S

Palermo, Sicily. Small posters in the streets of Palermo announce the insurrection for January 12th. The Bourbon commanders smile: there are 5,000 well-trained soldiers on the island.

Sunday morning in Milan. A throng of Austrian soldiers, on Radetzky’s orders, in defiance of the proclamation to abstain from smoking tobacco, offer tobacco to passersby. At the entrance to the Caffe Martini, next to La Scala, the situation escalates when an officer becomes too

All of Europe is shaken by the liberal and democratic revolution

Gibraltar miners discover Neanderthal specimens

Englishman Joseph Swan experiments with incandescent lamps.

Annexation of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California to the United States by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, at the end of the Mexican-American War. The war had been promoted by Democratic President Polk and opposed by conservatives (Whigs). It was fought by thousands of

Battle of Chapultepec (Hall of Montezuma), Mexico. American troops under General Winfield Scott capture Chapultepec Castle, a strategic location from which they will conquer Mexico City. This is the last battle of the Mexican-American War.

Karl Ludwig Hencke, a Prussian postal worker and amateur astronomer, discovered the asteroid Hebe, after discovering Astraea two years earlier. By 1852, there were already 21 planets in the asteroid belt, rising to 300 by the 1890s.

Milan, Ohio, United States. It’s a snowy morning. Thomas Alva Edison is born. He is the seventh and youngest child of Samuel Ogden Edison Jr. and Nancy Matthews Elliott. He is the first and only child not born in Canada, his father Samuel’s home country.

Riemann moves to Berlin. Over the next two years, he finally gets his hands on Gauss’s precious writings.

United States. President Polk (pronounced “poke”) signs the declaration of war with Mexico. The day before, the U.S. Senate had voted 40 to 2 in favor. The dispute is over the southern border of Texas, which had become a new U.S. state (formerly Mexico) a

Duchy of Modena and Reggio. Duke Francis IV dies. Much hated by the liberals of Modena, these verses circulate among them: “When they take him to the cemetery—this duke, finally dead—I pray to God that he will be his clergy—a hundred short-necked torturers—the guillotine be

Giovanni Mastai Ferretti was appointed Pope, taking the name Pius IX. His first decisions embodied a social and political shift compared to previous popes and the Restoration. For the next two years, until 1848, every religious holiday throughout the Italian peninsula became an occasion for

Giuseppe Garibaldi and his legion of Italian exiles stand out in Uruguay’s war for independence.

With the Oregon Treaty, Great Britain and the United States established the 49th parallel as the border with Canada. The United States effectively acquired the Oregon Territory.

Mexican-American War over Border Issues

Karl Ludwig Hencke, a Prussian postal worker and amateur astronomer, discovers the asteroid Astraea. In 1847, he discovers yet another world: Hebe. By 1852, there were already 21 planets in the asteroid belt, rising to 300 by the 1890s.

Texas, formerly part of Mexico, joins the United States as the 28th state. Mexico, in response, breaks off diplomatic relations with the United States. This sets the stage for the Mexican-American War, which will break out shortly thereafter.

Austin, Texas. The Texas Convention ratifies the application to join the United States.

Texas, Washington-on-the-Brazos. The Texas Senate and House (the latter meeting in a rustic building above a saloon) decide to request membership in the United States.

Milan has 590,000 people, a quarter of the entire Lombardy region.

Ireland. A terrible famine strikes the island, killing one million people; another million emigrate, mostly to the United States (Boston and New York) and England (Liverpool). A century and a half later, there will be 80 million Irish descendants worldwide, 35 million of whom are

American Richard Hoe in Philadelphia builds the first rotary printing machine

Richard Hoe invents the rotary press for printing newspapers in the United States

John Ericsson, of Swedish origin but a New Yorker by adoption, builds the first propeller-driven warship in New York

Samuel Morse sends the first public telegram from Washington to Baltimore

Astronomer Francis Baily, after observing an eclipse from Italy, demonstrated that the small luminosities observed at the edges of the lunar disk during a total eclipse, due to the lunar conformation (not to be confused with solar prominences), are part of the solar corona. They

Milan. Giuseppe Verdi triumphs at La Scala: his Nabucco receives a resounding reception. The Va Pensiero chorus celebrates Milan’s new patriotic sentiments. The opera will run for 57 performances between August and November, before reaping further successes in Vienna, Lisbon, Barcelona, Berlin, Paris, Hamburg, New

Bukhara, Central Asia. The two British officers, Charles Stoddart and Arthur Connolly, enter the city and don’t dismount their horses as a sign of respect. They are captured and imprisoned for months in a cell where maggots literally strip them alive. Then they are released

Trenton, New Jersey. John Augustus Roebling, a German immigrant, founds the eponymous company for the production of steel cables. These cables will change history, making suspension bridges possible, for example, with the cable being manufactured on-site. The first will be the Niagara Falls Bridge, but

Bologna has 40 thousand poor and beggars out of a total of 70 thousand inhabitants.

Milan. Above the windows of the Caffe’ Cova (one of the city’s 117 cafés), the Circolo dell’Unione was founded, a secret committee that would be instrumental in the Five Days of 1848. In some rooms, a clandestine association, the Lions Club, was also formed, consisting

Italy has 22 million people

Charles Goodyear produces the first vulcanized (i.e. soft) (natural) rubber

Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot builds the first camera

In China it is called the “Century of Humiliation”: it goes from the Opium War to the Second World War, and ends with the civil war that Mao established in Beijing.

Off the East Coast of the United States, 53 enslaved Africans successfully mutinied. The ship, the Amistad, was then stopped by the USS Washington, which was transporting the blacks to Montauk Point, on the eastern tip of Long Island (where a plaque still stands commemorating

Stevens and Caterwood discover the Mayan step pyramids of the city of Kopan in Palenque, Yucatan.

London. Giuseppe Mazzini reforms Young Italy.

Charles Darwin marries his cousin Emma and goes from being a globetrotter to a hypochondriac couch potato, suffering constantly from nausea, dizziness, insomnia, weakness, and bouts of tremors and vomiting whenever he receives guests.

Invention of the pedal-and-stick bicycle (Scottish blacksmith Kirk Patrick McMillan)

Paul Cezanne is born

Giuseppe Mazzini takes refuge in England.

Australia. First arrivals of non-British settlers and immigrants, such as German Lutherans. A second wave arrived in 1850 with the Chinese for the gold rush, and a third in 1860, arriving from Melanesia and Polynesia for the sugarcane plantations of Queensland.

Chatham Islands, 500 miles east of New Zealand. After centuries of independence and relative isolation, the indigenous Moriori population was invaded by 500 Maori armed with rifles and steel axes, followed by another ship with 400 more Maori on December 5th. The Moriori numbered more

Charles Darwin in Valdivia, Peru, senses the tremendous earthquake that destroys Concepcion and causes a tsunami.

Alexis de Tocqueville published Democracy in America. In this work, as in The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856), he attempted to answer the question of why things didn’t go as well in France as in the United States. He wrote that there were five

Carl von Clausewitz’s On War is published posthumously. It is probably one of the most important treatises on the subject published in the West. The famous and often repeated statement, “the continuation of politics by other means,” is apt.

The Frenchman Hipplyte Pixii and the American George Clark invented the dynamo, with the use of the fundamental commutator.

The 95th meridian in North America is established as the permanent Indian frontier by Jackson-Sharp Knife

Second American economic and social cycle. From Jackson to Hayes. The symbol and leader of this period is undoubtedly Abraham Lincoln. Investments are backed by the value of gold, which limits inflation, raises interest rates, and makes investments attractive. The United States enters the industrial

British GDP growth is booming: averaging 1.92% over forty years. This is significantly higher than in previous decades (0.2% in 1760–1800, 0.52% in 1800–1830). Such an acceleration has never been seen before. And it won’t stop.

Stephenson’s Rocket is the first steam locomotive (it will run the Liverpool – Manchester route)

Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau, known for his studies on stroboscopes and cinematography, conducted an experiment: fascinated by the persistence of images on the retina, he stared directly at the sun for 25 seconds. This resulted in the loss of his sight for several days. He

Mathematician Niel Abel dies at 29 (Abelian groups)

General Andrew Jackson wins the presidency of the United States for the Democratic Party. He is a frontiersman, and thus power within the party slips from the grips of Southern planters to the rough and ready hands of Western frontiersmen. Soon, these internal tensions within

Western New Guinea was claimed by the Netherlands in 1828, while the eastern part was claimed by Germany and Great Britain in 1884. It had been discovered by the Portuguese in 1526.

Robert Brown first observes Brownian Motion

Ohm’s Law

On the same day, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died in their beds in Massachusetts and Virginia, respectively.

George Stephenson’s Locomotion runs its first run, between Stockton and Darlington. Stephenson is then put in charge of the much more important Liverpool-Manchester route.

Englishman George Cayley invents the articulated track

Slavery. People of African origin or descent make up 56% of Brazil’s population, 22% of Spanish-speaking America, and 17% of the United States.

Aluminum was synthesized for the first time, separating it from alum, by a Danish and a German chemist, almost simultaneously. It was immediately classified as a precious metal, on a par with gold, platinum, and silver. Napoleon III reserved aluminum cutlery for his most illustrious

Alessandro Manzoni publishes the first version of The Betrothed

The price of light (per million lumens per hour – about enough to read a book for 2.5 hours a day for a year) falls to 5,000 pounds in 2000. It was 35,000 in 1350. It will fall to 3 by the beginning of the

The French philosopher and critic Auguste Comte wrote in Cours de Philosophie that we will never know how stars function and what they are, due to their enormous distance. Ironically, at around the same time, the German physicist Joseph von Fraunhofer was doing precisely what

Joseph Nicephore Niepce uses silver chloride for his original images. He uses silver chloride in the photographic process.

Lord Castlereagh, who had signed the Peace of Ghent, committed suicide in the throes of a severe manic-depressive crisis; Lord Castlereagh’s sister was the mother of Robert Fitz-Roy, the captain of Her Majesty’s ship Beagle, which would later welcome Charles Darwin aboard.

Milan. Trentino baron Carlo Giusti Torresani, who had served the Habsburg eagle for nearly half a century, was appointed head of the Milanese police force. He foiled the Mazzinian conspiracy in 1834, but then had to deal with the uprisings of 1848.

Greece, war for independence from Ottoman domination

Battle of Rieti. The Austrian army defeats the disintegrating Neapolitan army and enters Naples, where it closes Parliament and begins a manhunt.

Charles Babbage begins to think about how to build an automatic steam-powered calculating machine

Orsted connects electricity to magnetism

France. Thomas de Colmar creates the first mechanical calculator with four functions: the aritmometre. It will be marketed in 1851.

Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar develops the “arithometer”, the first practical mechanical calculator with the 4 operations

Aluminum is isolated for the first time. Today, it is a ubiquitous material, as important as steel. However, it wasn’t until the mid-19th century that a commercially viable industrial method was developed to separate it from its ore, bauxite (from Le Baux, Provence).

South America. Bolivar’s forces win the Battle of Boyaca and then conquer Tunja and Bogotá, where Bolivar proclaims the Republic of Colombia. They then head north toward Venezuela.

Carl Gauss, working on pairs of complex numbers, finds a formula similar to that of Diophantus, thus anticipating the possibility of defining quaternions as pairs of complex numbers, just as complex numbers can be defined as pairs of real numbers.

Fabian von Bellinghausen (Russia) circumnavigates Antarctica