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19th Century: Sixth Decade

Gallery
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Inness's Lackawanna Valley
George Inness'
landscape, 1855:
The Lackawanna
Valley

Daumier's Plead Not Guilty
Honoré Daumier's
lithograph, c. 1850s:
Plead Not Guilty

Currier & Ives' Across the Continent
Currier & Ives'
Across the Continent,
c. 1850s
1850-1859
1850: Elizabeth Barrett Browning publishes Sonnets from the Portuguese.
1850: Mathew Brady publishes collection of photographs of famous Americans.
1850: Auguste Comte, French philosopher, founds discipline of sociology.
1850: In China, foreign nations operate the postal systems.
1850: Alfred Lord Tennyson's lyrical poem "In Memoriam" is published anonymously.
1850: P.T. Barnum sets a razzle-dazzle tone with newspaper ads and handbills.
1850: Olive Gilbert's Narrative of Sojourner Truth, former slave, is published.
1850: Number of U.S. public libraries triples in 25 years.
1850: A new use for paper, the paper bag.
1850: Jean-Fran�ois Millet paints The Sower.
1850: Robert Schumann's 3rd Symphony, the Rhenish.
1850: The New York Times founded as the Daily Times.
1850: Ballroom dances divided into "round dancing" and "square dancing."
1850: Antonio de Torres Jurado invents the modern guitar.
1850: Submarine cable briefly connects England and France.
1850: "Songs of Labor of New England," arguably John Greenleaf Whittier's best work.
1850: Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter.
 
1851: Herman Melville's novel of the obsessive search for the great whale, Moby Dick.
1851: Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables.
1851: In the U.S., paper is made from wood fiber.
1851: Sojourner Truth gives "Ain't I a Woman" speech in face of jeers by hostile men.
1851: Soap is mass marketed.
1851: In Japan, type molds are designed to replace traditional wood printing blocks.
1851: The Erie railroad depends on the telegraph.
1851: Archer invents wet-plate photography process.
1851: In England, Talbot takes a flash photograph at 1/100,000 second exposure.
1851: Newspaper postage cut in half; free distribution within county.
1851: In London, Frederick Bakewell demonstrates fax machine to send pictures.
1851: The Reuters news agency.
1851: Giuseppe Verdi's opera, Rigoletto is staged.
1851: Fire damages the Library of Congress.
 
 
1852: Peter Mark Roget assembles his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases.
1852: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin increases abolitionist support.
1852: Postage stamps are widely used.
1852: In the U.S., stamped envelopes.
1852: E.P. Dutton, book publisher.
1852: Charles Dickens' Bleak House.
1852: Verdi's Il Trovatore.
1852: Telegraphic fire alarm system adopted in Boston, will spread worldwide.
1852: Massachusetts is first state to enact compulsory education law.
1853: London Stock Exchange sets up first pneumatic tube message delivery.
1853: Duplex system doubles telegraph wire capacity.
1853: European optical signalling system has 556 stations.
1853: Envelopes are made by a paper folding machine.
1853: Franz Liszt's Sonata in B Minor changes the structure of the sonata.
1853: Verdi continues his operatic magic with La Traviata.
 
 
1854: Telegraph brings news of the Crimean War.
1854: In Paris, Le Figaro.
1854: Thoreau publishes Walden.
1854: Bourseul in France builds an experimental telephone.
1854: Carte-de-visite process simplifies photography.
1854: Dickens' Hard Times.
1854: Wagner's opera, Das Rheingold.
1854: Curved stereotype plate obviates column rules; wide ads follow.
1854: George Boole develops logic system that future computers will depend on.
1855: The Bondwoman's Narrative, a novel apparently written by a former slave.
1855: Prepayment of letters made compulsory in the United States.
1855: Walt Whitman publishes, at his own expense, Leaves of Grass.
1855: In London, the Daily Telegraph.
1855: First edition of John Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.
1855: French diplomat Joseph Gobineau publishes racist book on Nordic supremacy.
1855: The stopwatch.
1855: Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha."
1855: Registered letters enter service.
1855: Charlotte Bront� dies in childbirth before completing Emma.
1855: Dickens' Little Dorrit.
1855: Publication of the collection of legends known as Bulfinch's Mythology.
1855: U.S. postal service adds registered mail, compulsory pre-payment of postage.
1855: A privately owned newspaper is published in Sierra Leone.
 
 
1856: Poitevan starts photolithography.
1856: Origin of Rand, McNally.
1856: Electric clocks.
1856: Photographer Mathew Brady starts trend with large-type newspaper ads.
1856: First full-page ad runs in a newspaper, the New York Ledger.
1856: Photojournalism begins with pictures of the Crimean War.
1856: Portugal gets a railroad and a telegraph line.
1856: Blotting paper replaces sand boxes.
1856: Another Wagnerian opera, Die Walk�re.
1856: Machine folds paper for books, newspapers.
 
1857: Johannes Brahms composes his Piano Concerto No. 1.
1857: A machine to set type is demonstrated.
1857: Currier & Ives prints go on sale.
1857: Harper's Weekly magazine features engraved illustrations.
1857: Reports from Germany's Neanderthal Valley: bones of a pre-modern man.
1857: Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary leads to immorality trial; he is acquitted.
1857: Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown's School Days.
1857: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "novel in verse," Aurora Leigh, praised, attacked.
1857: In France, Scott's phonautograph is a forerunner of Edison's phonograph.
1857: Anthony Trollope's novel Barchester Towers.
1857: "Les Fleurs du mal," the only poetry published during Charles Baudelaire's life.
1857: Matthew Arnold, new professor at Oxford, writes poetry and literary criticism.
 
 
1858: Mailboxes appear on American streets.
1858: First effort at transatlantic telegraph service fails.
1658: Work begins on the Oxford English Dictionary.
1858: Eraser is fitted to the end of a pencil.
1858: In London's Covent Garden, an opera house goes up.
1858: George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) writes Adam Bede, first of eight novels.
 
 
1859: Camera gets a wide-angled lens.
1859: The telautograph is another precursor to recorded sound.
1859: Edward FitzGerald publishes The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayy�m.
1859: Telegraph reaches from Atlantic to Pacific.
1859: A novel by an African-American woman, Harriet Wilson, is published.
1859: Gounod writes an opera about the legend, Faust.
1859: Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities.
1859: Jacques Offenbach's opera, Orpheus in the Underworld.
1859: Tennyson's Idylls of the King.
1859: Wagner's opera, Tristan und Isolde.
1859: George Meredith's novel, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel.
1859: Charles Darwin's Origin of Species sells all copies in one day, but creates fury.
1859: John Stuart Mill's On Liberty is a far-seeing liberal exposition.
 


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Copyright © Irving Fang and Kristina Ross, 1995-1996. All rights reserved.