1851 1852 1853 1854 1855 1856 1857 1858 1859 1860
The Crimean War ends February 1 as Russia yields to an Austrian ultimatum and agrees to preliminary peace terms at Vienna. Russia's viceroy in Poland Ivan Fyodorovich Paskevich, Knaz (Prince) Varshchavasky, dies at Warsaw February 1 at age 73. An Ottoman edict guarantees Christian rights, reassuring the European powers, and foreign secretary George Villiers, 4th earl of Clarendon, secures favorable terms for Britain at the Congress of Paris; the Treaty of Paris signed March 30 neutralizes the Black Sea and part of Bessarabia. The Danube is opened to ships of all nations, and the powers promise to respect the independence and integrity of the Ottoman Empire. Russia is obliged to cede Bessarabia to Moldavia, which is recognized along with Walachia as an autonomous state under Ottoman suzerainty. Russian foreign minister Karl Robert Vasilyevich, Graf Nesselrode, signs the treaty but resigns in April at age 75, having seen his efforts to establish Russian influence in the Balkans destroyed; he is succeeded by Aleksandr Mikhailovich Gorchakov, 57, who has served as minister to Austria during the war and whose cousin Mikhail Dmitriyevich Gorchakov served as a general in the conflict. The new foreign minister sets out to establish good relations with France and Prussia.
The Victoria Cross "For Valour" established in January by royal warrant will be Britain's highest military decoration.
Spanish prime minister Baldomero Espartero's cabinet falls in July, and Espartero is replaced as premier by Leopoldo O'Donnell, now 47, whose administration lasts only until October but who remains head of the moderately conservative Liberal Union government and will be prime minister again in 1858 and 1863.
Persian forces occupy the Afghan town of Herat, precipitating a new Anglo-Persian War (see 1855; 1857).
The new British governor general for India Charles Viscount Canning, 43, arrives at Bombay (Mumbai) January 29 with his wife, Charlotte Elizabeth (née Stuart), 38, after a two-month journey from England and reaches Calcutta (Kolkata) a month later. Charlotte Canning has endured her husband's philandering for the past decade and welcomes the opportunity to separate him from his mistress, but he remains distant. Britain annexes the Indian province of Oudh west of Lucknow (see mutiny, 1857).
Britain makes Natal a crown colony July 12 (it has been part of the Cape Colony) (see 1843).
Boers in South Africa establish the South African Republic (Transvaal), with the year-old town of Pretoria as its capital and Marthinus Wessels Pretorius, 37, as president (see 1854; 1877; 1880).
South Australia and Victoria introduce the secret ballot that will become known as the Australian ballot. Secret ballots have been used since ancient Athenian times, but the Australian colonists establish strict rules to prevent fraud (see Britain's Ballot Act, 1872).
A beautiful 21-year-old Chinese imperial concubine gives birth to a son fathered by the Qing (Ch'ing) emperor Xianfeng (Hsien-feng), he makes her empress under the name Xiaoqin, and she immediately gains control of the throne, beginning a ruthless and reactionary regime that will continue until her death in 1908. Chinese officials board a Chinese-owned ship October 8, and they seize and imprison 12 men on charges of piracy, smuggling, and involvement in the opium trade; registered in Hong Kong, the Arrow has flown the Union Jack, the emperor refuses direct negotiations with European envoys, and the incident precipitates what will be called a Second Opium War (see 1857).
Nashville, Tennessee-born filibuster (adventurer) William Walker, 32, sacks the Nicaraguan capital Granada. Slight of build (he weighs barely 100 pounds) and far from handsome, Walker is normally shy and reticent, but he led an armed force of 57 men into the country last year at the invitation of a native revolutionary faction. He envisions a Central American military empire based on slave labor, agricultural development, and a cross-isthmus canal, but when he tries to invade Costa Rica he encounters an army of 2,500 men led by Juan Santamaria and is defeated April 11 in the Battle of Rivas (Santamaria is killed). Walker nevertheless gains U.S. recognition of his regime in May and has himself inaugurated as president in July (but see 1857).
The Ley Lerdo (Lerdo Law) published by the Mexican government in June requires the Church to sell its properties (see Ley Juárez, 1855). Named for finance minister Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, 29, an associate of Benito Juárez, it is intended to break up large landed estates and create a stable middle class by enabling more Mexicans to acquire property, but it contains no threat of confiscation (see constitution, 1857).
The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 was a "swindle," says Sen. Charles Sumner (D. Mass.) May 20 during a Senate debate on the admission of Kansas to the Union. Now 45, Sumner inveighs against the act's authors Stephen A. Douglas and Andrew P. Butler, 62, (D. S.C.) condemning the "harlot slavery" and the "incoherent phrases" spoken in its behalf by Sen. Butler. Butler's nephew Rep. Preston (Smith) Brooks, 38, (D. S.C.) physically assaults Sumner 2 days later as he sits in the Senate Chamber, beating him so badly that he will not be able to resume his duties for 3 years; Massachusetts voters will defiantly reelect Sumner next year.
Democrats nominate former secretary of state James Buchanan as their candidate for president, refusing to consider a second term for the slavery sympathizer Franklin Pierce who has occupied the White House since 1853. Now 65, Buchanan receives 174 electoral votes to 114 for Republican John C. Frémont, who is vigorously supported by lawyer Abraham Lincoln but whose political opponents spread rumors that he is a Roman Catholic (he is actually an Episcopalian) and a cannibal as well. Lincoln's many speeches are widely reprinted, gaining him a national reputation (see 1858).
Sen. John M. Clayton of 1850 Clayton-Bulwer Treaty fame dies at Dover, Del., November 9 at age 60.
Britain's House of Commons receives a petition in January from the Madras Native Association alleging that officers of the East India Company have been allowed free rein to torture and harass subject peoples; if accused or convicted of brutality or crimes against Indians they are allowed extended appeals, and they allegedly use whatever means they have at their disposal to use extortion in collecting revenues. A parliamentary investigating commission sits at Madras (Chennai) for 3 months but the investigation is cursory and the petition is dismissed for lack of evidence (see politics, 1857).
Boone County, Kentucky, slave Margaret Garner, 23, and her husband steal a carriage in January and flee across the ice-covered Ohio River from Covington to Cincinnati with their four children. White bounty hunters burst into their shack January 28, she seizes a knife and says she would rather die than be returned with her children to the slave quarters of Maplewood plantation, she slits the throat of her 3-year-old daughter before she can be subdued, and the horror story makes headlines nationwide. She will be sold down the river in Mississippi and die there of typhoid fever in 1858.
Social reformer George Henry Evans dies at Granville, New Jersey, February 2 at age 50, having campaigned against slavery, imprisonment for debt, and monopolies (including the Bank of the United States) while urging equal rights for women and free homesteads in the West.
Lawrence, Kansas, is sacked May 21 by pro-slavery "border ruffians" who have poured into the territory by the thousands in a move to pack the territorial legislature of "bleeding Kansas" with men who will vote to make Kansas a slave state under terms of Stephen A. Douglas's "popular sovereignty" idea. The Kansas territorial legislature indicts Free Soil leaders for treason, and pitched battles ensue between free-soilers and slavery proponents (although some of the raids, lootings, lynchings, and murders arise out of claim-jumping, not the slavery issue).
Kansas abolitionist John Brown, 56, of Osawatomie and his followers attack pro-slavery men along Pottawatomie Creek May 24. They hack five of the slavery advocates to death in revenge for the sacking of Lawrence (see Harper's Ferry, 1859).
South Carolina governor James Hopkins Adams, 44, urges repeal of the 1807 law against trading in slaves.
More than 20 people are killed in an anti-immigrant riot at Louisville, Kentucky, August 6 ("Black Monday").
Arctic explorer Rear Admiral Sir John Ross, Royal Navy (ret.), dies at London August 30 at age 79.
Banque Credit Suisse is founded at Zürich.
Andrew Carnegie, 20, makes his first investment at the encouragement of his new employer and buys 10 shares of Adams Express stock at $50 per share. The Scottish-born railway telegrapher has taken a position as secretary to the Pennsylvania Railroad's Pittsburgh division superintendent Thomas Alexander Scott, 32, and by 1863 his $500 investment will be returning $1,500 per year in dividends (see 1865).
Catskill, New York-born San Francisco entrepreneur Henry Meiggs, 43, absconds October 5 aboard the barque America. Meiggs chartered the packet ship Albany in 1849 to carry New York lumber to California, sold the cargo at a large profit, hired hundreds of men into the woods to cut down trees, built the largest sawmill in the territory, and made a fortune in lumber and land speculations. A credit crisis has plunged him heavily into debt, his brother has won election as city comptroller, Meiggs has obtained a book of city notes signed in advance by the mayor and the outgoing comptroller, he has received upwards of $365,000 for the notes, the city does not discover its loss until October 16, and by that time Meiggs is far out in the Pacific en route to Chile, having taken his family and all his worldly goods, leaving behind obligations that total more than $800,000. He will be a fugitive from justice for the rest of his career (see transportation [railroad], 1861).
I. M. Singer & Company offers a $50 allowance on old sewing machines turned in for new Singer machines—the first trade-in allowances (see 1851). Singer's Edward Clark has established 14 branch stores with pretty demonstrators, he follows his trade-in offer with a pioneer installment-buying (hire-purchase) plan that allows $5 monthly rental fees to be applied toward ultimate purchase price, and Singer sales will increase by 200 percent within a year (see 1861).
Quebec-born fur trader-settler Solomon L. Juneau dies November 14 at age 63 on the Menominee reservation some 40 miles northwest of Milwaukee.
Marshall Field, 22, moves to Chicago to begin a career that will make him a legend among merchants. The Pittsfield, Massachusetts, store clerk turns down his employer's offer of a partnership, takes a job clerking for the dry goods firm Cooley, Wadsworth, works 18 hours a day at a yearly salary of $400, and by sleeping in the store and buying no clothes except overalls saves half his pay (see 1861).
The whaling ship E. L. B. Jennings returns to New Bedford, Mass., with 2,500 barrels of sperm oil after a 4½-year voyage.
Corliss Engine Co. is founded at Providence, R.I., by inventor George H. Corliss, whose works will grow to employ 1,000 men (see 1851). Cotton mills in Scotland will be importing his reciprocating steam engines within 3 years, and by 1864 they will be manufactured under license at Bolton, England, as well as at Providence (see Centennial Exposition, 1876).
The Declaration of Paris signed by the major powers March 30 pledges the signatories not to issue letters of marque under which pirates and privateers have been able to seize ships and their cargoes. The advent of steam-powered ships has made it easy to pursue and apprehend pirates, and few pirate crews remain.
The Wabash and Erie Canal opens after 24 years of construction marked by loss of life to cholera and loss of money to embezzlers. The 458-mile canal extending south to Evansville on the Ohio River is the largest ever dug in America, but the section below Terre Haute will close in 4 years and the rest in 1874 as railroads make the canal obsolete.
The first railway bridge to span the Mississippi opens April 21 between Rock Island, Illinois, and Davenport, Iowa. Built of wood resting on stone piers, the bridge is tested April 22 by a train of three locomotives and eight passenger cars. The steamboat Effie Afton rams the 1,582-foot bridge within 2 weeks, but before the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific can sue for damages the steamboat company files suit, claiming that the bridge has blocked its right of way. The courts will call the bridge a public nuisance, but lawyer Abraham Lincoln will persuade the Supreme Court to uphold its legality.
An excursion train carrying Philadelphia schoolchildren plows into a scheduled train at Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, July 17, and 67 are killed, most of them children; more than 100 are injured, many of them severely. Some railroads have been using the telegraph since 1851 to signal positions of trains, but in this case there was no communication.
The Illinois Central Railroad line opens September 21 between Chicago and Cairo, Illinois, creating competition for riverboat traffic.
British engineers in Egypt complete a rail line between Alexandria and Cairo, enabling passengers to avoid a 12-hour journey up or down the Nile (see 1841); they will extend the line to Suez in 1858 (see canal, 1869).
The Bessemer converter de-carbonizes molten pig iron with a blast of cold air to permit mass production of steel, which up to now has been a specialty item made in 50-pound batches. English engineer Henry Bessemer, 42, has previously invented a perforated stamp that can only be used once, saving the British postal service huge amounts of money and making Bessemer a fortune. He has also designed a bullet-shaped cannon projectile but has found that ordinary cast-iron cannon are too weak for his rotating artillery shell; this has spurred him to devise a converter in which the air's oxygen combines with carbon in the iron and dissipates it in the form of carbon dioxide. Bessemer's first British licensee is the 97-year-old Welsh firm Dowlais Iron Company, run since 1852 by Lady Charlotte Guest; by 1865 it will be one of the world's leading steelmakers. His Swedish licensee Göran Göransson will help Bessemer improve the process, which requires ore that is relatively free of such impurities as phosphorus but will bring down the price of steel and permit its use in many new applications (see Kelly, 1857; Krupp, 1862; Thomas process, 1875).
A regenerative smelting furnace invented by German engineer Friedrich Siemens, 30, permits production of ductile steel for boiler plate. Siemens works in England at his brother Wilhelm's works; his invention will lead to development of the open-hearth process for making steel, an "open" process that permits adding additional ingredients to a furnace without shutting it down for a new batch and enabling it to produce more varieties of steel (see 1861).
A mauve dye produced from coal tar by English chemistry student William Henry Perkin, 18, is the world's first synthetic dye. Hoping to find a synthetic quinine that will break the Dutch monopoly in cinchona bark, Perkin winds up with a disappointing tarry black solution, but when he dips a piece of silk into the solution he finds it is a stable dye, the first ever made from anything but a root, bark, or berry (see Fritzsche, 1841). Perkin has been working as assistant to German chemist August Wilhelm von Hofmann, 38, who was brought to London's Royal College of Medicine by the queen's consort Prince Albert. Von Hofmann will persuade young Perkin to develop a German aniline dye industry; synthetic dyes will wreck the market for indigo and for the madder roots used to produce the dye alizarine (see 1857).
French hydraulic engineer Henri-Philibert-Gaspard Darcy, 53, at Dijon discovers the mathematical relationship that governs the flow of groundwater, establishing a formula (Darcy's law) that will yield many practical (and sophisticated theoretical) derivations for calculating the amount of water flowing through an aquifer (or petroleum flowing through limestone or sandstone). Charged with designing and constructing a municipal water-supply system, he has factored in the surface roughness of the pipe material in his studies, which have been directed at purifying water by filtration through sand.
Gunsmiths Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson reunite at Springfield, Massachusetts, and introduce the revolver that Wesson has developed while working as a supervisor at the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company (see 1855). Their Smith & Wesson Model 1 is the only revolver with an open cylinder (Wesson has bought the patent for that from inventor Rollin White) and the only one to use a metallic cartridge. The gun and its cartridge gain immediate popularity, demand will be so great by 1859 that the partners will have to build a new factory on Stockbridge St. near Springfield's U.S. Armory, and although production at first is only for the U.S. markets the company will later receive orders from most European countries, including one for 200,000 revolvers from the Russian government (see 1861; Henry rifle, 1860).
Mathematician Nikolai I. Lobachevski dies at Kazan, Russia, February 24 at age 63; physicist Amadeo Avogadro, conte di Quaregna, at his native Turin July 9 at age 80.
"On the Structure and Motion of Glaciers" by physicist John Tyndall and English biologist T. H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley, 32, is based on studies the two have made in the Alps, where Tyndall has been visiting since 1849.
Geologist-clergyman William Buckland dies at London at age 62, having done pioneering work in paleontology while denying theories of evolution. He has insisted to the end that a biblical deluge was responsible for all erosion and sedimentation on Earth.
Neanderthal man fossils turn up in the Neander Valley of the German Rhineland near Düsseldorf. Johann C. Fuhrott discovers a human skull in a stratum of rock clearly thousands of years old; French surgeon Paul Broca, 32, world's leading authority on skull structure, maintains that the skull is from an early form of man, quite different in some ways from modern man. He disputes Berlin physician Rudolf Virchow, 35, who says that the skull is from an ordinary savage with a congenital skull malformation or bone disease (see Virchow, 1858). The site indicates that this caveman knew the use of fire, buried his dead with ceremony, but hunted with no more than a wooden spear (see Cro-Magnon, 1868).
German scientist Theodore Bilharz, 31, identifies the parasitic worm that produces kidney and liver malfunctions in the deadly snail-fever disease schistosomiasis (bilharzia). He has come to Cairo to study the disease but will die of typhus in 1862. Bilharzia will continue to affect 70 percent of rural Egyptian men and be an important factor in keeping Egypt's life expectancy to 52 long after other countries have increased theirs to 70 and more.
Pioneer bacteriologist Agostino Bassi dies at Lodi in Lombardy February 8 at age 82.
The Hatt-I-Humayun edict issued February 18 by the Ottoman sultan Abdul Mejid guarantees Christian subjects life, honor, and property, ends the civil power of Christian Church heads, abolishes torture, reforms prisons, guarantees full liberty of conscience, opens all civil offices to every subject of the sultan, makes Christians liable for military service but permits them to buy exemption, and permits foreigners to acquire property under certain circumstances. Austrian, British, and French ambassadors have forced the sweeping reforms on Constantinople following the Turkish defeat in the Crimean War.
A Chinese mandarin in Guangxi (Kwang-si) Province has 42-year-old Roman Catholic missionary August Chapdelaine beheaded February 29 (see politics, 1857).
French authorities send a formal letter of protest to the Vietnamese government at Hue as executions of Roman Catholic missionaries increase at the insistence of the emperor Tu Duc (see 1847; 1857).
The first kindergarten in America opens at Watertown, Wis. (see Froebel, 1837). Hamburg-born educator Margarethe Schurz (née Meyer), 24, came to Wisconsin from New York last year with her Cologne-born husband, Carl, and has started the school for children of other immigrants (see Peabody, 1960).
Electrical engineer Josiah Latimer Clark invents and patents a "double-bell" insulator for telegraph wire (see pneumatic messaging, 1853); he organizes a company that will be involved in manufacturing and laying more than 100,000 miles of submarine cable worldwide (see 1858).
The Atlantic Telegraph Co. organized by Cyrus W. Field, John Watkins Brett, and Charles Tilston Bright proposes to lay a cable between Ireland and Newfoundland, with Bright to be chief engineer (see 1854; Bright, 1853). They sign an agreement ". . . to exert ourselves with the view, and for the purpose of, forming a company for establishing and working of electric telegraphic communication between Newfoundland and Ireland, such company to be called the Atlantic Telegraph Company . . . " Frederic N. Gisborne charters the screw steamer Propontis out of London to lay a cable July 8 and 9 between Cape Ray on Prince Edward Island and Aspey Bay, Newfoundland; he engages the steamer Victoria August 10 to lay a cable between Cape Ray on Prince Edward Island and Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, but Field discovers in December that the cable under the Gulf of St. Lawrence has broken, he hires 22-year-old Nova Scotia telegraph superintendent Alexander M. McKay to replace the superintendent who has resigned, Gisborne withdraws from the Atlantic cable project after concluding that West, Brett, and Bright are planning to cheat him, and when McKay arrives at St. John's he finds that not a single section of the line in Newfoundland is in working order. The new Atlantic Telegraph Co. gives the London-based Gutta Percha Co. the task of manufacturing the cable's core: 119.5 tons of copper are to be drawn out into 17,500 miles of wire, seven strands of which are to be combined to make a core 2,500 nautical miles in length covered with 300 tons of gutta percha for insulation. Some 315,000 miles of steel wire are to be combined into about 45,000 miles of outer sheathing for added strength, half of the wire to be made by the English firm Glass, Elliot (Richard Glass and coal miner's son George Elliot, 41), the other half by R. S. Newall & Co. (see 1857).
The paddle-driven steam tug Goliah chartered by telegraph pioneer John Watkins Brett and his brother Jacob lays a 25-mile copper telegraph cable encased in gutta percha across the Straits of Dover to Cap Gris Nez August 28. S. W. Silver & Co. of Stratford, East London, devised a method 5 years ago of extruding the gum resin gutta percha for use in giving wire electrical insulation and making it waterproof (see golf ball, 1848). One-half inch in diameter, the cable has lead weights attached at frequent intervals to make sure that it sinks, it survives long enough for messages to be exchanged between J. W. Brett and France's president Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, but rubbing against rocks wears off the gutta percha and a fisherman the next day finds what he thinks is a new variety of seaweed, confirming that the cable has broken (see 1851).
Western Union Telegraph Co. is chartered as an amalgamation of small U.S. companies under the direction of Ezra Cornell and Hiram Sibley, who financed Samuel F. B. Morse in 1844. Sibley organized the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Co. in 1851, its general superintendent is New York-born telegraphy pioneer Anson Stager, 31, and Sibley immediately appoints him to the same position at Western Union, moves him to its Cleveland headquarters, and charges him with rearranging its various lines, strengthening the organization, and establishing good relations with the railroads. Sibley becomes president of the new Western Union, whose facilities will be greatly expanded (see 1859).
Harper's Weekly begins publication at New York, where it will continue until 1915 (seeHarper's Monthly, 1850; Thomas Nast, 1869).
Frankfurter Zeitung has its beginnings in the finance and investment market letter Frankfurter Geschäftsberichte published at Frankfurt-am-Main by textile manufacturer and banker Leopold Sonnemann, who will change the paper's name in 1859.
Le Figaro begins biweekly publication at Paris (see 1826). Local journalist Jean Hippolyte Auguste Villemessant, 42, will make the paper a daily beginning in 1866 (see Coty, 1924).
Nouveau Dictionnaire de la Langue Française by French lexicographer Pierre Larousse, 39, contains Larousse's dictum, "Un dictionnaire sans examples est un squelette" (skeleton).
Nonfiction: The Rise of the Dutch Republic by Massachusetts-born historian John Lathrop Motley, 42, who has served as secretary to the U.S. legation at St. Petersburg.
Metaphysical philosopher-logician Sir William Hamilton dies at Edinburgh May 6 at age 68.
Fiction: It's Never Too Late to Mend by Charles Reade details abuses that include torture in English prisons; Rudin by Ivan Turgenev; Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp by Harriet Beecher Stowe expands on the author's antislavery views.
Poetry: The Panorama by John Greenleaf Whittier contains the poems "Maud Muller" and "Barefoot Boy"; "A Farewell" by Charles Kingsley, is a satiric poem containing the line, "Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever."
Poet Heinrich Heine dies at Paris February 17 at age 58. He became paralyzed in 1848, and the French shopgirl he married in 1841 has cared for him ever since.
Juvenile: Snowflakes and Sunbeams; or, The Young Fur Traders by Edinburgh-born author R. M. (Robert Michael) Ballantyne, 31, whose adventure story is based on his experiences with the Hudson's Bay Company in North America; Beechcroft by Charlotte M. Yonge, whose ideas about feminine girlhood and young womanhood reflect those deemed appropriate for upper middle-class girls.
Painting: The Blind Girl by John Everett Millais; Sheepfold by Moonlight (drawing) by Jean-François Millet; La Source and Madame Moitessier, Seated by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, now 76.
Sculpture: Il Penseroso by Hiram Powers; Puck by Harriet Goodhue Hosmer meets with such success that 50 replicas are sold at $1,000 each.
New York photographer Matthew Brady advertises his "photographs, ambrotypes, and daguerreotypes" in the New York Herald (see 1850). He makes inventive use of type at a time when other advertisers conform to the newspaper industry's standard of all-agate type in the same size (see 1864).
Coventry-born actress (Alice) Ellen Terry makes her stage debut in April at age 9 in a London production of Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale staged by Charles Kean, with whose company she will remain until 1859.
Laura Keene moves into a new New York theater—Laura Keene's Theater—as manager and leading lady.
U.S. playwrights receive their first legal copyright protection under a new law that releases a flood of dramatic productions, but producers continue to put on British and European dramas and musical works without compensation to their authors.
The Wurlitzer Company founded at Cincinnati by German-born bank clerk Rudolph Wurlitzer, 25, will become world-famous for its organs. A grandson of the German violinmaker Hans Adam Wurlitzer, the young entrepreneur rents three small rooms and begins importing musical instruments while continuing to clerk at the Heidelbach and Seasongood Bank (see 1861).
Moscow's 80-year-old Bolshoi Theater gets a new 2,200-seat opera house that opens in Petrosky Street to take the place of the house that opened in 1825 but was destroyed by fire 3 years ago.
Ballet: Danish ballerina Lucile Grahn, now 37, retires from dancing and will serve as ballet mistress, first with the Leipzig State Theater, then with the Munich Court Opera (see 1836).
Composer Adolphe Adam dies at Paris May 3 at age 52, having written 71 operas; Robert Schumann dies in his German insane asylum July 29 at age 46.
Popular songs: "Darling Nelly Gray" by Otterbein College student Benjamin Russell Hanby at Westerville, Ohio, whose song does much to arouse sympathy for America's slaves; "Gentle Annie" by Stephen C. Foster.
Former heavyweight boxing champion Yankee Sullivan is found dead in his San Francisco jail cell May 31 at age 45, having been arrested and jailed as an underground suspect.
Parliament enacts legislation ending the ability of Britons to be married without prior notice by the blacksmith at Gretna Green in Scotland.
The Burberry raincoat introduced by English tailor Thomas Burberry, 21, of Basingstoke is made of water-repellent fabric rather than rubberized fabric or oilskin; he calls the fabric gabardine, he will set up a factory in New Street in 1868, and his coats will vie with those made by Macintosh and Aquascutum (see 1823; 1851; Tielocken, 1910).
Mauve (purple) becomes the color of fashion as the French empress Eugènie decides that the color matches her eyes.
The cage crinoline patented by a French-born American named Tavernier consists of lightweight, flexible, "watchspring" steel hoops, protected by rubber inserts riveted to vertical tapes. Easier to wear and much more efficient to produce, it will eventually bring an end to the fashion of hoopskirts now worn by so many women (see 1875).
The brand name "Fruit of the Loom" adopted by a Warwick, Rhode Island, textile mill will survive into the 21st century as a brand name for underwear.
Cigarettes are introduced at London clubs by Crimean War veterans, who have discovered them in Russia (see 1843). The new smokes are generally considered effete and effeminate, but Crimean veteran Robert Gloag opens the first British cigarette factory (see Philip Morris, 1858).
London architects enlarge the 20-year-old Buckingham Palace to give it a new south wing with a ballroom 110 feet long.
Balmoral Castle is completed in Scotland's Grampian region on the right bank of the River Dee. Queen Victoria's prince consort Albert acquired the property 4 years ago and has had its small castle replaced by a modern granite structure designed in Scottish baronial style to provide a royal residence in summer and during the grouse shooting season.
Swiss muleteer-stonemason Johannes Badrutt arrives at St. Moritz, is struck with its beauty, sees an opportunity, and leases the century-old, 30-room Pension Faller at 2,000 francs per year. He will buy it in 1858 for 58,500 francs, install flush toilets, and reopen it as the Engadiner Kulm (At the Summit of the Engadine)—the first hotel in St. Moritz Dorf (there are no other places to stay except boarding houses). Badrutt will make a wager in the early 1860s with some English guests who doubt that St. Moritz has sunny weather in winter, promising them free hotel space until spring and reimbursement of their return-trip travel expenses to London if there is as much as a single winter day without sunshine (he knows their bar bills will be enough to compensate for any loss). As he expects, they will tell their friends about St. Moritz, the town will become a winter resort, and business at the Kulm Hotel will boom as the English introduce the sports of skiing, curling, and, in 1880, bobsledding (the Kulm will expand to have 220 guest rooms in three buildings and an outstanding restaurant; see Palace Hotel, 1896).
The hurricane that strikes New Orleans August 10 is the most powerful in living memory. The Crescent City is surrounded by water, much of it is below sea level, and it has been vulnerable to hurricanes since its founding.
Xhosa prophets in South Africa encourage tribesmen to believe that legendary heroes are about to return and drive out the whites with whom they have warred for years. The Xhosa slaughter their cattle; two-thirds of the natives will starve to death in the next few years.
Gail Borden receives a patent for his condensed milk, which contains sugar to inhibit bacterial growth (see 1853); unsweetened condensed milk will not be canned satisfactorily until 1885. Made from skim milk devoid of all fats and of certain necessary food factors, his product will contribute to rickets in young working-class children (see Pekelharing, 1905). Borden's liquid milk gets a cold shoulder from New York customers accustomed to watered milk doctored with chalk to make it white and molasses to make it seem creamy (see 1841; 1855). He abandons the factory he has set up with two partners at Wolcottville, Connecticut, and sells a half-share in his patent to one of his partners (but see 1857).
Upstate New York-born U.S. envoy Townsend Harris, 52, awaits recognition at Shimoda and has a calf butchered for his table, the first calf ever slaughtered in Japan. A New York merchant dispatched by President Pierce to follow up Commodore Perry's opening of Japan and the first U.S. consul general to that country, Harris has arrived at Shimoda in August. He also has a cow milked—the first cow's milk ever obtained for human consumption in Japan (see 1872).
Baking powder becomes available commercially for the first time in the United States.
The German Mills American Oatmeal Factory opened at Akron, Ohio, by German-born grocer Ferdinand Schumacher, 33, employs water-powered millstones to grind 3,600 pounds of oatmeal per day. U.S. farmers grow 150 million bushels of oats per year and while most goes to feed horses, Schumacher will find a large market for his oatmeal among other German immigrants and his mills will become Akron's leading enterprise as he makes himself America's "Oatmeal King" (see 1875).
Boston exports more than 130,000 tons of "fine, clear" ice from Massachusetts lakes and ponds as 363 U.S. ships sail from various ports with a total of 146,000 tons of ice, up from 65,000 on 175 ships in 1846 (see 1880). Onetime ice harvester and explorer Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth dies August 31 at age 34, having returned from Oregon in 1836 and never gone back.
Mechanical ice-making is pioneered by Australian inventor James Harrison, an emigrant from Scotland whose ether compressor makes it possible to produce beer even in hot weather (see Perkins, 1834; Gorrie, 1842; Carré, 1858; Linde, 1873).
Schlitz Beer has its origin at Milwaukee, where German-born bookkeeper Joseph Schlitz, 25, takes over the 7-year-old August Krug brewery following the death of his employer, Krug. Schlitz will marry Krug's widow, change the name of the brewery, and increase production (see 1874).
German botanist Nathaniel Pringsheim, 33, observes sperm entering ova, thereby advancing human understanding of the reproductive process (see 1779; Hertwig, 1875).
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