Media History Project
mediahst@umn.edu

1830-1839

  • 1830: Calendered paper is produced in England.
  • 1830: Godey’s Lady’s Book, a second U.S. magazine targeting women readers.
  • 1830: Book of Mormon published, the basis of a religion founded by Joseph Smith.
  • 1830: First railway, Manchester to Liverpool, uses 5-needle telegraph.
  • 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, is best seller.
  • 1831: Pushkin’s novel in verse, Eugene Onegin; it will become a Tchaikovsky opera.
  • 1831: Stendhal’s novel, The Red and the Black sensitively 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: In England, Philip Watt invents sewing machine, can bind books.
  • 1832: Byron’s poetry, letters, journals are published posthumously.
  • 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 Fourth 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: A Bohemian peasant girl invents the polka.
  • 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, the first negative.
  • 1835: P.T. Barnum begins his career.
  • 1835: Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America looks at the new country.
  • 1836: First of phenomenally successful McGuffey Readers, moral tales for youth.
  • 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: Rowland Hill’s pamphlet on postal reform; will have global influence.
  • 1837: Charles Dickens becomes famous with publication of The Pickwick Papers.
  • 1837: Leigh Hunt publishes book of poems, including “Jenny Kissed Me..
  • 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 pendulum telegraph, but Alfred Vail invents Morse Code.
  • 1837: In Massachusetts, Horace Mann starts campaign for public school system.
  • 1837: Thomas Carlyle publishes The French Revolution.
  • 1837: Daguerre creates daguerreotype.
  • 1838: New York Herald opens bureaus in Europe.
  • 1838: In England, Wheatstone explains depth perception, but mirror stereoscope fails.
  • 1838: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, book publishers.
  • 1838: Dickens’ Oliver Twist.
  • 1838: Germany’s K.A. Steinheil finds that grounding can aid telegraph transmission.
  • 1839: John Herschel’s hypo fixative stops darkening of photographs.
  • 1839: Cameras manufactured for sale, the Giroux Daguerreotype.
  • 1839: Daguerre’s paper to Royal Society begins photography craze.
  • 1839: Stereoscopic photos—stereographs—are shot.
  • 1839: Dickens’ Nicholas Nickelby.
  • 1839: The New York Philharmonic.
  • 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’s novel, The Charterhouse of Parma.