Media History Timeline: 1820s

19th Century: Third Decade

Gallery

Forerunner of computer, difference engine
by Charles Babbage
begun in 1823

Samuel Morse's
painting of
Lafayette, 1826

Earliest Niépce camera
1826

1820-1829

1820: Arithmometer, forerunner of the calculator.

1820: Walter Scott's Ivanhoe.

1820: In Principles of Political Economy, Malthus urges delay of marriage.

1820: Washington Irving, The Sketch Book.

1820: John Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is the height of literary romanticism.

1821: In England, Charles Wheatstone reproduces sound.

1821: Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater.

1821: The Saturday Evening Post. It will publish weekly until 1969.

1821: The Manchester Guardian begins publication.

1821: Carl Maria von Weber's opera, Der Freischutz.

1821: Artist John Constable, The Hay Wain.

1821: Thomas Jefferson's Autobiography expresses debt to ideas of John Locke.

1821: Free public high school opens in Boston. Free education aids American literacy.

1822: Jean Champollion deciphers hieroglyphics by translating the Rosetta Stone.

1822: Biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck argues that species transmit acquired traits.

1822: Franz Schubert's unfinished 8th Symphony. He dies in 1828, age 31.

1822: Joseph Niépce is able to photograph an engraving superimposed on glass.

1822: Bowdler "bowdlerizes" the Old Testament of sexy or "irreligious" passages.

1823: Beethoven's 9th Symphony (Choral).

1823: U.S. Congress designates navigable waters as post roads.

1823: Clement Moore's poem, "A Visit from St. Nicholas" introduces Santa Claus.

1823: Charles Babbage builds a section of a calculating machine, a "difference engine."

1823: Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Posthumous Poems" published.

1823: Publication of the British medical journal, The Lancet.

1823: In England, Ronalds builds a telegraph in his garden; no one is interested.

1824: The Cherokee people get their own alphabet, 85 letters. Literacy booms.

1825: U.S. postal service creates a dead letter office.

1825: Persistence of vision shown with Thaumatrope, a disk with image on each side.

1825: Pepys Diary is published 156 years after he stopped writing it.

1825: Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin's Boris Godunov. Permission to publish in 1830.

1825: Height of Japan's ukiyo-e period, wood-block prints of the "floating world."

1826: James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Last of the Mohicans.

1826: Age 17, Felix Mendelssohn composes overture to The Midsummer Night's Dream.

1826: Promoting adult education, the Lyceum Movement grows in the U.S.

1827: Using a camera obscura, Niépce makes a true photograph on a pewter plate.

1827: Eugenè Delacroix paints The Death of Sardanapalus.

1827: The first black-owned newspaper in the U.S., the Freeman's Journal.

1827: Heinrich Heine's early poetry published in Book of Songs.

1827: First African-American newspaper, Freedom's Journal.

1827: Wheatstone constructs a kind of microphone and a kind of image scanner.

1828: First Native American newspaper, Cherokee Phoenix.

1828: Ladies' Magazine, first successful American magazine for women.

1828: Gioachino Rossini's William Tell Overture.

1828: In Belgium, the Anorthoscope is a forerunning of a motion picture projector.

1828: The first volume of John James Audubon's 10-volume The Birds of America.

1828: Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language, for educated adults.

1828: London's University College: professorship of English Language and Literature.

1829: Louis Daguerre joins Niépce to pursue photographic inventions.

1829: The first of 13 volumes of the first edition of The Encyclopedia Americana,

1829: William Burt gets the first U.S. patent for a typewriter.

1829: In Paris, The Poetical Works of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats are published.

1829: Louis Braille invents embossed printing for the blind.

1829: Postmaster General joins the U.S. Cabinet.