Media History Project
mediahst@umn.edu

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: The Saturday Evening Post. It will publish weekly until 1969.
  • 1821: Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater.
  • 1821: Carl Maria von Weber’s opera, Der Freischutz.
  • 1821: The Manchester Guardian begins publication.
  • 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 will aid literacy.
  • 1822: Jean Champollion deciphers hieroglyphics by translating the Rosetta Stone.
  • 1822: Diorama paintings, lit in dark room, are a forerunner of projection cinema.
  • 1822: Biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck argues that species transmit acquired traits.
  • 1822: Franz Schubert’s unfinished Eighth 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 Ninth Symphony (Choral).
  • 1823: In Britain, a medical journal, The Lancet, is published.
  • 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: 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.
  • 1824: British physicist Peter Mark Roget describes persistence of vision.
  • 1825: Persistence of vision shown with the Thaumatrope, 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.”
  • 1825: In France, a law makes sacrilege a capital offense.
  • 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: Swiss teacher Rodolphe Topffer draws a comic strip.
  • 1827: Heinrich Heine’s early poetry published in Book of Songs.
  • 1827: Wheatstone constructs a kind of microphone and a kind of image scanner.
  • 1827: First African-American newspaper, Freedom’s Journal.
  • 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: Charles Wheatstone also invents the concertina.
  • 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.