The majority of Italian emigration (98.3%) avoids Africa. It therefore follows the labor market more than geopolitics. Beginning in 1927, with the Great Depression in the United States and the forced colonization of Libya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia, the situation would change.

The Left in government with Agostino Depretis (who was an opponent of Cavour’s mission to Crimea)

King Leopold II of Belgium forms a non-governmental humanitarian corporation with the aim of exploring Central Africa. In 1885, the European powers agree to cede control of 2.3 million square kilometers of Africa: the Congo Free State is born. The true goal, of course, is profit. The rubber industry flourishes, and rubber plantations multiply in Central Africa. Six million Africans lose their lives to massacres perpetrated by the Belgians and to the harsh working conditions between 1885 and 1908.

Thomas Alva Edison announces to journalists his discovery of the “aetheric force”: he has actually discovered high-frequency electromagnetic waves, as James Clerk Maxwell will confirm theoretically and later Hertz, Lodge and Marconi in experimental practice.

Thomas Alva Edison begins a series of experiments on the acoustic telegraph for Western Union. In less than a week, he improves Gray’s acoustic transmitter with a delicate balance of electromagnets, resonators, and elastic pendulums, each connected to its own battery.

Thomas Alva Edison’s electric pen is born: a battery-powered stylus with a needle that quickly moves up and down thanks to an electromagnetic motor. This motor makes it pierce a sheet of template paper in a continuous line, allowing the operator to write or draw. The resulting template is then mounted and pressed onto white paper, and the roller is coated with ink to produce as many copies as desired. It’s a somewhat awkward tool to use and requires considerable skill, but it sells 60,000 units in ten years. It’s also the first consumer product to use an electric motor, as well as the first duplicator for large-scale production.

Spain. Second Bourbon Restoration: yet another coup d’état in the unstable Spanish Republic brings Isabella II’s son to the throne, under precise constitutional guarantees. The Bourbon sovereigns will thus be: Alfonso XII, Alfonso XIII.

Thomas Alva Edison demonstrates the quadruplex telegraph, which uses the phenomenon of induction, which he now fully masters. The demonstration is a success, and two days later, the New York Times announces it to the world. Edison gets his first taste of fame.

A few hours after Graham Bell, Elisha Gray also filed a patent application very similar to Bell’s; the invention was later recognized as Bell’s.

Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone (patent no. 174465) with earphone and microphone (Meucci did not renew it).

Konstantin E. Tsiolkovskii, deaf due to a childhood complication of scarlet fever, was barred from Moscow schools. He was also denied elementary school because he was deaf. He was educated by his parents and then taught himself. He became the father of cosmonautics. After his death, he was referred to as the father of Soviet cosmonautics. The great rocket designer Sergei Korolev took up his ideas and developed them further.

Friedrich Nietzsche published The Birth of Tragedy, in which he outlines the opposition of two aspects of the Greek soul: the wild and irrational passions personified by Dionysus, and the disciplined and harmonious beauty represented by Apollo.

Cornelius Vanderbilt and his competitor Tom Scott charge a single railroad tariff to each refiner, thus taking away the preferential tariff from John D. Rockefeller, who, to escape, will invent a new technology and build pipelines in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

The HMS Challenger, under the command of John Young Buchanan, discovered that the ocean floor was covered with countless manganese nodules of all sizes. It was later discovered that in certain areas (especially in the Pacific Ocean) there were as many as 11 kg per square meter. They grew only 1 mm every thousand years, which in total amounted to 6 million tons each year. In the Pacific alone, it is estimated that there are 1.66 trillion tons. Practically an inexhaustible resource.

The HMS Challenger expedition, funded by the British government, the Royal Society, and the British Museum, sets out on a 3.5-year voyage around the world; after 70,000 nautical miles, it collects 4,700 new species of marine organisms; it will take 19 years to catalogue them all; it also discovers seamounts in the Atlantic and thus gives birth to a new discipline: oceanography.

Charles Darwin publishes The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals

Isaac Newton’s private papers, inherited by his niece, Catherine Barton, then passed to the Earl of Portsmouth, who married his daughter, and then examined in 1777 by Bishop Samuel Horsley, who “viewed the contents with horror and slammed the lid,” were eventually donated to Cambridge University. The University cataloged them in 1888, only to discover that a large body of work, approximately one million words, was devoted to alchemy and theology! Newton, in fact, devoted a good part of his life to alchemy rather than physics and science. This portion of the material was deemed of little interest and returned to the Earls of Portsmouth.

American Simon Ingersoll invents the jackhammer

Antonio Meucci issues the first patent for the telephone

The first chewing gum balls were sold in New Jersey. The patent dates back to two years earlier, and was filed by dentist Sir William.

Three Newark schoolgirls sheltered from the rain in the doorway of Edison’s factory on Ward Street, New Jersey. Invited inside by an employee who knew them, they encountered Thomas Alva Edison, busy working on the teletype for stock market quotes. Mary Stilwell, one of the three girls, a 15-year-old woman, was struck by his eyes and by how dirty and greasy they must be. Mary Stilwell and Thomas Alva Edison married on Christmas Day 1871. They moved into their new home at 53 Wright Street in Newark. In the first year of their marriage, Edison successfully filed 39 patents. It’s notable that the early stages of Edison’s two marriages (he remarried a second time after Mary’s death at just 29) exhibit striking parallels. In both cases, he falls in love with girls who are still in school, and in both cases, in the spring. He pursues them all summer, marries them after the summer according to the rites of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and in the following months, the marriage becomes a volcano of ideas that he immediately patents and implements. Ultimately, both wives give him first a daughter and then two sons.

Antonio Meucci demonstrated the functioning of a device called the teletrophone, the operating principle of the telephone. He patented it but did not renew it, which was instead exploited by Bell. In 2002, the U.S. Congress recognized Meucci’s paternity of the invention.

Lazio. Plebiscite for annexation to the Kingdom of Italy. Voters numbered 135,188, with 133,681 voting in favor. In Rome, 40,875 voted in favor and only 46 voted against. The newspaper “Unita’ Cattolica” joked that the Pope found only 46 friends in Rome…

Breach of Porta Pia. On September 17, after the failure of diplomatic attempts and the withdrawal of the French garrison protecting the city, General Cadorna arrived at the gates of Rome with five divisions. He had entered papal territory without encountering resistance five days earlier. On the 20th, he attacked the city, breaching Porta Pia and encountering little more than token resistance, in accordance with the orders Pope Pius IX had given to General Klanzer, commander of the papal soldiers. At 2:00 PM, the two generals signed the surrender of Rome and the end of the Church’s temporal power. The Italians suffered 49 dead and 141 wounded, while the papal troops suffered 19 dead and 68 wounded.