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After Stephenson’s Rocket in 1829 (the first steam locomotive), Western Europe was already a dense railway junction, while in China, the first railway was laid in 1876, and built by Europeans. The Chinese government had it removed the following year…

Bologna. Guglielmo Marconi is born. His father, Giuseppe, is a wealthy landowner; his mother, Annie Jameson, is a young and determined Irish woman. The Marconi family is of extremely poor origins, with his grandfather being the first wealthy man. Annie, on the other hand, comes

Peace returns to Europe; under Bismarck’s harsh terms, France must cede two of its richest provinces: Alsace and Lorraine. France would never forget, and 44 years later it would go to war to reclaim them, dragging the entire world into the First World War and

China. Taiping Rebellion (a para-Christian society of God-worshippers). The Taiping rebels are definitively defeated in 1871. The human cost is staggering: between 1850 and 1871, more than 20 million people die.

The Bell family (including Alexander Graham Bell) moves from Scotland to Canada, near Montreal. Alexander finds work in Boston teaching the deaf to speak. Teaching the deaf to speak is and will remain his primary goal in life and career. Incidentally, he will also be

The Italian Eugenio Beltrami discovers the projective and conformal representations of hyperbolic geometry (later called the Klein representation and the Poincare model respectively)

French blacksmith Michaux makes a bicycle with brakes and pedals, wooden wheels and a solid steel frame

Thomas Alva Edison is in New Orleans, dreaming of boarding a steamship to Brazil. He meets an old sailor returning from Brazil, who waves his skinny hand in his face and says to Al, “There’s no country like the United States for a young man

Appomattox, Virginia. The 28,000 survivors of the Army of Northern Virginia march past the Army of the Potomac. General Chamberlain mutters an order, and the Unionists spring to the present-arms. Then the Confederates lay their rifles on the ground in a bundle. Then, on command,

Grant wrote to Lee, firmly but politely demanding surrender. Lee responded to his Confederate colleagues: “Not yet.”

Giovanni Battista Donati and William Huggins were the first scientists to discover concrete clues about the composition of comets. They analyzed the spectrum of Comet Temple, and then of Comet Temple Tuttle, and found traces of carbon molecules. They didn’t know it, but they had

Washington passes a law granting all heads of families or those at least 21 years old who had not taken up arms against the Union a right to a plot of land at the symbolic price of $1.25 per acre ($2.50 if not already occupied).

The Union Navy boldly manages to push four warships past New Orleans, up the Mississippi.

William Crookes, inspired by the discovery of cesium using Kirchoff and Bunsen’s spectrograph, discovered thallium by observing the bright green line in its spectrum. The name thallium derives from the Greek word for the green shoots of new plants.

Garibaldi crosses the Strait of Messina

London. Parliament passes the Government of India Act: by law, the rights of the East India Company are transferred to the crown. It marks the end of a long history of commercial imperialism in India, a history that began on December 31, 1600, a full

Eddie, the three-year-old son of Abraham Lincoln and his wife Mary, dies of pulmonary tuberculosis.

Piedmont. Unlike the rest of Italy, Piedmont did not experience a return to more conservative elements. The statute remained in force, and with it the parliamentary regime. Also beginning, at the end of 1849, was the discussion of the Sicardi Law, which affected the income

Porta Tosa (later Porta Vittoria) is demolished. It was one of the 11 gates in Milan’s Spanish walls, and opened the road to the East. It was named after a medieval bas-relief now on display at the Sforza Castle Museum of Ancient Art. The bas-relief

Bologna. Gorzkowski’s Austrians execute Garibaldi’s men Ugo Bassi and Giovanni Livraghi, captured in Comacchio.

Vienna. The deposed Ferdinand (princes and generals forced him to abdicate in favor of his nephew Franz Joseph) presides over the Great Victory Festival. “In Honor of Our Brave Soldiers in Italy,” a march composed by Johann Strauss in homage to Radetzky, is performed. It

Veneto. The papal army (10,000 men), led by Giovanni Durando, a former Piedmontese exile, reaches advanced positions in northern Austrian Veneto. There are also 7,000 volunteers from Lazio led by the fervent republican Andrea Ferrari. These volunteers are engaged in battle by the Austrians on

Milan. A proclamation is circulating from a young engineer and physics professor, Giovanni Cantoni, a frequent visitor to the Duomo café, a Jewish family with Mazzinian sympathies. The proclamation recalls the American War of Independence and their abstention from buying tea, and calls on Milanese

Liberia proclaims independence. The Republic of Liberia, a colony of the American Colonization Society, declares its independence. Under pressure from Great Britain, the United States reluctantly agrees to grant autonomy, making this West African state the first independent democratic republic in African history. A constitution

Linus Yale opens a lock shop in Newport, New York, specializing in bank locks. He goes on to hold dozens of lock patents and invent the lock as we know it today.

Camille Pissarro (or Pizzarro), an impressionist painter, was born in the East Indies

Franz Schubert dies

The Frenchman Joseph Nicephore Niepce obtains the first photographic image: it is on a metal plate made sensitive to light.

Karl Friedrich Gauss suggests contacting the Selenites (the inhabitants of the Moon) by cutting trees in the Siberian forest in the shape of a right-angled triangle with squares on the sides to represent the Pythagorean theorem.

Jubilee celebrated by Leo XII

Raw cotton was Britain’s major import, coming mostly from the United States, India, and Egypt. The sugar trade had provided the original capital for the Industrial Revolution, but much of Britain’s prosperity in the nineteenth century was based on cotton: easy to process, a cheap

Brazil officially declares its independence

Gregor Mendel was born in Czechoslovakia (Austro-Hungarian Empire)

Treaty of Maumee Rapids: All remaining Native Americans in Ohio are placed on reservations

The Tambora volcano, on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, violently erupts 100km3 of rock (molten and pulverized) equivalent to 5 million ocean liners, killing 92,000 people and triggering, with the dust emitted, a global cooling

Battle of Bautzen. At first, everything goes according to Napoleon’s plan: fierce fighting along the entire front, spreading northward.

Russia. Even by Russian standards, exceptional cold is arriving, causing the final disintegration of most French units east of the Russian border.

Northeast of Smolensk, Russia. The Russians desperately and successfully defend a key crossroads near Lubin, crucial for communications and supplies to Moscow. It is one of the crucial moments of the entire campaign.

Austria declares war on France. This leaves Russia no choice but to declare war. Napoleon is furious and from this moment no longer believes in an alliance with Russia. The war ends with Austrian defeat. This is the Peace of Schönbrunn in October 1809.

Charles Darwin

Modena. Napoleon Bonaparte stays in an apartment at the end of Via Ganaceto. He will return on October 15th, to a triumphant welcome, just before Modena’s union with the Cisalpine Republic (which would later become the Italian Republic in 1802).

Robespierre’s Terror

London. Jacob Sweppe, a Swiss emigrant, opens a carbonated drinks company that still bears his name. Joseph Priestley, a few years earlier, had dedicated himself to the study of “fixed air” (now known as carbon dioxide). His studies, begun in 1767, culminated in 1772 with

The adventurer Benjamin Thompson, who moved to Europe, scientifically disproved the theory of caloric as a substance that flows and transmits heat.

The American Revolution (War of Independence) codifies liberal democracy, later copied by the Declaration of Rights of the French Revolution

Rudolf Eric Raspe publishes “Strange Journeys: The Campaigns and Adventures of Baron Munchausen”

Emmanuel Kant writes: Individual men, but also entire peoples, think little of the fact that, while they pursue their ends, each according to his own judgment, and often against one another, they often proceed without realizing it, towards the purpose of nature, which is unknown

Man flies over Paris. In Paris, French inventor Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent, Marquis d’Arlandes, make the first human flight in a hot air balloon, covering five miles in 25 minutes. The fabric balloon was made by French brothers Jacques Etienne and Joseph

Brothers Etienne and Joseph Montgolpier built a hot air balloon in Paris and flew it first with animals and then, on October 15, 1783, with Etienne Montgolfier aboard, tethered to the ground by a 25-meter cable. A few weeks later, on November 21, Rozier and

JH Lammata investigates non-Euclidean geometries

Thai King Rama I moves the capital to what will become Bang Kok (City of Olives) but which for Thais is Krug Thep (City of Angels but whose real name is: Krung Thep is Krungthep Mahanakhon Amorn Rattanakosin Mahintara Yudthaya Mahadilok Pohp Noparat Rajathanee Bureerom

Yorktown, Virginia. The first French naval vessel appears in the bay.

Jons Jacobs Berzelius was born in Linköping, Sweden. He made fundamental contributions to chemistry. He discovered cerium, thorium, selenium, and silicon, and is the father of the current abbreviated notation of chemical elements.

Although the benefits of consuming lemons to prevent scurvy among sailors were already well known, one in three sailors still suffered from scurvy. By 1807, when lemons (mostly Sicilian, from English-owned plantations) were aboard every British ship, the scurvy case rate dropped to one in

Cooktown, Australia. Captain James Cook is the first European to discover coral reefs. He is sailing off the east coast of Australia when his ship, the Endeavour, runs aground on something, far from the coast and in very deep water. It is a nearly vertical

Amadeus Mozart’s first trip to Italy (Verona, Mantua, Cremona, Milan, Bologna, Florence, Rome, Naples) where he received the title of Knight and the Order of the Golden Spur from the Pope.

George Washington purchased 50,000 acres of land in Mason, Putnam, and Kanawha counties in what is now West Virginia.

Cook’s voyages in the Pacific: he discovers Australia, New Caledonia, Tonga and Hawaii and reaches the record latitude of 71 degrees South without finding the Antarctic continent.

During Russia’s three wars against the Ottoman Empire, the Tsarist armies occupied what is now Romania.

Catherine the Great becomes Tsarina after the plot that led to the dismissal and arrest of Peter III, considered by many to be incompetent.

The Russian Tsar’s troops arrived to occupy Berlin, the capital of Prussia. Only the death of Tsarina Elizabeth and the radical change of policy of her successor, Peter III, saved Prussia. Russia, however, surprised the Western nations with its military power.

Anglican priest and mathematician Thomas Bayes, born in 1701 in London, dies. He pioneered a theory of Conditional Probability, demonstrating that probability theory can be extended to events whose outcomes are linked. This is why most so-called conspiracy theories are actually highly improbable. The misunderstanding

Jean d’Alambert in his article “Dimension” treats time as the fourth dimension.

Gabriel D. Fahrenheit invents the thermometer

Luigi Ferdinando Marsili founded the Institute of Sciences and Arts in Bologna. Marsili served for about twenty years in the army of the Holy Roman Empire, often opposing, but at the same time falling under the spell of, the Ottoman Empire.

The Camisards are tried in England on charges of spreading terror among His Majesty’s subjects; the Camisards are French Huguenots exiled to England because of the persecution of Louis XIV; they are a fundamentalist sect of Protestants who believe that the Day of Judgement is

An undersea earthquake triggers a tsunami that hits the coast of Japan (of which written records remain) and, as a wave tens of meters high, the northwestern coast of the United States, where it leaves traces in the tree rings. Some scientific estimates suggest a

The Kingdom of Scotland unsuccessfully attempts to establish a colony on the Isthmus of Panama (Darien Scheme). Five ships leave Leith for Central America. They are grossly unprepared and ill-informed. They arrive in a mosquito-infested, uncultivable swamp and are unable to conduct business with the

Thomas Savery invented the first truly practical steam engine: a steam pump. James Watt’s contribution was the steam condenser, which increased the engine’s efficiency.

Isaac Newton noted that there was a problem with assuming a finite and stationary universe (or rather, with infinite time), namely that it would sooner or later collapse into a single point. This problem, we now know, has been solved with the Big Bang Theory

Boston has just 6,000 residents. Mexico City has 100,000.

Mughal Empire in India under Aurangzeb extends from Dhaka to Kabul

Isaac Newton was appointed the University’s representative in Parliament, where he would be conspicuous for his silence. It seems that in a year of sittings, he spoke only once, to ask the doorman to close a window that was causing a draft.

William of Orange was acclaimed King of England by the people and Parliament. With the support of a large part of the country, the Dutch army had invaded England. James II, unable to resist the invasion, was forced into exile during what has gone down

King James II of England is exiled in France

Man becomes self-conscious and it is the Declaration of the Rights of Man in the United States and the French Revolution: …and then Napoleon, the 7 Years’ War won by the UK, the first railways in the UK, Watt’s steam engine, American Independence, the Declaration

Leibniz publishes Discourse on Metaphysics. He argues that we live in the best of all possible worlds, a world freely chosen by God.

Kilkenny, Ireland. Philosopher George Berkeley is born.

Quaker William Penn founded the state of Pennsylvania (from Penn and Transylvania). Born into an influential Anglican family, at the age of 25 Penn joined the Quaker religious congregation, which was viewed with great suspicion by the English authorities for certain ideas considered heretical (such

The project of engineer Pierre Paul Riquet (of Italian origin) was completed a year after his death: the Canal du Midi, connecting the Mediterranean to the Atlantic.