Media History Timeline: 1830s

19th Century: Fourth Decade

Gallery

Samuel Morse's first
telegraph, using artist's
canvas stretcher, 1835

1837 Daguerrotype,
Still Life,
ammonites (detail)

Cooke-Wheatstone
5-needle telegraph
England, 1837

Telegraph key
with spring-loaded switch
1838

Daguerre's camera,
built by Giroux,
1839

Cover of first
pirated version of
Daguerre's manual,
1839

1830-1839

1830: Calendered paper is produced in England.; 1830: Book of Mormon published, the basis of religion founded by Joseph Smith.; 1830: First railway, Manchester to Liverpool, uses 5-needle telegraph.; 1830: Godey's Lady's Book, a second U.S. magazine targeting women readers.; 1830: Hector Berlioz' Symphony Fantastique breaks with traditional form.; 1831: Essayist Thomas Carlyle writes his spiritual autobiograhy, Sartor Resartus.; 1831: William Lloyd Garrison publishes abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator.; 1831: Victor Hugo's novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame.; 1831: Pushkin's novel in verse, Eugene Onegin; it will become a Tchaikovsky opera.; 1831: Stendhal's novel, The Red and the Black examines French society.; 1831: Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of History.; 1831: Artist Jean-Baptiste Corot, View of the Forest of Fontainebleau.; 1831: G. & C. Merriam start book publishing firm.; 1831: Vincenzo Belli stages his opera Norma.; 1831: Faraday's research in electromagnetism will lead to world of communication.; 1831: The Quarterly Journal of Education begins publication.
: 1832: Houghton, Mifflin publishing house established.; 1832: Byron's poetry, letters, journals are published posthumously.; 1832: In England, Philip Watt invents sewing machine, can bind books.; 1832: Publication of the poems of Wordsworth, Tennyson.; 1832: Phenakistoscope in Belgium and Stroboscope in Austria herald the movies.; 1832: Wheatstone builds a stereoscopic, but non-photo, viewer.; 1832: Paper jackets are wrapped around book covers.; 1832: Frédéric Chopin's Mazurkas (op 6).; 1832: Johann Wolfgang Goethe completes Faust, dies. It speaks to eternal yearnings.; 1833: A penny buys a newspaper,the New York Sun, opening a mass market.; 1833: Mendelssohn composes 4th Symphony in A.; 1833: In Japan, Hiroshige's drawings: Fifty-three Stages of the Tokaido Highway.; 1833: In Germany, the Weber and Gauss telegraph line runs for nearly two miles.; 1833: Prussian general Karl von Clausewitz' On War published posthumously.; 1833: Mendelssohn's, Italian Symphony.; 1834: Edward Bulwer-Lytton's popular novel, The Last Days of Pompeii.; 1834: The zoetrope, a toy using a rotating drum gives the illusion of movement.; 1834: Lithographer Honoré Daumier, Rue Transnonain.; 1834: Babbage conceives the analytical engine, forerunner of the computer.; 1834: Louis Braille creates a raised-point code to help the blind to read.
: 1835: Penny press expands with James Gordon Bennett's newspapers.; 1835: Hans Christian Andersen publishes his Fairy Tales.; 1835: New York Herald founded, starts to build a reference library of books.; 1835: Lucia di Lammermoor, most famous of Gaetano Donizetti's 60-plus operas.; 1835: In England, W. H. Fox Talbot produces his first photographs.; 1835: P.T. Barnum begins his career.; 1835: Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America looks at the new country.; 1836: Rowland Hill starts to reform British postal system.; 1836: William McGuffy publishes first of phenomenally successful McGuffy Readers.; 1836: In Germany, chromolithography adds color.; 1836: In Russia, Gogol writes The Inspector General.; 1836: German playwright Georg Buchner, Woyzeck.; 1836: Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay on "Nature" starts transcendentalist movement.; 1837: Wheatstone and Cooke patent an electric telegraph in England.; 1837: Charles Dickens becomes famous with publication of The Pickwick Papers.; 1837: Leigh Hunt publishes book of poems, including "Jenny Kissed Me."; 1837: In Massachusetts, Horace Mann starts campaign for public school system.; 1837: Isaac Pitman's Stenographic Soundhand introduces shorthand.; 1837: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twice Told Tales.; 1837: Start of Little, Brown, publishing house.; 1837: Samuel Morse exhibits telegraph, but Alfred Vail invents Morse Code.; 1837: Carlyle publishes The French Revolution.; 1837: Daguerre creates daguerreotype, begins photography craze.
: 1838: In England, Wheatstone's stereoscope shows pictures in 3-D.; 1838: G.P. Putnam's Sons, book publishers.; 1838: Dickens' Oliver Twist.; 1838: In the U.S., railroads are officially designated as postal routes.; 1838: Germany's K.A. Steinheil finds that grounding can aid telegraph transmission.; 1839: John Herschel's hypo fixative stops darkening of photographs.; 1839: Daguerrotype method.; 1839: The first camera manufactured for sale, the Giroux Daguerreotype.; 1839: Dickens' Nicholas Nickelby.; 1839: India gets an experimental electrical telegraph 21 miles long.; 1839: Chopin completes composition of 24 Preludes.; 1839: In Russia, Jacobi invents electrotyping, the duplicating of printing plates.; 1839: Electricity runs a printing press.; 1839: In London, a commercial telegraph line sends messages.; 1839: Fox Talbot's calotype method prints photographs from paper negatives.; 1839: Marie Henri Stendahl' novel, The Charterhouse of Parma.