleby the Scrivener" by Herman Melville is published in Putnam's Monthly Magazine (a fire at Melville's New York publisher destroys most of his books); Liberia by Godey's Lady's Book editor Sarah Josepha Hale sets forth her "solution" to the slavery problem, to wit, that slaves be liberated either by the U.S. Government or with funds earned by the slaves themselves, and that, once liberated, they be resettled in the African colony of Liberia since "among us" they have "no home, no position, and no future" inasmuch as "two races that do not intermarry can never live together as equals."
Novelist-critic Ludwig Tieck dies at Berlin April 28 at age 79.
Juvenile: Tanglewood Tales for Girls and Boys by Nathaniel Hawthorne; The Heir of Redclyffe by English author Charlotte M. (Mary) Yonge, 30, who seeks to spread the influence of the Oxford Movement.
Poetry: Poems by English poet-critic Matthew Arnold, 31, includes "Sohrab and Rustum," "Scholar Gypsy," and "Requiescat."
Painting: Le Tepidarium by Théodore Chassériau; Harvesters Resting by Jean-François Millet; The Horse Fair by Rosa Bonheur.
Sculpture: Watertown, Mass.-born sculptor Harriet Goodhue Hosmer, 22, at Rome creates an original bust of Daphne and begins selling busts based on figures from classical mythology. Denied admission to Boston Medical School on account of her sex (she had applied in order to study anatomy), she has attended the Medical College of St. Louis.
Theater: Gold by Charles Reade 1/10 at London's Drury Lane Theatre. English-born U.S. actress Laura Keene (originally Mary Frances Moss) becomes manager of Baltimore's Charles Street Theater December 24 at age 33.
Opera: Il Trovatore (The Troubadour) 1/19 at Rome's Teatro Apollo, with music by Giuseppe Verdi, libretto from the 1836 Spanish play El trovador by Antonio García Gutiérrez, now 39; La Traviata 3/6 at Venice's Teatro la Fenice, with a libretto based on last year's Alexandre Dumas play La Dame aux Caméllias, music by Verdi, who has completed it in 4 weeks (the production in modern dress is a dismal failure). French soprano Hortense (Catherine [Caroline-Jeanne]) Schneider, 20, makes her debut 5/15 at Agen singing the role of Inèz in Donizetti's 1840 opera La Favorita.
Ballet: Wedding in Hardanger (Brudefaerden i Hardanger) 3/4 at Copenhagen's Royal Theater, with choreography by August Bournonville.
First performances: Fantasia on Hungarian Melodies for Pianoforte and Orchestra by Franz Liszt 6/1 at Pest's Hungarian National Theater, with Hans von Bülow as soloist; Symphony No. 1 in E flat major by French composer (Charles) Camille Saint-Saëns, 17, at Paris.
The English Schools Music Association has its beginnings in the Tonic Sol-fa Association founded by Congregational minister John Curwen, now 36 (see 1845). He has developed a teaching method based on the attraction of notes to the tonic and, in modulation, to the principle of a shifting tonic, which he calls "the movable do." Curwen will establish a music publishing house in 1863, give up the ministry in 1864, and turn his association into a college in 1879.
Popular songs: "My Old Kentucky Home, Good Night" and "Old Dog Tray" by Stephen C. Foster; "Sweet Betsy from Pike" by an unknown composer, lyrics by John A. Stone (first printed version; the song may date to the 1840s).
Steinway & Sons has its beginnings in a New York piano factory established by German-born cabinet and instrument maker Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg, 56, who started making pianos at the small town of Seesen in 1835 and came to New York with his wife 3 years ago to escape political agitation and restrictive trade regulations (their son Charles had come earlier) (see 1859).
Boston piano maker Jonas Chickering dies December 8 at age 55 as his burnt-out Washington Street factory is being replaced by one in Tremont Street that is surpassed in size only by the U.S. Capitol at Washington. The new plant has 220,000 square feet of floor space and a huge inner court for Chickering & Sons, whose Thomas E., C. Frank, and George H. Chickering carry on the 30-year-old firm.
Freehold Raceway opens at Freehold, New Jersey, with harness races.
U.S. bareknuckle heavyweight champion Yankee Sullivan fights Irish-born challenger John "Old Smoke" Morrissey, 22, October 12 in a title bout at Boston Corners, New York, but although he gives Morrissey a sound beating he leaves the ring and ignores the call of "time" (see 1851). The referee declares Morrissey the winner; Sullivan, now 42, heads for California; Morrissey will hold the title until 1858.
Brighton-born bareknuckle English heavyweight Tom Sayers, 27, loses his only bout October 18. Standing just five feet eight and a half and weighing just 155 pounds, he has defeated much bigger opponents but is beaten by Ned Langham in 61 rounds.
Bavarian-born San Francisco entrepreneur Levi Strauss, 23, introduces "bibless overalls." He came to America in 1847, worked as a peddler at Lexington, Kentucky, joined two brothers at New York in 1848, and has arrived at the city on the bay to join his brother-in-law David Stern, who established a San Francisco dry-goods business in 1850. Strauss has arrived with a bundle of canvas fabric that he had hoped to sell to a tentmaker; told by a miner that what prospectors really need are sturdy pants, he has found a tailor and had him make up two pairs of canvas pants, wears one pair himself and gives the other to a new friend, who goes around town talking about these new pants of Levi's. Besieged with orders, Strauss sends word to his brothers in the East to "buy up all the canvas you can lay your hands on." He is soon hiring all the tailors and seamstresses that he can find for his California Street pants factory. He will switch from canvas to denim, and when he finds that two pieces rarely dye to the same shades of light blue, brown, or grey, he will order a deep indigo blue that assures him of a standard color for the "blue jeans" that will be worn by generations of Americans (see rivets, 1873).
The safety match is patented by Swedish inventor J. E. Lundstrom (see 1836; book matches, 1892).
The Betting Houses Act passed by Parliament closes the gambling establishments that have operated quite openly. London alone has had more than 40, but the attorney general has said that "the mischief arising from the existence of these shops . . . [is] perfectly notorious." Gambling will continue openly (albeit illegally) for more than a century before it becomes legal again (see 1961).
English divorcée Jane Digby, now 46, travels to Damascus after having lived for years in Paris, Munich, and Greece. Sheik Abdul Medjuel El Mazrab serves as guide for the 9-day camel caravan that takes her across the Syrian desert to view the archaeological remains of ancient Palmyra. After further journeys with El Mazrab to Baghdad, Digby will marry him, become queen of his tribe, and adopt native dress.
New York debutante Caroline Webster Schermerhorn, 23, marries local real estate baron William Backhouse Astor Jr., whose brother lives next door to her family's house in Lafayette Place (she will drop William's middle name and become queen of society as the Mrs. Astor; see 1872).
Texas-born captain Harry Love sets out May 11 from Sacramento, having received authorization from the state government to capture or kill the 22-year-old Sonora-born Mexican bandit Joaqin Murieta (originally Carillo), who began a career as outlaw about 3 years ago when his brother was allegedly beaten and killed by a California lynch mob for a crime he did not commit. Murieta has become a legend, moving about with a 50-man gang that includes Manuel "Three-Fingered Jack" Garcia; they have stolen cattle, robbed stagecoaches, killed a Los Angeles sheriff, and received protection from sympathetic villagers, but California's governor has offered a $1,000 reward for his capture dead or alive, the legislature has offered an additional $5,000, and Love has been given a 20-man posse and 90 days to succeed. He finally catches Murieta off guard alone in a canyon July 18, shoots his horse, and shoots Murieta dead; his men also kill Garcia, pickle his hand in alcohol to prove he is dead, pickle Murieta's head the same way, and collect the reward (see Nonfiction, 1854).
The Mount Vernon Hotel that opens at Cape May, New Jersey, is the world's first hotel with private baths (see London's Savoy, 1889).
Charleston's 125-room Mills House opens at the corner of Meeting and Queen streets, where it has been built at a cost of $300,000 by Otis Mills, known in South Carolina as the John Jacob Astor of Charleston.
The New York state legislature at Albany authorizes the city to purchase land for a public park, and some 624 acres of rocky real estate are acquired from 59th Street north to 106th Street, between Fifth and Eighth avenues (see Bryant, 1844; Olmsted, 1851; Central Park, 1858).
The world's largest tree is discovered in California and called the Wellingtonia gigantea.
Continued decline in French oyster production disturbs the government at Paris, which sends embryologist-ichthyologist Jean Jacques Coste, 46, to study the remains of ancient Roman oyster culture in Lake Fusaro (see 110 B.C.; 1375; 1840). Oyster stalls have disappeared from the poorer sections of London; overfishing and pollution have made the bivalves a luxury available only to the rich.
Fewer than half of Americans are engaged in agriculture, down from 83 percent in 1820.
The King Ranch has its origin as Texas steamboat captain Richard King begins acquiring land on Santa Gertrudis Creek between the Rio Grande and Neuces rivers (see transportation, 1850). Acting on the advice of his friend Colonel Robert E. Lee, U.S. Army, King pays the family of José Manuel Balli Villareal and his wife, María Antonia Cavazos de Hinojosa, $300 for 15,500 acres of land that the Balli family and its relatives received as part of a 2 million-acre grant (La Barreta) from the king of Spain (see Durham cattle, 1860). Extreme drought parches the Southwest, lowering prices of land and cattle; King is able to buy the land at less than 2¢ per acre and longhorns at $5 per head.
Texas cattleman Samuel A. Maverick, 50, receives an anonymous note telling him to look after his strays on the Matagorda Peninsula or risk losing them. Maverick accepted 400 head of cattle in payment of a debt in 1845 and has never bothered to brand the animals on his 385,000-acre ranch, but he sends down a party of cowhands who round up about the same number that were turned loose on the peninsula 6 years ago, sells the cattle to Toutant Beauregard of New Orleans, and retires from ranching. The word maverick will become a generic for unbranded cattle and for political or intellectual independents who do not go along with their associates.
Boston-born Concord, Massachusetts, horticulturist Ephraim (Wales) Bull, 48, exhibits the first Concord grapes September 3 at the Massachusetts Horticulture Hall, attracting great excitement not only because his grapes are heavy, prolific, fragrant, hardy, and juicy, but also because they ripen earlier than the Isabella variety, which often succumbs to frost. Bull planted seeds of the slip-skin Lambrusca variety in 1843, picked his first fruit September 10, 1849, and begins selling cuttings from the parent vine at $5 each (his net income for the first year is $3,200 but will derive little future benefit). Table grapes rather than wine grapes, Concords will be widely used to make port and within 10 years will be growing all across America (see Welch, 1869).
Potato chips are invented at Saratoga Springs, New York, where chef George Crum of Moon's Lake House gives a mocking response to a patron who has complained that his French fries are too thick. He shaves some potatoes paper thin and sends them out to the customers—who are delighted, order more, and encourage Crum to open a restaurant of his own across the lake. Crum's new restaurant will take no reservations; millionaires who include Jay Gould and Commodore van Derbilt will stand in line along with everyone else (see Wise, 1921; Lay's, 1939).
Keebler biscuits go on sale at Philadelphia's Steam Cracker Bakery; German-born neighborhood baker Godfrey Keebler, 31, will make his enterprise a leading producer of cookies (biscuits) and crackers.
Gail Borden succeeds in his efforts to produce condensed milk (see 1852). Now 52, he has lost between $60,000 and $100,000 in his meat-biscuit venture but now develops a process for making a product that has no burnt taste or discoloration and lasts for nearly 3 days without souring. Employing a copper kettle based on vacuum pans that he has seen Shakers at New Lebanon, New York, use for making preserves, he inserts a heated metal rod that evaporates most of the liquid which constitutes 75 percent of milk without scalding it; he believes that the keeping properties of his milk are due to the fact that it is condensed; only later will he learn that his heating process has destroyed microorganisms that cause milk to spoil (see science [Pasteur], 1857). Borden travels to Washington to file a patent claim (see 1856).
Swedish coffee roaster Victor Theodor Engwall at Gävle founds a company that will become famous for its Gevalia Coffee.
Britain lowers her import duties on chocolate, which will hereafter be cheaper and more popular both as a beverage and a sweet.
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