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The people of France give the people of the United States the Statue of Liberty.

Nikola Tesla first worked for Thomas Edison and then formed his own company, the Tesla Electric Light Company, where he patented the Tesla Arc Lamp. He was then forced to leave the company and found himself unemployed for a long time, during which he suffered

American Henry Weely builds the first electric iron

The United States and Canada are the first nations to adopt modern time: Capital Meridian Time

Nikola Tesla systematically repeats his experiments on three-phase AC electricity.

Fleming discovers chromosomes

Manhattan, New York. With the flick of a switch, Thomas Alva Edison transformed Lower Manhattan’s First District from a dimly lit gaslight hive to a blaze of dazzling jewels.

Scientific American magazine publishes a detailed description of Edison’s Electric Lighting System. The revolution is so subtle that very few people notice what’s happening: the end of the contrast between night and day that has endured throughout human history.

Charles Darwin is buried alongside Isaac Newton at Westminster Abbey.

Nikola Tesla developed the concept behind the three-phase asynchronous motor, eliminating the need for a DC motor’s commutator. This concept involves a rotating three-phase electromagnetic field.

First patent for the ballpoint pen

Cocaine, a powerful alkaloid similar to atropine, is isolated. Coca (Erythroxylon coca) is of American origin. Coca leaves have been used for centuries as a stimulant in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador, but in quantities of only half a gram per day, which is estimated to

Jacques and Pierre Curie discover piezoelectricity

There was a sense of the dawning of a new era in which internationalism and shared values would ensure growing prosperity and international order, with Europe firmly at the forefront. Over 100 world fairs were held during this thirty-year period, celebrating erudition, culture, and technological

John Michels wrote a letter to Thomas Alva Edison, expressing his intention to establish an American scientific journal to counter the British Nature, founded by Norman Lockyer for the Draper Expedition to the 1878 eclipse. Edison financed it for the first year and then withdrew.

De Beers diamond trust founded in South Africa

Official British opinion was firmly opposed to granting Edison any priority. The scientific journal Nature dismissed his light bulb as an “absolute failure: flawed in design and principle, and serving only to demonstrate how a crafty doer can dispense with genuine scientific expertise.” In Paris,

Iosif Vissarionovic Dzhugashvili (later known as Stalin) was born in Gori, Georgia, in the Caucasus, the son of a cobbler and a washerwoman.

Berlin Industrial Exhibition: Small electric railway with 150V Siemens DC motor powered by rails

King Cetshwayo, the last great chief of Zululand, was captured after the defeat in the war between the Zulu Kingdom and Great Britain. He was subsequently sent into exile. Cetshwayo had challenged British rule in southern Africa, prompting the invasion of Zululand in 1879. At

Thomas Alva Edison overcame his stage fright, partly due to his near-total deafness, by reading a speech in public on the plaster telephone receiver he invented, with Alexander Graham Bell in the audience. He would not give another public speech for 50 years, until the

Lars Nilson of Uppsala University discovers Scandium, filling the gap between Calcium and Titanium in Mendeleev’s table.

Anglo-Afghan Peace Treaty of Gandomak: Afghan Emir to handle internal affairs, British to handle foreign policy

LS Crandall releases a hammerless typewriter

Marsh, in a hasty note typical of the current race between him and Edwin D. Cope, describes Brontosaurus, but in reality it is still the Apatosaurus ajax, also described by him a few years earlier. The enormous amount of specimens discovered in just a few

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland discover saccharin, 400 times sweeter than sugar.

The Ottoman Empire must suffer the humiliation of a victorious Russian army camped within sight of the outskirts of Istanbul.

Russo-Ottoman War. The Russians fail to capture Istanbul. However, the Imperial Palace in Edirne is completely destroyed.

Giovanni Schiaparelli observes what he calls the canals of Mars

British doctor Sir Patrick Manson, nicknamed Mosquito Manson, proved that the disease elephantiasis was caused by mosquitoes; 17 years later, he would also prove the same for malaria.

Louis Pasteur was the first to demonstrate that one microorganism could be used to kill another. These would be called antibiotics. Note that there is also a broader definition of antibiotic, which includes chemicals derived from dyes that attack certain bacteria. Pasteur demonstrated that the

Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph contains some interesting aspects, typical of the circumstantial and sometimes accidental nature of some important inventions. Edison envisioned applications: recording the last words of dying people, recording books for the blind, announcing the exact time, and teaching correct pronunciation.

Italy. Milanese Enrico Forlanini experiments with a sort of steam-powered helicopter, much to the delight of Milanese citizens who witness it in a demonstration in the Public Gardens.

Tolstoy publishes Anna Karenina

Graz, Austro-Hungarian Empire. Nikola Tesla has successfully completed his second year of university, and during the summer he socializes with students at the Botanical Gardens, staying up late, smoking cigarettes and drinking copious amounts of coffee, and playing dominoes, chess, billiards, cards, and gambling. In

Bell Telephone Company is the largest telephone service provider in the United States. In 1987, it was dissolved by antitrust regulations.

Notorious bank robber Jesse James is killed in the ensuing shootout during a Minnesota bank robbery.

Tsarist Russia. During this thirty-year period, 486 people were sentenced to death, or 17 people per year, throughout Russia, including those convicted of common crimes. From 1906 to 1908, during the years of the first revolution, death sentences soared to 2,200 people (45 per month!),

Thomas Alva Edison writes an interminable patent application for a super acoustic telegraph transfer system that practically exploits the concept of time division that predates time division multiple access (TDMA) protocols by a century.

The first Workers’ International, founded on the initiative of philosopher Karl Marx, is dissolved. After six congresses in nine years, it had fallen into disrepute due to internal dissension, led by the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, but also externally, for its support of the futile but

The 4-stroke Otto engine is introduced.

Philadelphia. Centennial Exhibition.

Alfred Wallace publishes The Geographical Distribution of Animals

Charles Darwin publishes The Different Forms of Flowers in Plants of the Same Species

Charles Darwin publishes The Effects of Cross-Fertilization and Self-Fertilization in the Vegetable Kingdom

Pius IX celebrates the Jubilee from the Papal State, which for the first time was reduced to the Vatican alone.

London is the largest city in Europe, the Royal Navy is by far the most powerful navy in the world, and it maintains a Pax Britannica on the planet’s seas.

Blenheim Palace (UK): Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was born as a seventh child in a ballroom closet.

Arizona, United States. The government moves Geronimo’s Chirikawa Apache tribe to a reservation in the eastern part of the state. Geronimo will escape several times with several loyal warriors. And several times he will be captured and forced to return to the reservation.

Avignon. John Stuart Mill, a liberal utilitarian who had fought successfully for women’s suffrage in England, dies.

Japan. The national bank is born.

Philosopher of science William Jevons applies the Second Law of Thermodynamics and finds a time in the past with zero entropy: the beginning of the Universe.

Konstantin E. Tsiolkovskii, at 16, imagined a spaceship that harnessed centrifugal force; Tsiolkovskii, the father of cosmonautics, would also imagine multi-stage rockets, liquid fuel, orbiting stations, space suits, and ecologically independent colonies capable of intergalactic travel. Tsiolkovskii saw space travel as inevitable: “Earth is the

Nino Bixio dies in Indonesia, killed by yellow fever. He had traveled there on his ship, the Maddaloni. Bixio was Garibaldi’s right-hand man in the Expedition of the Thousand. A staunch anticlerical, he had threatened to throw the Pope and all the cardinals into the

One of the greatest mathematical achievements of the 19th century was the classification of all topologically different surfaces.

Klein introduces topology

Thomas Alva Edison takes out a patent for an electric typewheel typewriter

Japan. Elementary school becomes compulsory, as in the West. Initially, Japan followed the highly centralized French model for education, switching to the decentralized American model in 1879, and then to the German model in 1886. Higher education, rather than birthright, becomes a sign of social

Japan. The national postal system, the first railroad, and the first telegraph line are born.

England. The Eastern Telegraph Company is founded, which will make huge investments in submarine cables to connect the homeland to the British colonies in the world’s largest empire. Funding will come primarily from the private sector.

American Albert Jones invents corrugated cardboard to protect glass bottles

Charles Babbage dies. He was one of the fathers of modern computers, but also a pioneer of automatic machine tools and operations research. Babbage, perhaps more than anyone else, brought the world of theoretical science closer to that of machines.

Iwakura Mission. Fifty Japanese government representatives travel to the United States and then to a dozen European countries, aiming to understand and capture the best innovations, technologies, customs, and practices that could improve Japan. They meet with President Grant and several European leaders and produce

Japan moved toward Western culture, giving a dramatic boost to its industry and economy. This also had cultural repercussions: in 1871, an imperial decree required high-ranking officials to wear the yofuku, the European frock coat, over a high-collared white shirt. In 1887, it became customary

John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil is born (later split in 1911 by the Antitrust Authority into 34 companies including Exxon, Mobil, Chevron)

German troops march into Paris: Louis Napoleon (Bonaparte’s nephew) is humiliated

After the Prussians crushed the French army, Napoleon III lost all power and was no longer able to intervene on behalf of his protégé, the Papal States. Within weeks, the Italian government planned and executed a rapid maneuver to annex Lazio and Rome.

In 1870, Prime Minister Bismarck provoked France into declaring war on Prussia. The Franco-Prussian War was brief and brutal, with the Prussians defeating the French at Sedan. Napoleon III was taken prisoner and forced to abdicate, Paris was besieged, and 200,000 French soldiers were killed.

Napoleon III, ill and defeated, surrenders to William of Prussia at Sedan

Gold & Stock paid $15,000 for the rights to the Edison-Pope jointly patented teleprinter. It reported real-time fluctuations in the price of gold on the New York Stock Exchange.

India. The railway from Bombay (Mumbai) to Calcutta (Kolkata) is completed.

Mitsubishi is founded in Japan

He sees the light at Pope, Edison & Co. at 78-80 Broadway, New York. It includes Thomas Alva Edison and his partners Franklin L. Pope and James Ashley. Every morning, Edison, in New Jersey, gets up at 6:00 a.m. to catch the train, works the

Promontory Point, Utah, United States. The last ties and rails are laid, and the First Transcontinental Railroad is completed. The Coast-to-Coast journey suddenly drops from six months to a week. Everything changes. Even though the ticket costs a whopping $65 ($1,240 today). Lyman Potter, on

German Johann Hittorf, a student of Heinrich Geissler, who invented the vacuum tube in 1855, noticed a strange glow on the wall opposite the cathode. He called them cathode rays. They were nothing more than electrons.

Serious financial crisis in the markets

American John Wesley Hyatt patents (US patent 50359) celluloid, which will have a thousand uses, including billiard balls, piano keys, and false teeth.

Thomas Alva Edison, only four days in New York, arrives at the offices of the Gold & Stock Reporting Telegraph Company, his rival in Boston, just as the transmitter has just jammed, sparking widespread panic. He tells the owner, Samuel Laws, that he knows how

The U.S. Congress passes the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing the right to vote for blacks. It will be ratified in February 1870 under the presidency of war hero Ulysses Grant.

Thomas Alva Edison registers his second patent: the Teleprinter for stockbrokers. He also boldly decides to open his own stock exchange listing office, just above that of the Gold & Stock Reporting Telegraph Company, a well-established firm. But Boston soon proves too small and provincial