19th Century
The 19th (nineteenth) century began on 1 January 1801, and ended on 31 December 1900.
On Earth, this century saw a lot of social change: wide-spread slavery was abolished (though not "underground"), and the First and Second Industrial Revolutions led to massive urbanization, and much higher levels of productivity, profit and prosperity. The Islamic gunpowder empires were formally dissolved, and European imperialism brought much of South Asia, Southeast Asia and almost all of Africa under colonial rule. It also saw the collapse of the Spanish, Zulu Kingdom, First French, Holy Roman and Mughal empires. These governmental and societal collapses paved the way for the growing influence of the British Empire, the Russian Empire, the United States, the German Empire, the Second French Empire, the Kingdom of Italy and Meiji Japan.
The British and Russian empires expanded greatly, becoming the world's leading powers. The British Empire grew rapidly in the first half of the century, and by the end of the century, the British Empire controlled a fifth of the world's land, and one-quarter of the world's population.
It was an era of rapidly accelerating scientific discovery and invention, with significant developments in the fields of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, electricity, and metallurgy that laid the groundwork for the technological advances of the 20th century. The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain and spread to continental Europe, North America and Japan. The Victorian era was notorious for the employment of young children in factories and mines, as well as strict social norms regarding modesty and gender roles. Advances in medicine and the understanding of human anatomy and disease prevention took place in the 19th century, and were partly responsible for rapidly accelerating population growth in the western world. Europe's population doubled during the 19th century, from approximately 200 million to more than 400 million. The introduction of railroads provided the first major advancement in land transportation for centuries, changing the way people lived and obtained goods, and fueling major urbanization movements in countries across the globe. Numerous cities worldwide surpassed populations of a million or more during this century.
The first electronics appeared in the 19th century: the electric relay in 1835, the telegraph and Morse code protocol in 1837, the first telephone call in 1876, and the first functional light bulb in 1878.
The last remaining undiscovered landmasses of Earth, including vast expanses of interior Africa and Asia, were explored during this century, and with the exception of the extreme zones of the Arctic and Antarctic, accurate and detailed maps of the globe were available by the 1890s.
Scientific Advances
- 1807: Potassium and Sodium are individually isolated by Sir Humphry Davy.
- 1859: Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species.
- 1865: Gregor Mendel formulates his laws of inheritance.
- 1869: Dmitri Mendeleev created the Periodic table.
- 1877: Asaph Hall discovers the moons of Mars.
- 1896: Henri Becquerel discovers radioactivity
- 1896: J. J. Thomson identifies the electron, though not by name.
Medical Advances
- 1804: Morphine first isolated.
- 1842: Anesthesia used for the first time.
- 1847: Chloroform invented for the first time, given to Queen Victoria at the birth of her eighth child, Prince Leopold in 1853
- 1855: Cocaine is isolated by Friedrich Gaedcke.
- 1885: Louis Pasteur creates the first successful vaccine against rabies for a young boy who had been bitten 14 times by a rabid dog.
- 1889: Aspirin patented.
Inventions
- 1804: First steam locomotive begins operation.
- 1825: First isolation of aluminium.
- 1825: The first public railway in the world, is opened.
- 1826: Samuel Morey patents the internal combustion engine.
- 1829: First electric motor built.
- 1837: Telegraphy patented.
- 1841: The word "dinosaur" is coined by Richard Owen
- 1844: First publicly funded telegraph line in the world sends demonstration message, ushering in the age of the telegraph.
- 1849: The safety pin and the gas mask are invented.
- 1855: Bessemer process enables steel to be mass-produced.
- 1858: Invention of the phonautograph, the first true device for recording sound.
- 1866: Successful transatlantic telegraph cable follows an earlier attempt in 1858.
- 1867: Alfred Nobel invents dynamite.
- 1869: First Transcontinental Railroad completed in United States on 10 May.
- 1877: Thomas Edison invents the phonograph.
- 1880: Introduction of the widespread use of electric lighting.
- 1879: Thomas Edison patents a practical incandescent light bulb.
- 1894: First gramophone record.
- 1895: Wilhelm Röntgen identifies x-rays.
Cultural Events
- 1808: Beethoven composes Fifth Symphony.
- 1813: Jane Austen publishes Pride and Prejudice.
- 1818: Mary Shelley publishes Frankenstein.
- 1837: Charles Dickens publishes Oliver Twist.
- 1845: Frederick Douglass publishes Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.
- 1851: Herman Melville publishes Moby-Dick.
- 1851: Sojourner Truth delivers the speech Ain't I a Woman?.
- 1852: Harriet Beecher Stowe publishes Uncle Tom's Cabin.
- 1855: Walt Whitman publishes the first edition of Leaves of Grass.
- 1862: Victor Hugo publishes Les Misérables.
- 1865: Lewis Carroll publishes Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
- 1869: Leo Tolstoy publishes War and Peace.
- 1886: "Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" by Robert Louis Stevenson is published.
- 1887: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle publishes his first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet.
- 1889: Vincent van Gogh paints The Starry Night.
- 1897: Bram Stoker writes Dracula.
- 1900: L. Frank Baum publishes The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
See the full article here, at Wikipedia.
