1851 1852 1853 1854 1855 1856 1857 1858 1859 1860
The Crimean War that begins March 28 will continue until 1856 (see 1853). British and French fleets have entered the Black Sea January 3, Russia has broken off relations with both nations February 6, the czar has ignored a February 7 Anglo-French ultimatum to evacuate the Danube principalities by April 30, but Sir Charles Napier, now 67 and commander of the Royal Navy's Baltic Fleet has refused to attack the Russian naval base at Kronsthstadt, claiming that he lacked sufficient firepower. London and Paris have made an alliance with Constantinople March 12, Russian troops have crossed the Danube March 20, and Britain and France declare war March 28.
Austria gives Russia an ultimatum June 3 not to carry the war across the Balkan mountains and signs a treaty June 14 with Constantinople, agreeing to intervene in Bosnia, Albania, or Montenegro should any disturbance break out there. Turkish forces defeat a Russian army under the command of Ivan Fyodorovich Paskevich at Silistria June 8; Paskevich, now 72, is relieved of his post, the Russians evacuate the Danube principalities August 8, and Austria occupies them with Turkish consent August 22. Allied troops land on the Crimean Peninsula of the Ukraine in mid-September and defeat an inferior Russian force September 20 at the Battle of the Alma River, 15 miles north of Sevastapol. Field Marshal Fitzroy (James Henry) Somerset, 66, Baron Raglan of Raglan, has 27,000 men; the 58-year-old Marshal Jacques Leroy de Saint Arnaud 25,000; and the Turks 8,000 to throw against the 37,000-man army of Russia's Prince Aleksandr Sergeivich Menshikov, 65. The Russians lose 1,800 killed, 3,700 wounded; the British 362 killed, 1,621 wounded; the French only about 500 killed and wounded, but Saint Arnaud dies at sea September 29 en route home to France as the Allies lay siege to Sevastopol.
Greece's prime minister Aléxandros Mavrokordátos appoints nationalist Dimitríos Kallérgis to his cabinet, but the king will force him to resign in October of next year (see 1848; 1863).
The Battle of Balaklava (or Balaclava) October 25 ends indecisively after a costly cavalry charge by Britain's Light Brigade. Russian forces occupy the Fedyukhini and Vorontsov heights, but when their cavalry advance on the town of Balaklava about five miles outside Sevastapol, they encounter heavy resistance from the 93rd Highlanders of Sir Colin Campbell and the Heavy Brigade of cavalry officer Gen. Sir James Yorke Scarlett. Baron Raglan and his staff officers on the heights above Sevastopol observe the Russians removing guns from captured positions on the Vorontsov heights, Raglan sends orders through an aide-de-camp to have cavalry forces thwart the removal, and two regiments of Scarlett's Heavy Brigade attack the stronger of the two Russian positions, routing the enemy's main cavalry force. Cavalry commander George Charles Bingham, 54, 3rd earl of Lucan, receives orders from Raglan to stop the Russians from towing away captured guns; he mistakenly sends his brother-in-law James Thomas Brudenell, 57, 7th earl of Cardigan, down a mile-long valley protected by the Russian and Ottoman artillery. Cardigan has made a career of purchasing military commissions, fighting duels, and womanizing, he is the first man to reach the lines and emerges unscathed, but the Russian guns cut down 503 of his 673 men (Lucan sustains a leg wound). The name of Lord Cardigan will survive in the cardigan sweater; that of his commanding officer in the raglan-sleeve coat.
The Battle of Inkerman November 5 gives the allies another major victory. A Russian force of 55,000 under the command of Prince Menshikov has tried to break the siege of Sevastopol, but a French division arrives to support Lord Raglan, and the combined siege force of about 20,000 men throws back the Russians in bitter hand-to-hand fighting, killing 4,400 and wounding 7,500 while sustaining 2,573 British and 1,743 French casualties (see 1855).
The British withdraw from territory north of South Africa's Orange River in accordance with the Convention of Bloemfontein signed February 17 with the Boers. Boer settlers organize the Orange Free State (see 1852; Pretorius, 1856).
Egypt's Ottoman viceroy (khedive) Abbas I is assassinated in his palace at Banha July 13 at age 41 on orders from enemies in his court, who have paid two servants to strangle him. Dead after a 6-year reign in which he has curtailed government spending, reduced taxes, turned from the French to the British for support against the Ottoman Turks, and cut back on compulsory labor and army conscription, Abbas is succeeded by his uncle Muhammad Said, 32, the fourth son of the late viceroy Muhammad Ali, who will reign until 1863 as Said.
The Treaty of Kanagawa signed March 31 opens the Japanese ports Hakodate and Shimoda to U.S. trade, makes provision for shipwrecked sailors, and establishes friendly relations (see 1853). Commodore Perry said last July that he would return in the spring but has returned in February with 10 ships and all sorts of things never before seen in Japan, including a camera and a miniature locomotive. The new shōgun Iesada Tokugawa decides that Japan needs a defense force, and he asks that the emperor order Buddhist temples to contribute their great bells for gun metal.
Filipino insurgent José Cuesta leads a revolt against Spanish rule, but Captain General Manuel Pavía y Lacy, 39, crushes the rebels.
The Hawaiian king Kamehameha III dies at Honolulu December 15 at age 40 after a 29-year reign (see 1843). He is succeeded by his 20-year-old nephew and adopted son Alexander Liholiho, who will reign until his death in 1863 as Kamehameha IV.
The Republican Party organized February 28 at Ripon, Wisconsin, by former Whigs and disaffected Democrats opposes the extension of slavery (see human rights [Wilmot Proviso], 1846). Led by men who include prominently Sen. William Pitt Fessenden, 49, of Maine and Indiana abolitionist George Washington Julian, 38, they take the name Republican from the party founded by Thomas Jefferson, which became known as the Democratic-Republican Party but dropped the last part of its name in 1828. The House of Representatives approves the Kansas-Nebraska Act May 8, and Rep. Israel Washburn, 40, of Maine calls a meeting May 9 of some 30 anti-slavery representatives, who meet in the rooms at Washington, D.C., of two Massachusetts congressmen and take further steps toward organizing the new party. The Kansas-Nebraska Act approved by the Senate May 20 repeals the Missouri Compromise of 1820, opens Nebraska country to settlement on the basis of popular sovereignty, provides for the organization of Kansas and Nebraska territories, undoes the sectional truce of 1850, and effectively destroys the Whig Party, whose northern members join the new Republican Party, a name used by Rep. Washburn soon afterward in a speech at Bangor.
The Elgin Treaty signed June 5 establishes reciprocity between Canada and the United States. Governor General James Bruce, 43, 8th earl of Elgin, has concluded the treaty with help from Irish-born Canadian journalist and co-prime minister Francis Hincks, now 46.
Rhode Island constitutional reformer Thomas Wilson Dorr dies at his native Providence December 27 at age 49.
Mexico's La Reforma period begins with the issuance of the Plan de Ayutla, which calls for the ouster of the dictator Antonio López de Santa Anna (see 1853). Santa Anna has tried to secure direct control of Guerrero, whose governor Juan Alvarez, 64, begins a rebellion at Ayutla and joins with the liberals, some of them in exile, who issue the plan (see 1855).
Frontiersman Thomas Fitzpatrick arrives at Washington, D.C., to discuss Indian affairs but dies February 7 at age 55 (approximate).
Quixiault, Lummi, Nisqualie, Puyallup, and other Puget Sound tribes that have ceded their lands in the Northwest receive treaty rights to fish for the salmon which climb the rivers of the region—rights guaranteed "in common with white men."
The Wisconsin Supreme Court releases a Wisconsin man convicted by a federal court of rescuing a runaway slave in violation of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act; the court rules that the act is unconstitutional and therefore invalid (see 1842; Dred Scott decision, 1857).
The Kansas-Nebraska Act signed into law May 30 permits the extension of slavery into the territories. Crafted and promoted by Sen. Stephen A. (Arnold) Douglas (D. Ill.), 41, the legislation alarms Springfield, Illinois, lawyer Abraham Lincoln, now 45, who served in Congress from 1847 to 1849 but has virtually retired from politics; Lincoln considers slavery a "wen" (cancer) that can be eliminated only if it is contained. A war over slavery erupts in Kansas, but President Pierce does nothing to suppress it.
A Boston mob attacks a federal courthouse May 26 in a vain attempt to rescue the fugitive slave Anthony Burns, 21, who arrived by ship from his native Virginia and was taken into custody on behalf of his master, Charles F. Suttle, who has pursued him to the north. A special deputy is killed in the riot, and police arrest several of the antislavery demonstrators. A weeklong trial ensues. Burns's legal defense team includes lawyer-novelist Richard Henry Dana, Jr., but the law is on Suttle's side and Judge Edward G. Loring rules in his favor. Federal troops are called in to escort Burns to the Boston docks for return to his southern owner; they march the prisoner through streets that are draped in mourning and lined with nearly 50,000 outraged citizens, most of whom stand in silence although a few shout, "Kidnapper!" or "Slave catcher!" or "Shame! Shame!" Local ministers, including Theodore Parker of the Congregational Society, deliver sermons calling the semi-literate Burns a modern Christ who has been sacrificed to slave power, and orators at a large antislavery rally at Framingham, Massachusetts, July 4 use the Burns case to challenge the Fugitive Slave Law; Henry David Thoreau delivers his speech "Slavery in Massachusetts," saying that the Burns trial "was really the trial of Massachusetts" and that the American system has lost its integrity and purity; William Lloyd Garrison burns copies of the Fugitive Slave Law and the Constitution while the crowd chants, "Amen."
Scottish-born journalist James Redpath, 21, of Horace Greeley's New York Tribune travels through the slave states urging slaves to run away.
New York schoolteacher Elizabeth Jennings jumps aboard a horsecar to reach a church where she is to play the organ, the horsecar's conductor tells her to get off and wait for a car that takes black passengers, she grabs hold of the car window, the conductor ejects her, she hires a lawyer to sue for damages, Chester A. Arthur represents her, and she wins.
English widow Elizabeth Leslie Wright (née Rous), 38, emigrates to Canada, sets up a shop at Belleville, Ontario, and will soon become a Quaker minister. She will marry John T. Comstock in 1858, move to his town of Rolin, Michigan, and establish a station of the Underground Railway as she throws herself into the Abolitionist movement, speaking out not only at Quaker assemblies but also to reform groups (see 1863).
Abolitionist Sarah Grimké leaves the household that she has shared with her sister Angelina and Angelina's husband, Theodore Dwight Weld, in an effort to pursue a career of her own. Now 62, Sarah works in public libraries with the idea of compiling various state laws that she considers unfair to women.
The Massachusetts legislature enacts a Married Women's Property Act at the prodding of feminist Mary Ferrin (née Upton), 44, who has been petitioning the lawmakers since 1848 and gaining support for the measure from able men and likeminded women. The law gives control of their property to women who marry after the law takes effect, empowers a wife to make a will without her husband's consent (except as it applies to one half her personal property), and gives her certain fixed rights in the estate of her husband should he die intestate.
"A Brief Summary in Plain Language of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women" by English educator Barbara Leigh Smith, 27, is a pamphlet documenting the consequences of not permitting married women to own property and raising questions about other laws that discriminate against women. Smith attended the Ladies College in Bedford Square in 1849 and last year founded an experimental primary school for London boys and girls (see 1857).
Surgeon-explorer John Rae surveys the Boothia Peninsula in the Arctic (see 1853), proves that King William Land is an island, and receives the first news, from Eskimos at Pely Bay, of the fate that befell the expedition of Sir John Franklin in 1847.
Arctic explorer Elisha Kent Kane passes 80° North—the farthest point thus far reached by any expedition—and his party records valuable scientific information before being frozen in for another winter (see 1853). Irish-born British naval officer Robert J. (John) Le Mesurier McClure, 47, meets two rescue ships coming from the east and completes the first Northwest Passage. McClure took command of H.M.S. Investigator in 1850 to search for the lost Franklin expedition, entered the Bering Strait from the Pacific, headed eastward north of Alaska, found two entrances to the Northwest Passage just north of Banks Island, but became trapped in the ice just to the north of the island; forced eventually to abandon ship, he and his crew have sledged overland to Melville Island, where they meet the rescue ships, which are in turn abandoned as all hands continue on foot to Beachey Island; McClure will be knighted upon his return to Britain, but nobody will navigate the Northwest Passage by sea until 1906 (see 1855).
Lawrence, Kansas, is founded by two parties sent out by the New England Emigrant Aid Society, a group organized by Massachusetts educator Eli Thayer, 34, to encourage emigration to Kansas. The town is named after the society's late patron, Boston merchant Amos Lawrence (see 1845; Brown, 1856).
Omaha is formally founded in the Nebraska Territory (see 1825).
The Kansas-Nebraska Act signed into law by President Pierce May 30 opens to white settlement western lands that have been reserved by sacred treaty for the Indians. Motivated in large part by a desire to facilitate construction of a transcontinental railway, Sen. Stephen A. Douglas has introduced the term "popular sovereignty" to replace the less elegant term "squatter sovereignty."
Merchant and philanthropist Thomas Handasyd Perkins dies at his native Boston January 11 at age 89, having made a fortune in the Chinese opium trade and been liberal in his contributions. Blind for a time in his final years, he had the sight of one eye restored by an operation late last year.
The U.S. Mint opens a San Francisco branch and pays miners the official rate of $16 per ounce for gold (which can drop to as low as $8 per ounce in the open market but which can also go much higher than $16). Private mints have illegally been turning out gold pieces; the federal mint produces $4 million in gold coins in its first year, and will produce nearly $24 million by 1856.
The credit-rating service B. Douglass and Company is founded by Benjamin Douglass, 38, who 5 years ago joined with Lewis Tappan's brother Arthur to buy the Mercantile Agency started by Lewis in 1841. Douglass has purchased Arthur's interest and will, in turn, sell his agency to R. G. Dun in 1858 (see Bradstreet, 1855; Dun and Bradstreet, 1933).
Hudson's Bay Company fur trader-explorer Peter Skene Ogden dies at Oregon City September 27 at age 60, having married two Native American women, each of whom bore children, and remained a British subject. Following orders from the Bay Company's governor Sir George Simpson, Ogden has directed his men to drive out U.S. trappers by stripping Oregon Territory of every fur-bearing animal.
Australian miners stage a massive strike at the Eureka Stockade December 3, protesting low wages and dangerous working conditions.
Yale chemistry professor Benjamin Silliman the younger, 38, makes the first fractional distillation of crude petroleum (see 1852). New Englander George H. (Henry) Bissell, 33, has asked him to analyze a sample of Pennsylvania "rock oil," which burns better than the coal oil squeezed from asphalt, cannel coal, coal tar, and "albertite" bituminous rock (see Pennsylvania Rock Oil Co., 1855).
The Pennsylvania Railroad opens its line between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh via Altoona in February (see 1852). Springfield Township, Pennsylvania-born engineer J. Edgar Thomson, 46, now heads the railroad and has directed construction of a giant horseshoe curve that forces trains to travel an extra three-quarters of a mile on a 220° path but allows a train to gain altitude without increasing gradients. The horseshoe curve will have four tracks by 1900, and the Pennsylvania will account for more than 10 percent of the nation's railroad trackage (see 1857).
The B&O opens its line between Baltimore and Wheeling (see 1851).
The Chicago & Rock Island Railroad reaches Rock Island in the Mississippi in February, giving Chicago its first rail link to America's key waterway (see 1852). Built along the 35th parallel and intended to run from Memphis to Tucumcari in New Mexico Territory, the road will grow to have 7,560 miles of track extending north to Minneapolis-St. Paul, south to Galveston, east to Memphis, and west to Denver, Colorado Springs, and Santa Rosa (see Iowa City, 1855).
The Chicago, Burlington & Quincy is created by a merger of four small lines that include the Michigan Central (see 1846; Aurora Branch, 1850). Lawyer James Frederick Joy, now 43, acquired control of the Aurora Branch Railroad 2 years ago and has joined with Michigan Central president John Murray Forbes to engineer the merger (the new corporate name will be adopted February 14 of next year), having been helped by lawyer Abraham Lincoln in 1850 to extend the Michigan Central to Chicago through an arrangement with the Illinois Central; Joy now works to enlarge the Burlington, which extends from Burlington, Iowa, to Quincy, Illinois, on the Mississippi and will ultimately extend from the Great Lakes to the Rocky Mountains (see 1857).
U.S. railroads use telegraph messages for the first time to send information ahead about the location of trains and thus alert engineers to possible safety problems, but the practice will not be universally adopted for many years, and engineers will meanwhile depend on timetables based on times that vary from one locality to another (Illinois alone has 27 different time zones, Wisconsin 38; see 1883).
The Vienna-Trieste rail line opens over Semmering Pass in the Alps with tunnels and steep gradients that make it an engineering marvel. Shortening distances in eastern central Austria, it is the world's first mountain railroad opens through the Alps (see 1867).
Brazil's first railroad opens between Guanabara Bay, near São Paulo, and the coffee plantations of Serra do Mar. Built mostly with British capital using thousands of workers, most of them former slaves, the tiny new railroad goes through mountainous jungles, opening the interior to settlement and lowering the price of coffee by eliminating the costly transport of beans by mule train from the interior to the coast.
The marine compound steam engine developed by Glasgow-born engineer John Elder, 30, enables seagoing vessels to use both high and low pressures, reduces their coal consumption by 30 to 40 percent, and thereby make long voyages that have heretofore been impossible without refueling en route.
The sidewheeler U.S. mailship S.S. San Francisco goes down in the Atlantic early in January with a loss of more than 300 lives. Commissioned as a troopship, she left New York for San Francisco December 22 with more than 700 aboard and ran into a hurricane; the S.S. City of Glasgow leaves Liverpool March 1 and is not seen again; the sidewheeler S.S. Long Beach sinks off Long Beach, New York, April 16, taking 311 lives.
The sidewheeler S.S. Arctic sinks September 27 off Cape Race, Newfoundland, after colliding with the 250-ton French iron propeller ship S.S. Vesta. A sister ship to the S.S. Pacific that went into service in 1852, the 3,000-ton S.S. Arctic has been the largest and most splendid of the Collins Line steamships (see 1850), her casualties include 92 of her 153 officers and men, and all her women and children are lost, including the wife, only daughter, and youngest son of E. K. Collins.
Egypt's new khedive Said grants a Suez Canal concession November 30 to his longtime friend Ferdinand, vicomte de Lesseps, 49, a French diplomat-promoter who has dreamed of such a canal for 25 years (see 1859; Darius, 520 B.C.). Lesseps distinguished himself as consul at Cairo from 1833 to 1837 by working to combat an outbreak of plague, but the prospect of a canal alienates Said from the Ottoman sultan and from the British, whose overland rail line between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea is jeopardized (see railroad, 1856).
Vermont-born freighter William Hepburn Russell, 42, forms a partnership at Leavenworth, Kansas, December 28 with Alexander Majors, now 40, and William B. Waddell that will become Russell, Majors & Waddell in 1858, working on U.S. government contracts to provision western Army outposts (see Majors, 1848). Russell and Waddell handle purchasing and financing while Majors has sole responsibility for road operations, which employ more than 4,000 men, 40,000 oxen, and 1,000 mules to move wagon trains of 25 wagons each, with 12 oxen and a teamster per wagon plus 30 oxen in reserve for every train plus five mules, extra men, and a wagonmaster. Profits in the 1855-56 season will run to $300,000, but the operation is fraught with peril and the profits of several years may be lost in one bad season (see stagecoaches, Pony Express, 1860).
The Volcanic pistol and rifle mechanism patented February 14 by Smith & Wesson Company gunsmith B. Tyler Henry makes the repeating rifle as powerful as a single-shot rifle (see 1852). The 2-year-old Smith & Wesson Co. obtains the patent rights and develops a small revolver that employs black powder and a lubricant to shoot a hollow-base flat-nosed bullet. It employs mercuric fulminate (the priming compound used in percussion caps) as a primer-propellant, and a centrally mounted firing pin ignites each round by striking the primer-propellant at the base of the bullet, but while the ammunition is problematic (it sometimes ignites inside the magazine) the weapon has an entirely new repeating action that is not entirely successful in pistols but will be the basis of rifles far more practical than Henry's, which fires caseless ammunition. Smith & Wesson runs into financial troubles, starts to reorganize, and receives funding from shirtmaker Oliver F. Winchester to help it continue production of its Volcanic lever-action pistol (see 1855; Winchester, 1850).
"An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, on Which Are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities" by mathematician George Boole, now 39, advances the first workable system substituting symbols for all the words used in formal logic (see 1847). Boole also describes the binary algebraic system that will provide the basis for all computer logic.
"On the Hypotheses That Form the Foundations of Geometry" ("Uber die Hypothesen, welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen") by Bernhard Riemann offers a comprehensive view of the subject (see Riemann, 1851). Delivered as his inaugural lecture at the University of Göttingen, his paper shows the limitations of Euclidean geometry, which is based on the postulate of parallels, and formulates a non-Euclidean geometry. Nikolai Lobachevski showed the illogic of Euclid's postulate in 1829, János Bolyai confirmed Lobachevski's work in 1832. Riemann is evidently unaware of their papers. He suggests that since two ships on a meridian must meet at a pole there are no parallels to the Euclidean line, and his paper wins him a position as an unpaid lecturer at the University of Göttingen, dependent on student fees for his income (he will receive a small, additional stipend beginning next year and become an assistant professor in 1857; see 1859).
English chemist Alexander William Williamson, 30, explains for the first time the function of a catalyst in a chemical reaction.
Irish-born English experimental physicist John Tyndall, 34, of the Royal Institution at London demonstrates to the Royal Society that light can be conducted through a curved stream of water (see communications [Photophone], 1880).
Physicist Georg Simon Ohm dies at Munich July 6 at age 67.
A typhus epidemic in the Russian army spreads to the British and French in the Crimea, reaches Constantinople, and is spread by merchant ships throughout Russia and Turkey. Florence Nightingale, 34, takes 34 London nurses to Scutari. Superintendent of a London hospital for invalid women, born in the Italian city for which she was named, Nightingale left her upper-class family in her 20s to train as a nurse at Kaiserwerth Institute, near Dusseldorf. Doctors at Scutari stubbornly refuse her help until casualties from the Battle of Inkerman spill into their rat-infested corridors, but she has been charged by the secretary of state for war to take complete charge of nursing British soldiers. Nightingale organizes a barracks hospital, where she introduces sanitary measures that will reduce the toll of cholera, dysentery, and typhus, although disease will still account for more deaths in the Crimean War than will battle casualties. Despite being burdened with problems of administration and supply, Nightingale always takes her turn at nursing; at night, she walks through the wards with her lamp, giving encouragement, comfort, and advice to the patients.
A cholera epidemic at Chicago kills 5 percent of the city's population.
Upstate New York-born Philadelphia dentist and electrical engineer Mahlon Loomis, 28, obtains a patent May 2 on a metal-plate (kaolin) process for making false teeth. He patents the process in Britain as well.
The first Young Men's Hebrew Association is founded at Baltimore as a counterpart to the Young Men's Christian Association founded at London 10 years ago. Young Jewish men have formed literary societies in America since the 1840s, and YMHAs will spring up in many other cities, with the first women's auxiliary opening at New York in the 1880s.
U.S. Roman Catholics come under attack on numerous occasions throughout the year from members of a new political party that holds its first national convention in November at Cincinnati. Composed of "native-born Protestants," the new American Party opposes immigration and compares the Roman Catholic Church to the infamous slave powers of the South; New York publisher E. Z. C. "Ned Buntline" Judson calls it the Know-Nothing Party.
The Religion of God (Brahmo-Dharma) by the Hindu philosopher Debendranath Tagore, now 37, is a commentary in Bengali on the Sanskrit scriptures (see 1845; 1863).
The West African Tukolor leader Umar Tal, 57, launches a holy war (jihad) in March with about 10,000 men to drive out pagan chieftains and encourage the return of errant Muslims to the fold. Initiated as a youth into the Tijani brotherhood, he set out on a pilgrimage to Mecca in about 1820, reached the sacred city in about 1827, spent time in Medina and Jerusalem, was designated caliph for Black Africa after curing a son of Egypt's Ottoman viceroy Muhammad Ali, returned to the African interior in 1833, and is known as the Pilgrim (al-Hadj) (see 1855).
A Vatican ruling makes the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin an article of faith and implies papal "infallibility" in all matters. The papal bull Ineffabilis Deus, issued by Pius IX December 8, declares: "From the first moment of her conception the Blessed Virgin Mary was, by the singular grace and privilege of Almighty God, and in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, Saviour of Mankind, kept free from all stain of original sin" (see 1869; 1870).
Educator Josiah Holbrook dies near Lynchburg, Va., June 17 at age 65 while promoting the lyceum movement he began in the 1820s.
New Jersey schoolmistress Clara (Clarissa Harlowe) Barton, 33, quits the free school she has founded and goes to work at Washington, D.C., for the U.S. Patent Office, where she becomes the only female employee of the federal government. The school has grown so large that the townsmen have decided to install a man as principal; Barton has declined to subordinate herself to a man (see medicine, 1861).
Cable enthusiast Frederic N. Gisborne persuades retired New York paper merchant Cyrus W. Field to back him in laying a transatlantic telegraphic cable between Newfoundland and Ireland (see 1852). Now 34, Field organizes a consortium of investors who include Peter Cooper and Moses Taylor (who serves as treasurer) and travels with Gisborne to Newfoundland, whose legislature incorporates the New York, Newfoundland, and London Telegraph Company in April. Manchester cotton merchant John Pender invests £1,000 in the enterprise, Gisborne arranges to have the exclusive rights granted 2 years ago for Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island transferred to the new company, and he obtains similar rights in the state of Maine (see 1856).
The 14-year-old Dundee firm R. S. Newall & Company receives an urgent order from the British government for a cable between Varna, Bulgaria, and Sevastopol in the Crimea (see 1853); sheathing only the shore ends of the cable in metal, covering the rest only with gutta percha, Newall completes the work in record time, and has the telegraphic connection operating in November. It will provide good service for nearly a year.
German engineers Werner Siemens and Karl Frischen pioneer multiplex telegraphy (see 1852). They independently discover a way to transmit messages in opposite directions simultaneously by means of an electromagnetic apparatus (see energy [dynamo], 1866).
A paper mill at Roger's Ford in Chester County, Pennsylvania, produces paper from wood pulp at low cost. Philadelphia inventor Morris L. (Longstreth) Keen, 34, boils wood in water under pressure and will found the American Wood-Paper Company in 1863 with English inventor Hugh Burgess, 29, who with Charles Watt developed a process 3 years ago to cut pulpwood into small chips, boil them in solution with caustic alkali in a closed container under pressure, wash the resulting pulp in water, and bleach it if so desired (see Fourdrinier machine, 1807). Having proved the practicality of this process by having some pages of the weekly London Journal printed on pulp paper, Burgess and Watt arrive at Roger's Ford, Burgess obtains a patent, and he will build a paper mill at Roger's Ford to use the soda process for making paper from wood pulp (see Tilghman, 1867).
The Age begins publication at Melbourne. Australian journalists John and Henry Cooke have started the "journal of politics, commerce, and philanthropy," a printers' cooperative will take over next year, and it will sell the paper in 1856 to Ebenezer Syme for £2,000; Syme's brother David will run it until 1908, building circulation from 2,000 to 130,000 and making The Age one of the world's leading dailies.
Former meat packer Samuel Wilson dies at Troy, New York, July 31 at age 88, but whether or not he was the inspiration for the term "Uncle Sam" will remain a matter of controversy; journalist Anne Newport Royall dies at Washington, D.C., October 1 at age 85.
New York's Astor Library opens February 1 just below Astor Place in Lafayette Street (see 1848). None of the library's 80,000 volumes may be taken from the building, nor can a book even be removed from the shelf unless the visitor is accompanied by a library officer, but by 1873 the library will be averaging 86 visitors per day, 5 percent of them women (see Dewey, 1876; New York Public Library, 1895).
Nonfiction: Walden, or Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation" (1, "Economy"), "Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify" (2), and "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away" (18, "Conclusion"); Système de Politique positive by Auguste Comte, whose "positivism" seeks to expound laws of social evolution, describe the organization and hierarchy of all branches of knowledge, and establish a true science of society as a basis for social planning and regeneration, with "Humanity" becoming the object of religious reverence and love (the first volume appeared in 1851).
Fiction: Hard Times by Charles Dickens; Ten Nights in a Barroom and What I Saw There by Timothy Shay Arthur, now 45, whose work about the evils of drink will be adapted to the stage and be the leading temperance drama for decades (see 1844; "Come Home Father," 1864).
Poetry: "The Charge of the Light Brigade" by Alfred Tennyson glorifies the action by Lord Cardigan at the Battle of Balaclava: "Half a league, half a league, half a league onward,/ Into the Valley of Death rode the Six Hundred."
Painting: The Reaper by Jean-François Millet; Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet (The Meeting) and Homecoming by Gustave Courbet; Christ on the Sea of Galilee by Eugène Delacroix; The Light of the World by Holman Hunt; The Falls of Tacemdama by Frederick Edwin Church, now 28, who has traveled to South America.
Theater: Poverty Is No Disgrace (Bednost ne porok) by Russian playwright Aleksandr Nikolayevich Ostrovsky, 30, 1/25 at Moscow's Maly Theater, with character actor Prov Sadovsky (Prov Mikhailovich Yermilov), 35; The Courier of Lyons by Charles Reade and Tom Taylor 6/26 at the Princess's Theatre, London; One Must Not Live as One Likes (Ne tak zhvi, Kak Khochetsya) by Ostrovsky 12/3 at Moscow's Maly Theater, with Prov Sadovsky.
Playwright-novelist Robert Montgomery Bird dies at Philadelphia January 23 at age 47, having become literary editor and part owner of the North American; playwright-patriot Silvio Pellico dies at Turin January 31 at age 64.
Opera: Henrietta Sontag travels to Mexico City with an Italian company for an engagement at the local opera house, appears in the title role of Lucrezia Borgia, comes down with cholera, and dies June 17 at age 48.
The New York Academy of Music opens 10/2 at the northeast corner of 14th Street and Irving Place with a performance of the 1831 Vincenzo Bellini opera Norma, featuring Italian soprano Giulia Grisi, now 43 (she has appeared earlier in the year at Castle Garden in the title role of the 1833 Donizetti opera Lucrezia Borgia) and her paramour, tenor Giovanni Matteo Mario, 43, backed by a 24-piece orchestra. Built at a cost of $335,000, the new house has private and stage boxes for the city's Old Guard social families; 4,600 seats upholstered in crimson velvet; and an interior painted in white and gold with thousands of gaslights to provide illumination. Its first season will consist of 79 or 80 performances, giving many New Yorkers their first hearing of Mozart's 1787 opera Don Giovanni and Rossini's operas Tancredi (1813), Il Turco in Italia (1814), Otello (1816) and Cenerentola (1817). Fire will destroy the building in 1866, but it will be rebuilt by 1868 and continue for 15 more years to be the chief venue for foreign opera singers visiting New York (see Metropolitan Opera House, 1883; Carnegie Hall, 1891).
Ballet: Gemma 5/3 at the Théâtre de l'Academie Royale de Musique, Paris, with choreography by former ballerina Fanny Cerrito, music by comte Gabrielli Gautier.
First performances: Orpheus (symphonic poem) by Franz Liszt 2/16 at Weimar (originally a new overture to the Gluck opera Orfeo ed Euridice of 1762); Les Préludes (Symphonic Poem No. 3) after Lamartine's Méditationies Poétiques by Franz Liszt 2/23 at Paris; Mazeppa by Liszt 4/16 (Easter Sunday) at Weimar's Grand Ducal Palace; Fest-Lange (Symphonic Poem No. 7) by Liszt 11/9 at Weimar.
Oratorio: L'Enfance du Christ by Hector Berlioz 12/10 at the Salle Herz, Paris.
German composer Robert Schumann attempts suicide February 27 in a fit of depression (he suffered a mental breakdown in 1844 but recovered). Boatmen in the Rhine pick Schumann up after he jumps from a bridge, and he is committed to an asylum 5 days later (see 1856).
Mason & Hamlin Company is founded at Boston by Brookline-born composer's son Henry Mason, 22, and Rome, New York-born inventor Emmons Hamlin, 32, who has worked for a Buffalo company making melodeons (free reed instruments with keyboards). Hamlin has perfected the tone coloring of the reeds to eliminate the thin, reedy, nasal tone of conventional melodeons, making it possible to increase the variety of stops and permit the player to approximate the timbre of a violin, clarinet, flute, oboe, horn, or other instrument. The new company will introduce its first Organ-Harmonium next year, its double bellows will have an unbroken tone that will win popular acceptance, Hamlin will make further improvements, and the company will begin production of pianos in 1881 to become a major competitor to Steinway & Sons, founded last year at New York.
Popular song: "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair" by Stephen C. Foster.
A disposable paper collar patented by sewing machine pioneer Walter Hunt of 1849 safety pin fame will gain great popularity, but only after Hunt's death. He takes pains to patent his new invention and secure a royalty agreement for its production (see 1858).
Imperial layetier (clothes packer) Louis Vuitton, 33, establishes a luggage company; formerly a servant to the empress Eugènie, his enterprise will diversify into other luxury leather goods and survive into the 21st century (see 1898).
The London barbershop Taylor of Old Bond Street opens to compete with the Truefitt shop opened in 1805.
Cabinetmaker Duncan Phyfe dies at New York August 16 at age 86 (approximate).
The Otis safety elevator invented 2 years ago impresses visitors to the world's fair that opens for a second season off New York's Fifth Avenue. The eight-sided, 350-foot Latting Observatory, erected by Warren Latting just north of the Crystal Palace, provides spectacular city views for visitors to the fair, and a steam-powered elevator gets them to the top. Elisha G. Otis has thus far sold only three of his devices, but he has himself hoisted aloft in the cage, orders the hoisting rope to be cut with an axe, and plunges melodramatically earthward as spectators gasp and scream; safety ratchets engage to halt his descent, and Otis emerges from his elevator cage saying, "All safe. All safe, ladies and gentlemen," as he sweeps the stovepipe hat from his head and takes a bow. His stop is abrupt, because his design is still crude, but he works on improvements and next year will invent a new steam engine drive (see 1857). Latting's $100,000 venture fails, since the walls of the reservoir, just to the east of the Crystal Palace, afford views just as sweeping and at no cost whatever.
The Supreme Court confirms Cyrus McCormick's reaper patents in the case of Seymour v. McCormick. Baltimore lawyer Reverdy Johnson, 58, and Washington lawyer Thaddeus Stevens, 62, have represented the reaper inventor (see 1851; Stanton, 1861).
San Francisco butcher Henry Miller pays $33,000 in cash for a herd of cattle (see 1850). Now 31, he will go on to buy directly from ranchers in the Santa Clara and San Joaquin valleys and the San Francisco peninsula (see 1858).
Railroads reach the Mississippi, but cattlemen continue to drive Texas cattle great distances overland as drought persists in the Southwest. The first Texas longhorns to reach New York arrive after a long trek that has made their meat tough and stringy.
Henry David Thoreau describes ice harvesting on Walden Pond: "They told me that in a good day they could get out a thousand tons, which was the yield of about one acre . . . They told me that they had some in the ice-houses at Fresh Pond five years old which was as good as ever . . . The sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, or Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well" (see 1856; Tudor ice ships, 1846).
Dairyman Harvey P. Hood gives up his retail dairy route at Charlestown, Massachusetts, to concentrate on building a supply of quality milk for other Boston area routemen (see 1846). He collects milk each morning from farms near his own place at Derby, New Hampshire, loads the cans into a freight car attached to the one daily train into Charlestown on the Concord Railroad, and sells the milk to peddlers who deliver it throughout Boston (see 1890).
McSorley's Ale-House opens in the ground floor of a five-story red-brick New York tenement at 15 East 7th Street, off Cooper Square, under the proprietorship of Irish-born publican John McSorley, 31, who opens his door each morning at 7, sweeps out, covers the floor with fresh sawdust, serves ale in pewter mugs at 5¢ per mug to the German and Irish brewers, bricklayers, carpenters, slaughterhouse workers, tanners, and teamsters who frequent the neighborhood, serves a free lunch of cheese, soda crackers, and raw onions, lives above the place (he will buy the building in 1864), heats his rooms with a pot-bellied stove, does not serve women, and will own the saloon until his death in 1910 at age 87, when his son will take over.
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