Siberia. The Cossacks, devout Christians, found the city of Blagoveshchensk, or the Annunciation, on the northern bank of the Amur River.

The collapse of the Ohio Life Insurance Company sparked the first widespread telegram panic. Michigan was particularly hard hit, and Detroit collapsed. In Port Huron, the family of young Thomas Alva Edison was among those to suffer.

First attempt to establish a transatlantic link between Ireland and Newfoundland. The mighty HMS Agamemnon and the American frigate Niagara, with a flotilla of support vessels, set out from Valentia, an island just off the coast of Ireland, with 1,200 two-mile-long copper cable sections, pre-spliced into eight 300-mile sections. The cable weighs one ton per nautical mile (of which, however, only 50 kg of copper per mile). Thomson is aboard the Agamemnon while Samuel Morse is aboard the Niagara, struggling with seasickness and a leg injury. The cable breaks 600 km from Valentia, and work is interrupted in anticipation of winter. The following summer, two more attempts are made: the first fails immediately, while the second works for about a month, after which it fails due to excessive voltage passed through the cable in an attempt to strengthen the signal.

Indian Mutiny. A major Indian revolt seriously threatens British rule in the Indian subcontinent.

Carlo Pisacane embarks from Genoa for Sapri, on the border between Basilicata and Campania, with 24 other revolutionaries, including Giovanni Nicotera and Giovan Battista Falcone, on the Rubattino Company’s liner Cagliari, originally bound for Tunis. The intention is to spark a revolt in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

Sir Charles Locock (an obstetrician who assisted Queen Victoria in the birth of her nine children) used bromide on “hysterical” women, sharing the (mistaken) opinion of other scholars of the time that hysteria and epilepsy were linked to masturbation, nymphomania, and generally excessive sexual arousal. He believed this was confirmed by the fact that these women experienced increased menstrual discomfort. It proved effective as an anticonvulsant and antiaphrodisiac. In the US, bromide salts were withdrawn from the market as generic sedatives (so much so that bromide still frequently appears in jokes about sexual performance failures) in 1975. They were withdrawn due to dangerous side effects known to accompany the diagnosis of bromism.

Mathematician Georg Bernhard Riemann suffers another nervous breakdown.

Trinity Church is completed in New York City, and with its 86-meter spire, it becomes the tallest building in Manhattan. It will remain so until the construction of the first skyscraper: the Manhattan Life Insurance Building on Broadway in 1898.

Crimea. Upon hearing the news of the end of the war from the Congress of Paris, strange events unfold: British officers organize horse races to which officers from all belligerent countries, including the enemy, are invited. The races are attended by 3,000 mounted spectators and thousands more on foot, and are an unforgettable spectacle due to the incredible variety of helmets, uniforms, plumes, and military regalia. The Russian commander hosts a banquet for all the officers of all the armies. At the end, glasses of wine are raised to the rulers of all countries. A Piedmontese officer notes that “the greatest brotherhood and cheerfulness reigns…”

The Democratic Party still manages to win the US presidency with Buchanan, but the Republicans win 11 of the 15 Northern states and almost all of the highly populous states of New York and Ohio, while Democrats narrowly win Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Indiana. The Democratic Party is now the only political force with a national reach.

Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph, visiting Venice and Milan, found the atmosphere very cold.

Karl Friedrich Gauss dies in Göttingen

Crimea. Battle of the Tchernaya River. The French and Piedmontese engage the Russians. The Allies prevail. The Piedmontese suffer 14 dead and 156 wounded, including General Montevecchio; the French suffer 181 dead and 1,224 wounded; while the Russians suffer so many casualties that they take two days to evacuate them. After the Tchernaya, the Tsar’s generals will no longer attempt attacks against enemy lines.

Crimea. Two thousand Piedmontese soldiers are stationed in three military hospitals due to the rampant cholera epidemic. Sanitary conditions and medical support are poor and at times ridiculous: Genova di Revel writes of seeing nurses passing among the wounded lying on the bare ground, with a bucket of water and a brush to moisten the patients’ lips. The few real doctors present have no effective remedies, and sometimes they even distribute coffee every morning as a prophylaxis and brandy as a cure.

Crimea. Intense bombardment of Sevastopol.

Crimea. The Piedmontese military chaplain dies of cholera. It marks the beginning of a terrible epidemic that, within a few weeks, will reach 73 deaths a day on June 7th.

Piedmontese soldiers, officers first, began landing in Crimea. But the landing was only completed on May 20th.

The Piedmontese parliament approved participation in the Crimean War. The mission was commanded by Alfonso La Marmora. Within a few weeks, 18,000 men were ready under the command of Giovanni Durando and Ardingo Trotti, and the brigades under the command of Manfredo Fanti, Enrico Cialdini, and Rodolfo di Montevecchio.

Rudolf Virchow states that all cells arise from other cells

Alfred Wallace publishes On the Law Which Regulated the Introduction of New Species, in which he enunciates the Sarawak Law (named after the province where Wallace is the guest of the white raja James Brooke, who later inspired Emilio Salgari to create the character of Sandokan).

Russia. Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy leaves the Caucasus and reaches Sevastopol in Crimea as a soldier in the Crimean Army. He takes part in the defense of the city’s fourth bastion.

The Charge of the 600. In an episode alternately described as one of the most heroic and most senselessly criminal in British military history, Lord James Cardigan leads a cavalry charge against heavily defended Russian artillery during the Crimean War. The British were victorious at Balaclava when Cardigan received the order to attack the Russians. His cavalry charged valiantly down the valley but was decimated by nearly half the Russians’ heavy artillery. It was later discovered that the order had been given in confusion, not intentionally. Lord Cardigan, who survived the battle, was welcomed home as a hero.

George Boole develops symbolic logic; he will be derided by his colleagues for the uselessness of the argument and will die of starvation in anonymity.

Street lighting and gas distribution are being installed in Rio de Janeiro; there is already a passenger transport line to Paris and London.

Hermann von Helmholtz enunciates the Second Law of Thermodynamics: the Universe will experience a heat death, that is, a state of uniform heat everywhere.

Canadian Abraham Gesner distills kerosene from petroleum

Georg Bernhard Riemann, in his historic speech at the University of Göttingen, demonstrates that forces can be seen as a consequence of geometry. The laws of physics appear simpler when expressed in higher-dimensional spaces. He concludes that electricity, magnetism, and gravity are caused by the compaction of a higher-dimensional geometry into three dimensions. He then introduces the concept of tensor and even wormholes (Riemann’s cut).

Bernhard Riemann presents his dissertation. And he makes history in mathematics and physics. In the lecture hall of the University of Göttingen, Bernhard Riemann presents his dissertation: “Uber die Hypothesen, welche der Geometrie zugrunde liegen” (On the Hypotheses on Which Geometry Is Based), completely reformulating 3,000 years of geometry, doing so in simple German with almost no mathematical notation. It will give rise to differential geometry as we know it today.

Riemann: concept of integral

Mathematician Georg Bernhard Riemann, an extremely shy man with severe financial problems, suffers a severe nervous breakdown. As often happens, this is also his year of wonders in mathematics, laying the foundations of integral calculus and non-Euclidean geometry in dimensions higher than three.

Puritan John Brown (the one to whom the song “John Brown” was rededicated), a staunch anti-slavery man, settled with his family in Kansas near the Ossawatomie River. When he heard news of the burning of the town of Lawrence by Southerners, and then of Southern settlers who, having settled in Pottawatomie, had insulted some freesoilers, Brown attacked them one night, dragged them out of their house, and massacred them. Five people died. This episode was part of a long chain of revenge, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act becomes law: Kansas is divided into two territories, Kansas to the south and Nebraska to the north. The latter is soon invaded by Northern freesoilers, who will soon also reach southern Kansas, which the Act intended to reserve for Southern settlers and their slaves. This will create further friction between Northerners and Southerners, resulting in full-blown clashes in Kansas at Lawrence, Pottawatomie, Black Jack, and Ossawatomie. The Union begins to slide toward the abyss of civil war.

In the Crimean War the English and French made use of the rifled gun for the first time, with a range (900m versus 180m) and much greater accuracy than the smoothbore musket used by the Russians, defenders of the fortress of Sevastopol.

The Crimean War can be seen as one of the few “hot” episodes in the very long “cold” war between Britain and Russia for control of Central Asia, with the Mediterranean and India in mind. Some compare the Crimean War to the Korean War of the (real) Cold War in the 20th century.

France and England ally against Russia, which has just attacked Turkey. It is the Crimean War. France also invites Austria to join the coalition. The Franco-Austrian entente, fortunately for Cavour’s plan, fails. Cavour will seize the opportunity to join the Franco-British alliance to sit at the victors’ table and bring the Italian cause to the European table.

Kazakhstan, Tsarist Russia. The Cossacks founded the city of Vernyj, next to a pre-existing fort, which later became Alma Ata (which in Kazakh, strangely enough, means “Grandfather of Apples”) under the Soviets in 1921.

Tokyo Bay, Japan. Commodore Perry’s American fleet returns as promised, with nine warships. The shoguns respond with the first treaty with a Western country. It is a momentous compromise for Japanese culture, until then completely closed to foreign influence. Japan opens two ports to American ships, accepts the American consul, and agrees to humane treatment for captured American sailors. Shortly thereafter, the British, Russians, and Dutch reach similar trade agreements. In 1858, the Americans reach a new trade agreement. The Japanese strategy is to gain time and, in the meantime, advance the adoption of Western technology and improved techniques and customs.

London. A second cholera epidemic erupts in the city, 22 years after the first. It kills over 500 people in the SoHo neighborhood in just two weeks. Then, doctor John Snow maps all known cholera cases and discovers they are clustered around the Broad Street public water pump. He persuades the authorities to shut it down, and the epidemic comes to a halt. New underground sewer systems and a better understanding of the bacterial nature of diseases like cholera ensure that this will be London’s last cholera epidemic.

England. Work on the Difference Engine, Charles Babbage’s first mechanical calculator, is suspended, never to be resumed. (It will be completed over a century later at the Science Museum in London.)

John Ericsson designs the first battleship with revolving turrets in New York

California mines three times more gold than the rest of the world combined.

Crimean War between Türkiye and Russia.

Thomas Alva Edison’s public education didn’t extend beyond the beginning of second grade: “I could never get by in school; I was always at the bottom of my class. My father thought I was stupid.”

With Matthew Perry’s expedition, the Americans broke Japan’s centuries-old commercial and cultural isolation. With this contact with Western culture, the Japanese drew the opposite conclusions from the Chinese, who instead withdrew into Western culture. Japan would become the first non-Western society to experience the transformation of the Industrial Revolution.

Japan. When Commodore Perry arrives in Japan, Tokyo has already been the largest city in the world for over a century and a half.

Tokyo Bay, Japan. A fleet of American ships led by Commodore Perry sails into the bay. They demand open trade with the West and rights for captured American sailors. It is the beginning of a revolution for Japan, which will lead to the Meiji Era. Matthew Perry delivers a letter from President Millard Fillmore, calling for open trade with Japan and demanding a response the following year.

William Wallace, the third son of Abraham Lincoln and his wife Mary, is born.

Mazzini founds the Action Party.

Milan. Mazzini promotes a popular uprising that, however, meets with total failure, fueled also by the distrust between Mazzini’s bourgeoisie and Mazzini’s common people.

Alfred Wallace, returning from Brazil, but without any insect specimens because the ship was wrecked, publishes his recollections in A Travel Narrative on the Amazons and Rio Negro

John Davis discovers gold in the Transvaal of South Africa

Hawaii. The indigenous population had shrunk from 500,000 at Cook’s arrival in 1779 to just 84,000, due to epidemics of typhus, gonorrhea, syphilis, tuberculosis, and influenza. In 1853, smallpox arrived, killing another 10,000 of the survivors.

Vincent Willem van Gogh was born in Groot Zundert, Holland, the son of a Protestant pastor.

Invention of Blue Jeans

Piedmont. From November 1852 until his death in 1861, Cavour remained almost uninterruptedly at the helm of the government, transforming Piedmont from a backward and absolutist state into a modern and advanced state, radically different from other Italian states, under the banner of consolidated bourgeois hegemony, worthy of standing on par with other liberal states in Western Europe. The railways were also greatly expanded and other public works were carried out, which, however, led to enormous public debt and tax burdens.

By 1852, 21 small planets had been discovered in the Asteroid Belt, and this number would rise to 300 in the 1890s.