The radical newspaper “Rheinische Zeitung,” edited by Karl Marx, was closed down by the Prussian government under pressure from the Russian Tsar. Karl Marx and his wife, Jenny von Westphalen, then moved to Paris. There he befriended Friedrich Engels.

After Ada Lovelace’s groundbreaking “Notes by the Translator,” she asked Charles Babbage to become business partners to build a general-purpose logic machine. Babbage declined, but their friendship would endure even though they would no longer collaborate professionally.

United States. During the passage of the Great Comet of 1843, tens of thousands of people turn to William Miller, a New England preacher, who predicts the end of the world brought by the comet. As you may have noticed from the fact that he still exists, the moment never came, and Miller was dead wrong. The episode would be called “The Great Disappointment” (of not being dead?). In 1840, Edgar Allan Poe also published a short story, “A Conversation of Eiros and Charmion,” in which the two characters converse in a world now finished, poisoned by the wake of a comet.

Fremont the Pathfinder covers 3,500 miles in 14 months in the American West and is the first to establish that the American West is a great basin with no connection to the Pacific.

Abraham Lincoln marries Mary Todd

Kabul. The British negotiate a surrender with the Afghan rebels, and a mournful caravan of soldiers, having abandoned all their artillery, leaves the city and heads for Jalalabad, the gateway to India. Of the 16,000 who set out, only a few arrive. It seems that only one surviving British soldier arrives. Thus, the first British attempt to control Afghanistan and keep the Russians away from India fails.

Kabul. The uprising quickly turns into a general revolt, and the British find themselves under siege in a hastily entrenched camp.

Kabul. A hostile mob, incited by the mullahs, attacks the residence of a British official, Sir Alexander Burnus, captures him, and cuts him to pieces. The fury then turns against the British garrison, resulting in over three hundred deaths.

During a storm in Northern Germany, many fish rain from the sky, some still alive.

The race for the American West begins

Hong Kong was ceded to British rule. It remained under British rule until 1997.

Richard Owen calls the ancient animals whose fossils he has discovered “dinosaurs.”

In the Jewish ghetto of Modena there are 9 synagogues.

Abraham Lincoln is going through a period of depression. He has just broken up with his girlfriend, Mary (who loves him), because he fears a romantic relationship might interfere with his career.

In the state of New York, the Cardiff Giant is “discovered”, a fake prepared by the cigar merchant George Hull, which for a long time actually works and is believed to be an exceptional find of a fossilized giant specimen.

Claude Oscar Monet was born in Paris. He is one of the most beloved painters of all time for the delicacy and light expressiveness of his paintings.

China. The siege of the British community of Guangzhou is considered an affront by British public opinion. Minister Palmerston demands the permanent cession of one or more islands along the Chinese coast to be used as collection and storage centers for British goods. When China refuses, the British respond with a naval blockade of China’s main ports. It is the Opium War. With the British in control of the ports and ready to launch a land attack on the ancient capital Nanjing, the Chinese surrender. Hong Kong will be ceded, and special licenses will be established for the ports of Nanjing, Shanghai, Xiamen, and Fuzhou.

Western United States. Over half a million bison are shot by Native Americans every year for food. Another 100,000 are killed by hunters each year for their fur, which is shipped east via steamships. Hunting focuses on young females, for their soft and more valuable coats. Between 1872 and 1874, hunters slaughtered approximately 6 million bison (each pelt resulting in an average of five animals killed due to losses to wolves and incompetent skinning) with the new .50-caliber rifle, quickly bringing the species to the brink of extinction. In the second half of the 19th century, the American bison population collapsed, and by 1894, the enormous herds in Yellowstone Park had been reduced to 25 animals. By the end of the 20th century, the American bison population had collapsed. The American bison population will reach 545,000 animals, of which 500,000 are on private land, 30,000 on public land, and approximately 15,000 in the wild, on unfenced land.

First documented polio epidemic.

William Rowan Hamilton shows that the square root of the ordinary three-dimensional Laplacian can be obtained through the use of quaternions: (id/dx + jd/dy + kd/dz)^2 = -(d/dx)^2 -(d/dy)^2 -(d/dz)^2 = -nabla^2; this result will be fundamental to deriving the wave operator (or d’Alambertian) and the Dirac operator of the Klein-Gordon equation of Quantum Field Theory (quantum theory + special relativity).

The game of Billiards sees the cushions change material from wood to Charles Goodyear rubber.

Milan. The average life expectancy is 30 years. Of the 50,000 working adults, only 17,000 have a permanent job.

Claude Monet, founder of Impressionism, is born

Bohemia (now Czechia). A method of producing glass on an industrial scale at a low cost is invented. This will allow the sale of beer mugs, made of glass, allowing customers to see what they’re drinking. And they won’t like it: the beer often varies in color from dark brown to amber. This will lead to the success of Pilsner beer, also from the same region, with its distinctive, transparent blond color.

Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford University. A battery-powered bell is rung. It still rings today, using the same battery, never recharged. It rings so quietly that it’s almost inaudible, using a tiny charge to move the clapper. No one knows exactly what kind of battery it uses, because no one dares dismantle it and stop the record…

First rail connection in Milan. It connects Milan to Monza. The first two trains, Milan and Lombardy, cover the 15km in 17 minutes.

Opium War between China and Britain, which gains Hong Kong

Charles Goodyear, by heating rubber mixed with sulfur and accidentally dropping it on the family stove, discovered what would become the vulcanization process (patented in 1843). Subsequent experiments involved rubber samples impregnated with sulfur and compressed between very hot irons, roasted in the oven, toasted over a fire, and finally exposed to steam in a kettle and buried in heated sand.

Kabul surrenders to the British army without a fight. But the British’s entry into the city isn’t a triumphal one; it resembles a funeral procession.

The British intervene militarily in Afghanistan to keep the Russians away from India.

The Ottoman Empire underwent an internal reorganization and modernization called the Tanzimat: Sharia law was replaced by secular law, non-Muslims were declared equal to Muslims, and public administration was modernized along Western lines, even leading to the introduction of the Ottoman Empire’s first railway.

Gabriel Lame’ proves Fermat’s Last Theorem for the case n=7, based on the method of Mrs. Sophie Germain

The German Theodor Schwann was the first to understand that all life is cellular in nature.

Englishman William Grove creates the first fuel cell

Anglo-Afghan War: The British are massacred during their retreat

Augustus De Morgan introduces the term “Proof by Induction”

Friedrich Bessel measures the annual parallax of the star 61 Cygni, thus managing to calculate the distance to a star for the first time.

Michael Faraday: Theory of Electrostatic Induction

England. It becomes illegal to own slaves. 800,000 slaves suddenly become free.

England. William Wheelwright founds the Wheelwright Pacific Steam Navigation Company (WPSNC), which sends and receives cargoes of nitrogenous substances (obtained from the abundant heaps of bird droppings in Chile and Peru) between England and the west coast of South America. Nitrogenous compounds are essential for making fertilizers, which make agriculture much more productive in Europe. The chemical process for producing fertilizers requires a lot of energy, which is provided by coal. This virtuous circle is one of the new drivers, triggering a development that ends the Malthusian cycles that had been recurring for at least six centuries (i.e., rising income and population, followed by crises that cause income and population decline). The world begins to steadily increase income and population for several centuries.

The Ottoman Empire attempts to catch up with the Western system, having lagged behind by two hundred years. A government report confirms the new importance attributed to science: “Religious knowledge serves the salvation of the world to come, but science serves the progress of man in this world.”

Scientists have established that the active ingredient in tea is the same substance discovered by Runge in 1820 in coffee: caffeine.

American inventor Samuel Morse is in England to patent the telegraph system he’s built, but Charles Wheatstone uses his connections to ensure his competitor’s application is rejected. And so it happens.

Samuel Morse creates the famous code that took his name

Charles Wheatstone and William Fothergill Cooke build a functional telegraph with a 2km connection along the new railway between Euston and Chalk Farm in London.

Vermont, United States. Thomas Davenport invents the first DC commutator electric motor and obtains a patent. He powers it with batteries, which were quite scarce at the time. And electrical power distribution did not yet exist. The first DC electric motor had been invented by William Sturgeon just a few years earlier, in 1832.

Queen Victoria reigned in England. Queen Victoria of England was the head of power from 1837 to 1901, the year of her death. At the time (and until the 21st century with Queen Elizabeth II), it was the longest reign in English history, and she was responsible for great conquests and expansion: she was, in fact, the first queen to hold the title of Empress of India.

William Procter and James Gamble founded Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati, taking advantage of the abundance of hogs to use their lard to produce candles.

Nicola Fabrizi, a Mazzinian-inspired exile from Modena, after fighting against the reactionaries in Spain, went to Malta with the intention of promoting a revolution in Sicily through gang warfare.

Louis Agassiz proposes the theory of ice ages

Poisson: Laws of Large Numbers

From Charles Darwin’s travel journals, here are some pearls of wisdom: “A wife is better than a dog,” “When married, you can’t read at night, you get fat, and if you have many children, you have to earn your bread.”

Toward the end of Charles Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle, he realized that the key to understanding the nature of the coral formations he saw in the Pacific atolls and in Australia was an interaction between biology and geology: corals grow on the edges of a volcanic island or on a continental margin, which then slowly sinks into the ocean, and the coral, continuing to grow, always stays at the water’s edge, thus forming colossal structures.

Swedish engineer John Ericson invents the ship’s propeller

Charles Babbage notes in his Scribbling Books the concept of replacing the drums of the Jacquard loom with punched cards, making the machine programmable with a program as long as desired and modifiable at will.

Samuel Morse invents the telegraph in the United States

Siege and fall of Fort Alamo and David Crockett’s “Volunteers”: Texas secedes from Mexico to join the United States: the Mexicans massacre the rebels barricaded in Fort Alamo where David Crockett is also killed; in the end the Americans prevail.

Colt patents the rotating cylinder pistol

Dunfermline, Scotland. Birth of Andrew Carnegie, Scottish-born American entrepreneur and steel king in the United States. His Pittsburgh steelworks produced steel for tens of thousands of buildings in dozens of American cities, starting with Chicago. He is also known as an influential philanthropist. Among other institutions, he founded Carnegie-Mellon University.

Charles Darwin, aboard the Beagle, visits the coral reefs of Tahiti. He is struck by this singular life form, so in harmony with its geology. He describes the reef as “among the most wonderful objects in the world”: part animal, part plant, part mineral.

Cockfighting is banned in England

Ann Rutledge, fiancée of the young Abraham Lincoln, dies of typhoid fever, leaving him in a long hypochondriac depression.

Ada Byron marries William King, who becomes Earl of Lovelace, making her Ada Lovelace, as she is known in the software industry. Ada Lovelace is considered the first, or one of the first, to have a clear and detailed vision of multi-purpose automatic logic machines.

The New York Sun newspaper, with 55,000 copies sold daily, becomes the world’s best-selling newspaper thanks to false images of lunar civilizations and life that astronomer Sir John Herschel supposedly observed with his new telescope in South Africa; every day the newspaper reports new drawings of winged men, strange creatures, forests, rivers, seas.

Adolphe Quetelet publishes the book Sur l’homme et le developpement de ses facultes, ou, Essai de physique sociale, where he introduces the concept of the “average man,” a fictitious individual with average characteristics.

With the Battle of San Jacinto and the annexation of Texas by the United States, the United States became the dominant power in North America. Mexico’s defeat was not as obvious as it might seem today, as Mexico was, in the 19th century, much more developed and wealthy than the United States, but it struggled to bring reinforcements and extend supply lines to revolting Texas.

The year before the company of the same name was founded, Johann Sebastian Staedtler had already invented a colored oil pastel that could be sharpened like a normal pencil, making it one of the first colored pencils.

The new president of Mexico, General Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana, wielding semi-dictatorial powers, abolished the Federal Constitution of 1824 and established a highly centralized power. This immediately irritated the Texan settlers, who saw all autonomy stripped away. An insurrection broke out in Texas. After defeating the Mexicans at San Giacinto, the Texans achieved independence, in theory, but not in practice. The American appetite for Texas later contributed to the war with Mexico and the subsequent annexation, with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California to the United States.

McCormick invents the automatic reaper in the United States. Mass production begins in Chicago in 1847, which at the time was a small Midwestern town with only 17,000 inhabitants.

André Marie Ampere inaugurates Cybernetics (the science of control)

Siberia. Dmitry Mendeleev is born. He is the youngest of Maria Mendeleeva’s 14 children. Her husband, having gone blind, receives a meager pension. Maria reopens the family glassworks and manages it, the only woman in the family. The factory is then destroyed by fire. As a last resort, she turns to Dmitry, her brightest son. She puts him on a horse, and they ride 2,000 kilometers to Moscow, where she attempts to enroll him in the university, but the university rejects him because he is Siberian. She then rides another 500 kilometers northwest to St. Petersburg, enrolls him in the university there, and dies soon after. Dmitry becomes a brilliant student and continues his studies in Paris and Heidelberg. Mendeleev has a terrible temper and refuses to acknowledge the existence of atoms and other invisible objects such as electrons and radioactivity. But he understood, better than many others, that some properties of elements persist in chemical reactions. And he knew metals well, which were the most difficult to pigeonhole. And, in particular, he had the courage to predict the existence of elements in empty boxes, predicting atomic weights and densities. He also made incorrect predictions, such as the elements before hydrogen, or the existence of the element coronium, which would have been present in the solar corona.

China. Lord Palmerston’s diplomatic mission (the third ever from the British crown). Naval officer Napier is sent. He contracts malaria during the voyage and dies. But before dying, Napier notes the presence of a rocky outcrop called Hong Kong, almost uninhabited, which could make an excellent natural harbor.