Media History Project
mediahst@umn.edu

1880-1889

  • 1880: Civil War General Lew Wallace’s novel, Ben Hur.
  • 1880: Muybridge’s Zoopraxiscope projects photographic images in motion.
  • 1880: Tchaikovsk’s 1812 Overture.
  • 1880: Emile Zola’s realistic novel, Nana.
  • 1880: Sculptor Auguste Rodin begins Gates of Hell, never completes it.
  • 1880: Offenbach dies before completing Tales of Hoffmann.
  • 1880: France’s Leblanc theorizes transmitting a picture in segments.
  • 1880: An American, John Paine, writes a symphony, In Spring.
  • 1880: A halftone photograph, “Shantytown,” appears in a newspaper.
  • 1880: Antonin Dvorak’s First Symphony.
  • 1880: Parcel post.
  • 1880: National Bell, others merge into American Bell Telephone Company.
  • 1880: Advertising copywriter becomes an occupation.
  • 1880: The U.S. has about 50,000 telephones.
  • 1880: From Italy, Carlo Collodi’s tale for children, Pinocchio: the Story of a Puppet.
  • 1880: Birth of Helen Keller, who will learn to communicate by sign language.
  • 1880: Telephone pay stations are opened in New York.
  • 1880: John Powers, the first skilled ad copy writer.
  • 1880: Richard Strauss, age 16, wins acclaim with Symphony in D Minor.
  • 1880: A dispatch is telegraphed from a field of battle (the Second Afghan War).
  • 1881: Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D.
  • 1881: The Los Angeles Times.
  • 1881: France gets press freedom; this time it lasts.
  • 1881: The first photographic roll film.
  • 1881: The Electric Telescope, a book about television, intrigues readers.
  • 1881: In London, the Savoy Theater is built to house Gilbert & Sullivan operas.
  • 1881: Women enter the business world via the typewriter.
  • 1881: A revised edition of the New Testament is published.
  • 1881: Business offices acquire typewriters, begin to look modern.
  • 1881: Paris Exposition lets visitors listen to opera over telephone headsets.
  • 1881: Bell and Tainter’s graphophone; has better sound than Edison phonograph.
  • 1881: Selford Bidwell sends electronic image by telegraph using photoelectric cell.
  • 1882: Mark Twain’s novel, The Prince and the Pauper.
  • 1882: Gilbert & Sullivan’s operetta, Iolanthe.
  • 1882: Wagner’s final opera, Parsifal.
  • 1882: In England, a twin-lens camera goes into production.
  • 1882: Emma Lazarus’ sonnet is inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.
  • 1882: In England, the first wirephotos.
  • 1882: Etienne-Jules Marey designs a rifle-like camera that shoots 12 photos per second.
  • 1882: Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is banned in Boston.
  • 1883: After many rejections, Anton Bruckner succeeds with Seventh Symphony.
  • 1883: Edison stumbles onto “Edison effect”; later, basis of broadcast vacuum tubes.
  • 1883: Annie Besant, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, exposes industrial poverty.
  • 1883: Stevenson’s Treasure Island.
  • 1883: Newspapers are folded by machine.
  • 1883: Pulitzer buys the New York World from financier Jay Gould.
  • 1883: Buffalo Bill Cody opens his Wild West Show.
  • 1883: Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra.
  • 1883: Mark Twain’s recollections, Life on the Mississippi, first typed book manuscript.
  • 1883: Henrik Ibsen’s play, An Enemy of the People.
  • 1884: In Germany, Paul Nipkow’s scanning disc, early version of television.
  • 1884: People can now make long distance phone calls.
  • 1884: The electric tabulator.
  • 1884: The Stebbing Automatic Camera, first production model to use roll film.
  • 1884: Jules Massenet’s opera, Manon.
  • 1884: Lewis Waterman designs a practical fountain pen that doesn’t blot.
  • 1884: The letter “A” of the Oxford English Dictionary is finished; volume published.
  • 1884: Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
  • 1885: Fingerprints are used for identification.
  • 1885: Dictating machines are bought for offices.
  • 1885: American Bell Telephone Co. creates AT&T for its long distance business.
  • 1885: H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines.
  • 1885: Transparent film negatives are sold.
  • 1885: Tainter and Bell “graphaphone” uses wax-coated cylinders for better sound.
  • 1885: U.S. Post Office offers special delivery.
  • 1885: Scottish game of golf crosses the Atlantic.
  • 1885: Mail rates for publications drop to a penny a pound.
  • 1885: Franz Liszt completes nineteen Hungarian Rhapsodies.
  • 1885: Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony.
  • 1885: Vincent van Gogh paints The Potato Eaters.
  • 1885: Richard Burton’s The Arabian Nights sets imaginations aflame.
  • 1885: Gilbert & Sullivan’s operetta The Mikado. It will infuriate Japanese.
  • 1885: Trains are delivering newspapers daily.
  • 1885: “Nellie Bly” begins career as exposé reporter.
  • 1885: Emile Zola’s Germinal, about a bitter coalminers’ strike in France.
  • 1885: Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses and Prince Otto.
  • 1885: William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham.
  • 1886: Sapphire stylus improve sound.
  • 1886: Little Lord Fauntelroy, a novel by Francis Burnett.
  • 1886: Pointillist painter George Seurat, Bathing at Asnières.
  • 1886: Tokyo’s Imperial University is founded.
  • 1886: Berne Convention sets up international copyright agreements.
  • 1886: Thomas Hardy’s novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge.
  • 1886: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
  • 1886: Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Kidnapped.
  • 1886: Rudyard Kipling begins a long writing career with Departmental Ditties.
  • 1886: One-third of all books published in U.S. are cheap paperbacks.
  • 1886: Ottmar Mergenthaler’s Linotype at New York Tribune replaces setting type by hand.
  • 1886: Amos Dolbear gets patent for wireless communication using induction.
  • 1887: Cellulose photographic film on a roll is developed by New York clergyman.
  • 1887: William Randolph Hearst gets his first newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner.
  • 1887: Montgomery Ward mails out a 540-page catalog.
  • 1887: Annie Sullivan meets Helen Keller; will develop touch teaching for the blind.
  • 1887: St. Nicholas Magazine, best of early children’s magazines; will publish until 1943.
  • 1887: Berliner gets music from a flat “gramophone” disk stamped out by machine.
  • 1887: Thomas Edison assigns engineer W.L.K. Dickson to create a motion picture camera.
  • 1887: In Chicago, with a broomstick and an overstuffed ball: softball.
  • 1887: Comptometer multi-function adding machine is manufactured.
  • 1887: Impressionist Pierre Renoir, The Bathers.
  • 1887: Alexander Borodin dies before finishing his opera, Prince Igor.
  • 1887: Arthur Conan Doyle writes his first short story about Sherlock Holmes.
  • 1887: Ads appear in magazines.
  • 1887: Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, calls for heroic morality, supermen.
  • 1888: A new magazine: National Geographic.
  • 1888: Wisconsin telegraphy teacher George Parker designs a new pen.
  • 1888: Printer’s Ink, a newspaper for the advertising industry.
  • 1888: Cesar Franck composes the Symphony in d Minor.
  • 1888: “Kodak” box camera makes picture taking simple. The “snapshot” is born.
  • 1888: In London, the Financial Times.
  • 1888: Considered an office machine, the phonograph is franchised in territories.
  • 1888: Edison tries to record movies on a wax cylinder like his phonograph.
  • 1888: Richard Strauss’ tone poem, Don Juan.
  • 1888: McGraw-Hill begins book publishing.
  • 1888: Heinrich Hertz proves that radio waves exist.
  • 1888: Experimental motion pictures are recorded on sensitized paper rolls.
  • 1888: The first beauty contest is held in Spa, Belgium.
  • 1888: The Kodak box camera, $25, takes 100 pictures on a roll.
  • 1888: The coin-operated public telephone, patented by William Gray.
  • 1888: Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony.
  • 1888: Nikola Tesla invents alternating current.
  • 1888: John Loud patents ballpoint pen; never manufactured.
  • 1888: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s tuneful symphonic suite, Scheherazade.
  • 1888: Edison’s phonograph is manufactured for sale to the public.
  • 1888: Oberlin Smith sets forth theory of magnetic recording.
  • 1888: Lehigh Valley Railroad adopts wireless telegraph; uses induction coil.
  • 1889: Eleven years after patent, Edison mass produces a phonograph doll.
  • 1889: William Dickson reportedly synchronizes motion pictures with phonograph.
  • 1889: John Philip Sousa’s “Washington Post March” honors the newspaper.
  • 1889: Andrew Carnegie, “The Gospel of Wealth”; endows 2,800 libraries, much else.
  • 1889: Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
  • 1889: Eastman sells cellulose roll film.
  • 1889: The Wall Street Journal.
  • 1889: Coin-operated phonographs are placed in bars, arcades, the first jukeboxes.
  • 1889: Richard Strauss’ tone poem, Death and Transfiguration.
  • 1889: Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae.
  • 1889: Columbia Phonograph Company issues one-page music record catalog.