1840-1849

Gallery

Daguerrotype sliding box camera made in Glasgow approx 1840

Voigtländer bellows camera, 1841

George Cruikshank's The New School of Portrait-Painting, 1842

1840: Charles Darwin publishes Voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle.
1840: German paper makers experiment with wood pulp.
1840: Richard Henry Dana exposes seamen's life in Two Years Before the Mast.
1840: Richard Wagner's first successful opera, Rienzi.
1840: Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop.
1840: Donizetti's opera, The Daughter of the Regiment.
1840: Anarchist Pierre Proudhon opposes both property and equality for women.
1840: In China, thousands of post offices handle letters, packages, remittances.
1840: England starts penny post. Stamps are cheap, so people write more letters.

1841: Petzval of Austria builds an f/3.6 lens, the first designed for photography.
1841: In the U.S., Volney Palmer is the first ad sales agent.
1841: New York Tribune begins publication.
1841: Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge.
1841: The satirical magazine Punch starts to publish.
1841: Thomas Cook, a Baptist minister, opens a travel agency.
1841: Robert Browning’s cynical poem, Pippa Passes.
1841: James Fenimore Cooper’s adventure novel, The Deerslayer.
1841: Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue starts modern detective story.
1841: Wagner’s fourth opera, Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman).
1841: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s humanistic essay, Self-Reliance.
1841: The first type-composing machine goes into use in London.
1841: Phineas Barnum opens his museum in New York City.
1841: First American women university graduates.

1842: Illustrated London News begins publication with engravings.
1842: Charles E. Merrill, book publisher, opens for business.
1842: In England, Alexander Bain demonstrates a crude fax machine.
1842: Another use for paper: the first commercial Christmas card.
1842: Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Morte de Arthur.
1842: In Russia, Mikhail Glinka’s opera, Russlan and Ludmilla, is hissed by audience.
1842: Cyanotype film printing: white image on blue background. Still used.

1843: In the U.S., the photographic enlarger.
1843: Donizetti’s comic opera, Don Pasquale.
1843: A photo portrait studio is opened in Edinburgh, Scotland.
1843: John Stuart Mill publishes System of Logic.
1843: Wheatstone telegraph installed alongside railroad in England.
1843: Denmark’s Søren Kierkegaard’s Either-Or will become a basis of existentialism.
1843: Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, a huge success, and Martin Chuzzlewit.
1843: Byron’s daughter, Ada Lovelace, explains concept of computer programming.
1843: The Economist is founded.
1843: On an American stage, the first blackface minstrel show.
1843: British Algae, an album illustrated with photographs, is produced by Anna Atkins.
1843: Congress gives Morse funds to build an experimental telegraph line.
1843: Rubbery “gutta percha” is found in Malaya, a future submarine cable wrap.
1843: Exchanging Christmas cards becomes popular.
1843: Thomas Hood’s Song of the Shirt stirs anger at working conditions of women.
1843: Edgar Allan Poe writes the first modern mystery story, The Gold Bug.

1844: William Makepeace Thackeray, Barry Lyndon.
1844: Samuel Morse’s telegraph connects Washington and Baltimore.
1844: In Germany, paper is made from wood pulp.
1844: A camera is designed to take panoramic photographs.
1844: A newspaper is published in Thailand.
1844: Electrotyping in book printing makes plates of type and woodcuts.
1844: Fox Talbot publishes The Pencil of Nature, first book with photographs.
1844: Alexander Dumas’ The Three Musketeers.

1845: U.S. postal reform bill lowers rates, regulates domestic and international service.
1845: The typewriter ribbon.
1845: Rules are written for a popular pastime: baseball.
1845: Submarine cable is laid across the English Channel.
1845: Mathew Brady opens a portrait studio in New York.
1845: Telegraph message leads to capture of murderer in London.
1845: Friedrich Engels, The Conditions of the Working Class in England.
1845: Horace Mann leads movement to improve U.S. public education.
1845: Wagner’s opera, Tannhäuser.
1845: Benjamin Disraeli begins career as a novelist, with Sibyl.
1845: Edgar Allan Poe writes his most famous poem, The Raven.
1845: Dickens’ The Chimes and The Cricket on the Hearth.

1846: In Germany, Zeiss begins manufacturing lenses.
1846: In France, Prosper Merimee’s play, Carmen; it will lead to Bizet’s opera.
1846: Richard Hoe’s cylinder press produces 8,000 sheets an hour.
1846: Herman Melville’s first novel, Typee, life among South Seas cannibals.
1846: Printing telegraph is forerunner of ticker tape.
1846: Dickens’ Dombey And Son.
1846: Edward Lear publishes his Book of Nonsense.
1846: Dumas’ Man in the Iron Mask and Count of Monte Cristo.
1846: Hector Berlioz’ Damnation of Faust.
1846: Henry Rawlinson deciphers cuneiform writing, key to Babylonian history.

1847: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Poems.
1847: Honoré de Balzac: Cousin Bette
1847: The first Merriam-Webster dictionary.
1847: Congress sells demonstration line; first use of telegraph as business tool.
1847: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre criticizes limited options for women.
1847: Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights; doomed love and revenge.
1847: William Makepeace Thackery’s Vanity Fair is serialized.
1847: George Boole’s Mathematical Analysis of Logic; basis for computer programs.
1847: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem, Evangeline.

1848: Forerunner of the Associated Press is founded in New York.
1848: Wagner’s opera Lohengrin.
1848: The Communist Manifesto, a pamphlet by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
1848: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, reveals misery of industrial age England.
1848: Egg whites are discovered to hold photo negatives on glass plates.
1848: Spiritualism becomes popular; alleged communication with the dead.
1848: Walt Whitman starts the newspaper Brooklyn Freeman.
1848: John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy.
1848: The first two volumes of Thomas Babington Macaulay’s History of England.
1848: Dante Gabriel Rossetti begins England’s Pre-Raphaelite poetry movement.
1848: Jacob Grimm publishes History of the German Language.