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Timeline from 1800-1900

1900: More to come

1899: More to come

1898: Hawaiian Islands in the Pacific Ocean are transferred to the United States.

1898: In China, Dowager Empress Cixi crushes attempts at reform.

1898: First photography of The Shroud of Turin. In Turin, as the city celebrated the inauguration of the Cathedral of St John, photographer Secondi Pia was asked to photograph a famous local relic, a shroud which had supposedly been used to wrap the body of Jesus as taken down from the Cross. Which was 4.34 metres by 1.09 metres, and showed two faded, yellow-brown images. Of a naked man, front and back, with his hands covering his groin. The man had suffered flogging injuries to his back, and a wound through his left wrist. Pia made a glass plate for the first negative image, from which a positive would be made. But the negative image to his surprise gave a positive one! The Shroud of Turin, as it is known, was first heard of in 1354,supposedly owned by a French knight named Geoffrey de Charny. It was exhibited in 1389, though a Bishop of Troyes denounced it as a fake, as he had become aware that the artist who had painted it had confessed the matter. The Avignon Pope Clement VII backed up this opinion and ruled that the Shroud could only become an object of pilgrimage (or devotion) only if it was regarded as "a representation" of any shroud used for the deceased Jesus. The Shroud was later owned by the Duke of Savoy, and it was in the royal chapel of Turin Cathedral by 1694. In 1988, modern scientists dated the shroud with a claimed 95 per cent accuracy at between 1260AD and 1390AD. One Walter McCrone, a member of American Academy of Forensic Sciences, once analysed the "blood" on the shroud and found it to be red ochre and vermilion in a collagen tempera medium. Other scientists have found reasons to be sceptical about the dating of the origin(s) of the shroud. Plant seeds from the shroud have been examined, etc, failing to provide any date near that of the crucifixion of Jesus. But controversy continues. (From an item by Australian Dr. Karl Kruszelnicki in Sydney Morning Herald Good Weekend, 6 April 2002).

If you value the information posted here, and the projects of these websites in general, you may like to consider making a donation to help reduce our production costs? It would be greatly appreciated. Options include: paying via PayPal which this website uses - Ed

1897: First Zionist Congress (Basle, Switzerland) declared Palestine to be the Jewish Homeland. Participants developed a structure of government which could be transferred to Palestine at some future time, including the World Zionist Organization to link all Jews together, the Jewish National Fund to acquire land, a committee to manage finances, a political committee to govern the land.

1897: On Australian writer Henry Lawson, see Bill Pearson, Henry Lawson Among Maoris. Australian National University Press, 1968. A famously-obscure book on Lawson's bleak period in New Zealand in 1897 as a failing teacher, a period he blotted from general reports on his life.

1896: Alfred Nobel, Swedish industralist, inventor of dynamite, uses his wealth to found the Nobel prizes.

1896: Herzl Theodore writes The Jewish State. "The idea which I have developed in this pamphlet is a very old one: it is the restoration of the Jewish state." Herzl is considered the Father of Zionism, a political movement to create a Jewish state. The said state of Israel was created in 1948 by the UN, replacing an earlier British mandate over the territory in question, and many Palestinians were subsequently displaced.

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1896: British persuade Malay states to form a federation.

1896: Modern Olympics begins in 1896, as a socio-political movement.

1896: H. N. Huntingdon publishes, Prehistoric Man and Beast. England?, Smith, Elder and Co., 1896.

1895: Rise of world's probably first "real" skyscraper, completed in 1895, the 15-floor Reliance Building in Chicago's Loop, the central business area. Designed by Charles Attwood of Daniel Burnham's office. The world's tallest structure by 2001 is Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

1895: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other women write "The Women's Bible", rather sceptical about Adam/Eve mythology of their day.

1895 or earlier: First dental drill used/devised by Englishman George Fellows Harrington (1812-1895).

1894-1895: War between Japan and China; Japanese win, occupy Korea.

1894: South Australia becomes first Australian colony to grant women right to vote and to stand for Parliament, assented to by 21 March, 1895.

1894-1895: Taiwan is ceded to Japan, which uses the island as a food basket and modernises it.

1893-1976: Life of Mao Tse Tung.

1893: New York woman Marie Tucek invents the modern brassiere.

1893: Australian socialist William Lane goes to Utopia, a "new Australia" colony in Paraguay. Lane and his family withdraw from New Australian settlement in Paraguay and went to New Zealand where he became a non-socialist, pro-Imperialist newspaper editor. (There was a German utopia in South America at the same time, where Mengeles is later said to have repaired! It was perhaps this German colony which was home to the sister of Friedrich Nietzsche, who later edited her brother's papers?).

1893- 1-2 December, 2001, Corowa, NSW, The People's Conference, a historic conference to help decide on a process to determine on the issue of finding a Head of State for Australia. Phone Melbourne on (03) 9285 6325.
(Why Corowa? Because at a conference there in 1893, a process was put forward to enable Australians to decide on Federation).
By 1893: Australian Historian F. M. Bladen found that for the first 40 years of New South Wales' history, practically no official records had been kept in the colony, everything had to be got from England.

Born in 1893, Paramahansa Yogananda, founder of Self-Realization Fellowship.

1892: More to come

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1891: Died, William Sherman, US Civil War Union general.

30 May, 1891: Womanhood suffrage movement started in Sydney with Rose Scott as secretary.

1891: A young Dutchman, Eugene Dubois, sets out to find "the missing link" of humanity in Asia, and makes a great find in Java, the skull-cap of a human-like creature in the bank of a stream. Java Man! Pithecanthropus erectus or Erect-Walking Ape Man. The specimen would seem to have huge and bulging browridges, thick cranial walls, a brain capacity much less than Homo sapiens, and possibly more primitive even than a Neandertal. The following year, Dubois found a thighbone near where he had found the skull. Java Man was not greeted with enthusiasm except in Germany. But questions do arise, such as: were there several species of "early man". Dubois retired into some years of self-imposed silence, but re-emerged in 1924 to discuss resemblances of Java Man discovered by himself, and Peking Man as discovered by a Canadian, Davidson Black. Peking Man (Sinanthropus) was discovered near "evidence of fire and hints of cannibalism". Between 1935-1939, about 45 sets of remains of Peking Man were uncovered. (These were lost by wartime misadventures when the Chinese government, invaded by Japan, sent the specimens to the US.) While Dubois was followed up in Java by a Dutchman, G. H. R. von Koenigswald, during WWII, found more evidence of "Pithecanthropus at a site called Sangiran, and also more advanced skulls near the Solo River of eastern Java. He thought that the Solo River specimens were a transitional type somewhere between Java Man and modern man. (From Shreeve, Neandertal) Shreeve adds, re Peking Man, evidence is found in an "abundantly bone-rich" cave near Beijing, Zhoukoudian, which has given up skulls, artefacts, ancient meals, traces of fire use and perhaps cannibalism, information on up to 250,000 years of human occupation at a single site. But whether such fossil remains present reliable evidence on the origins of modern Chinese is a matter still argued.

1890-1920: World Migration: One million people per year migrate from southern and eastern Europe to United States. (Source: 2003, UN, International Organisation for Migration)

1890: W. Scott-Elliot publishes his book, The Story of Atlantis.

1890s: Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius and an American, P.C. Chamberlain, independently consider possible problems arising from a CO2 building up in the atmosphere. Both scientists realise that the burning of fossil fuels could lead to global warming, but neither suspect the process might already have started. (Greenhouse Timeline)

1899: Sir Wallis Budge publishes book, Egyptian Magic. 1899.

1889: New Meiji constitution for Japan; first general election in 1890.

1888: Following the explosion of Karakatoa, Indonesia, radical mullahs preached that the eruption was a revenge from Allah on the archipelago's infidel rulers, and in 1888 they declared a jihad, and there followed killing of European men, women and children. This rebellion was soon crushed, but it was a forerunner of events leading to eventual Indonesian independence. (From a review of Simon Winchester's book, The Day The World Exploded.

3 May 1888: Mass meetings in Sydney re arrival of two ships of Chinese migrants, later a Chinese Exclusion Bill arises in NSW Parliament.

In 1887, Thomas Edison makes the first sound recording as he recites nursery rhyme, Mary Had A Little Lamb.

1887: Susanna Salter is elected in Argonia, Kansas, to become the world's first female mayor.

5 May 1887: Australian Socialist League formed in Sydney.

1886: Two Neandertal skeletons are discovered at a cave at Spy, in the Belgian province of Namur, along with remains of flaked stone tools and bones of extinct mammals. This discovery tends to confirm the immense age of the Neandertals. (Shreeve, Neandertal)

1886: Josephine Cochran in USA invents the dishwasher.

1950: Marion Donavan invents the disposable nappy.

1886: In England, Thomas Crapper revamps the flush toilet with two innovations, lifting the water-holding tank higher, and added a u-bend to obviate bad odours.

1886: Melbourne wharfies striking for better wages and an eight-hour work day. Seventh Day Adventists begin preaching in Australia.

1884: British biologist W. H. Caldwell sends a telegram from the Burnett River area in Queensland to Montreal, helping to reorganise/refine views on the oddity of the Australian platypus. His message read: Platypuses lay eggs, in Latin, "Monotremes oviparous, ovum meroblastic".

1884: Cornerstone of Statue of Liberty is laid at entrance to New York Harbour.

1884: Acquisition of papers re Captain James Cook, etc., from Lord Brabourne and re history of early NSW, and collection by barrister Edward Wise.

1884: Dowager Empress Cixi sacks grand council of China.

1883: Copies of the Indian sex manual, The Kama Sutra, begin to circulate in Europe. Translated by Sir Richard Burton and F. F. Arbuthnot. The Kama Sutra was compiled by about 3rd-5th Centuries AD. But by 9AD, the Chinese had up to eight sex manuals in circulation. (Eg., 39 positions for sexual intercourse). (Source: Thorpe/James).

1883: On there being very little that is new under the sun to complain about... "Juvenile Stone Throwing - A Birmingham manufacturer recently complained to the magistrates of his having to replace more than nine hundred panes of glass in his factory which were broken every year by stone-throwing juveniles." Cited in, The Welcome, A Magazine For The Home Circle. London. S. W. Partridge and Co., Paternoster Row. 1883., p. 528.

1883: Gigantic volcanic explosion of Krakatoa (Indonesia).

January 1882: Suspicion arises in Australia of Russian intentions after three Russian naval ships visit Melbourne.

December 1882: Formation of first women's trade union in Melbourne, for tailoresses.

1881+: Economic and political instability and pogroms shake Eastern Europe. Some Jews go to Palestine but 2.5 million move west, 2.0 million to the US by World War I. 1894-1906 Dreyfus Affair in France exposes deep anti-Semitism. Trial is covered by Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl.

In 1881: Louis Pasteur develops immunisation against anthrax.

1881: Salvation Army begins preaching in Australia.

1881: Alexander Fleming, (1881-1955), discoverer of penicillin and saviour of millions of lives.

1880: Discovery at Gokstad, Norway, of a marvellous Viking ship. On the west side of Oslo fjord, 50 miles from Oslo, under a funerary mound. A sailing boat, nearly 80 feet long, 17.5 feet at the widest point, built of oak with decking of pine. The keel was of a 60-foot long piece of single timber, suitable for shallow water moving; the hull was clinker style. Weight of 8.5 tons, 10 tons when fully laden. A replica was built in 1892 and sailed to New York is less than a month in April 1893, Capt Magnus Anderson. The replica made speeds of over ten knots with unsophisticated rigging.

11 November, 1880: Bushranger Ned Kelly is hanged in Melbourne.

1879: More to come

1863-1878: USA: Chief of the Nez Perce people, Old Joseph, becomes disenchanted with Christianity and the white man's continual demands for Indian land. President Ulysses S. Grant had set them aside in a valley, but this was not enough. Random killings began of Nez Perce people. When Old Joseph died, his son, Young Joseph, continued to try to reason with the whites, eloquently but vainly. The US Govt. insisted the Nez Perce, about 1000 people, move to a reservation in Idaho. Young Joseph reluctantly agreed, as he did not want bloodshed. Three of his young men murdered four whites whom they thought had committed crimes against the Nez Perce. US Govt. and the Nez Perce were shortly at war. The Nez Perce made for Canada, and were only 60km away from its border, with Sitting Bull, when their war chief, Looking Glass, gave them a rest. Colonel Nelson Miles and his men were soon upon them, and took them to Oklahoma, where the heat made them call it hell. In 1878, Young Joseph managed to again speak with the US Govt., but nothing changed. The Nez Perce languished.

1878: Much experimentation with telephones in Australia.

1878-1879: Second Afghan War: British invade Afghanistan to counter Russian influence.

1878: Burma scholar, Sir J. George Scott, invents a Burmese version of soccer. He was born 1851, year of the Great Exhibition in England, and became "a natural British Imperialist. He wrote The Burman. (1882). See Andrew Marshall, The Trouser People: The Quest for the Victorian Footballer Who Made Burma Play the Empire's Game. Viking, 2002.

August 1878: Rise of more anti-Chinese feelings on Australian mining fields; on ships as well.

1878: Australian Bushrangers: Ned Kelly gang robs bank at Euroa, Victoria, of £2000.

1877: The first cricket test between Australia and England is played in Melbourne. The home side wins by 45 runs.

1877: Satsuma rebellion in Japan; last stand of traditional samurai class is defeated.

1877: Drought over most of Australia.

8 December, 1877: Telegraph line extended from Perth to Adelaide and hence to London, completed.

In 1877, Edison invents his phonograph. On printing as above, see Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel.
In 1877, Thomas Edison invents phonograph and in 1879 Edison invents electric light bulb.

1877: Explorer Henry Morton Stanley prepares to descend the uncharted waters of the Congo River, Africa.

1876: Alexander Bell invents the telephone.

1876: US: "Wild Bill" Hickock is murdered, shot in the back, while playing cards.

1876: Queen Victoria of Britain is proclaimed Empress of India.

1876: Japanese pressure forces Korea to open ports to trade.

1876-1878: Famine in the Deccan, southern India; over five million die.

1876: Truganini, believed to be the last full-blooded woman Tasmanian Aboriginal, dies in Hobart aged 73.

1876: South Australia becomes first of the colonies to legalise trade unions by legislating for provide for registration and protection of their funds. Other states follow to 1900.

1875: A first, Capt. Matthew Webb becomes first to swim the English Channel in 21 hours, 45 minutes.

1875: Fiji: After a Fijian chief visits Sydney and catches measles, the disease later kills one-quarter of Fijian population.

1874: More to come

1873: Trouble on Newcastle coal fields, five mining companies join forces, miners are on strike.

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1873: Australia: Ayers Rock discovered by Gosse, later named Uluru.

11 November, 1873: Australia passes first Factory Act, re employment of women in workrooms and factories.

1873: Wine on the world market: Vienna: At a wine competition at The Vienna Exhibition, the French judges blind-tasted a certain shiraz wine and judged it the best. Soon they were horrified to find that it was not French wine, but came from Victoria, Australia. They reportedly resigned en masse. By February 2001 the French are irritable yet again with Australian (mere "agricultural wines") and Californian (mere "industrial wines") winemakers, who are doing increasingly well on the world market. It seems the French marketing philosophy based on "taste of the soil", (gout de terroir) is lately doing less well on the world wine market.
(Reported in Australian press on 17 February 2001)

1872: Ship the Mary Celeste is found drifting and apparently abandoned, allegedly having struck trouble in the mysterious "Bermuda Triangle".

1872: First Japanese railway opens (Tokyo to Yokohama).

1871: Richard Parry, Trial By Ice: The True Story of Murder and Survival on the 1871 Polaris Expedition. HarperCollins, 2002, 321pp. (About a US expedition)

1791-1871: Early computer worker, Charles Babbage.

1871: Charles Darwin publishes his controversial book on evolution, The Descent of Man.

1870: Unification is completed of Italy. Franco-Prussian War, leads to proclamation of German Empire in 1871.

25 May, 1870: Australia: Noted bushranger, Capt Thunderbolt (Fred Ward) shot dead near Uralla, NSW by Constable A. B. Walker.

31 August, 1870: All British troops to be withdrawn from Australia. Soon, NSW is arranging for a permanent military force.

1870: Calamity Jane, real name Martha Cannary, begins to wear men's clothes when she joins General Custer as a military scout.

1870: Australian author Marcus Clark is serialising his novel on the horrors of the convict system in Australia, For The Term Of His Natural Life.

1870: According to Australian writer Barry Jones, the originator of the Russian idea of open-ness (glasnost) later adopted by Gorbachev was Aleksandr Herzen (1812-1870), who lived much in exile in London and Paris.

3 March 1869: William Lanney, the last full-blood Tasmanian Aboriginal, dies.

1869: Suez Canal soon to be opened.

1868: Last convict ship reaches Western Australia. End of the system of convict transportation from Britain to Australia.

1868-1910: Reign of Rama V, founder of modern Thailand.

1868-1912: Meiji period in Japan: great leap forwards in industrialization.

1868: Japanese capital moves to Edo (renamed Tokyo), shogunate abolished; 1875-88, civil legal code drawn up.

1868: In America's Great Train Robbery near Marshfield Indiana, seven members of the Reno Gang make off with US$96,000 in cash, gold and bonds.

1867: Opening in Sydney of Rookwood Cemetery, at the time one of the largest cemeteries in the western world.

1867: Fiji: A Christian missionary, Thomas Baker, is killed and cannibalised by a certain tribe. The tribe later suffers a series of bad luck, crop failures and poor health. By 2003 the tribe asks for the forgiveness of Baker's descendants, who provide forgiveness. (Reported Australian evening TV news, 14 November 2003)

1867: Born, Andrew Douglass, inventor of dendochronology, for the dating of archaeological material by comparison with the ring patterns of old timber.

1867: Alfred Nobel patents Nobel's Extradynamit". He was born in 1833 and once remarked that he "should have been strangled by a humanitarian doctor" when he was born. The idea for the Nobel Prize arose in 1888, when Nobel was living in Paris, and read of his death in a French newspaper, which had misreported the death of Alfred's brother, Ludwig. Alfred found he would be remembered as "the dynamite king", who made a fortune from blowing up things and people. When he died in 1896, he owned 93 explosives factories.

1866: Trans-Atlantic cable is laid by the steamer Great Eastern to establish reliable telegraphic communication between UK and US.

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25 October 1865: Civil War salvage: Dreams of finding a US Civil War fortune are rising as explorers for 12 years now, Greg Stemm and John Morris of Odyssey Marine Explorations, claim they have found a wreck in 520m of water about 160km south-east of Savannah, Georgia. The wreck could be that of a US steamer, SS Republic, which carried 20,000 $20 gold coins which were intended to help the reconstruction of the south after the Civil War. Today, the coins could be worth US$120-180 million. Meanwhile, Stemm and Morris have negotiated with the British Government to excavate the wreck off Gibraltar of HMS Sussex, which sank in 1694 as it lead a British fleet into the Mediterranean Sea for a war against France's Louis XIV. It is thought the fortune aboard the fleet leader - 8.16 tonnes of gold coins - was to buy the loyalty of the Duke of Savoy, a potential ally of the British who was then in south-eastern France. (Reported 18 August 2003)

1865: (And Sydney Morning Herald 31 March-1 April 2007, Ben Hall was a famed bushranger in New South wales, and now his relatives want the circumstances of his death re-examined. The call comes 150 years and more after an original coronial inquest into how Hall died during a police shoot-out. Hall died on 5 May, 1865, near Forbes, NSW, after the earlier passage of a piece of legislation designed specifically to target him and his gang, the Felons Apprehensions Act (which had a shoot-to-kill intent). When he died, Hall's body was riddled with more than 30 bullets, although it has been said that the very first bullet, sent through his back, had disarmed and disabled him. In 2007, a group of Hall's relatives are being led to have the case reopened by Sydney engineer Peter Bradley, who is descended from Ben Hall's brother, Henry. The descendants now believe that Hall was deliberately assassinated. The official verdict of the coronial inquest, held rather quickly a day after Hall died, was held under William Farrand, the police magistrate at Forbes, who found that Hall died as a matter of justifiable homicide. Peter Bradley now complains that police involved were not cross-examined, no family members were present and there was no legal counsel acting in Hall's interests. The NSW coroner's office has confirmed to newspapers that if the family formally apply, their request will be considered. The family will contend that Hall's death was pre-meditated, since the Felons Apprehension Act had been passed, but did not come into effect until six days dater Hall died, so he was not an outlaw as defined by the Act when he was killed. They also have the view that the police search party which left Forbes on 29 April for Hall's hideaway location at Billabong Creek, knew that the new Act was not law until 10 April. Hall when confronted by eight plain-clothes and heavily-armed police was alone, outnumbered, never fired a shot and tried to run away. Police apparently had him covered on three sides, Hall had no horse nearby, and he tried to run across an open plain. The question arises, then, was Hall's death the result of an unlawful killing? (Ends)

1865: Slavery is abolished in USA.

19 December 1865: Chinese bushranger Sam Poo is hanged in New South Wales, Australia.

Circa 1865: The 1860s gang wars of New York between Irish and descendants of the original Anglo-Dutch settlers are to be remembered in a movie planned by director Martin Scorsese, budgeted at around US$100 million. The film's producer is Harvey Weinstein of Miramax. (Reported 22 May 2002)

1860s: Patenting in France of barbed wire, a new invention, much-used in the US to contain livestock that ignore ordinary fencing. By the mid-1870s, about 4500kg of it had been produced, and then years later, more than 36 million kg of it. American Indians called it "the devil's rope". Barbed wire was not used as a defensive weapon till the Spanish-American War of 1898-1900 and not as an offensive weapon till the Boer War in South Africa, 1899-1902, as "a giant series of entanglements" spread across landscape. (In Australia, Museum Victoria has on display about 900 different types of barbed wire.) See book, Alan Krell, The Devil's Rope: A Cultural History of Barbed Wire. Reaktion, 2003.

1865-1870: King Kojong persecutes Christians in Korea; reform of traditional institutions.

1865: US president Abraham Lincoln was subject to uncharacteristic bouts of rage during his rise to power. The cause may have been mercury poisoning as a result of pills given him to cure his melancholia, which contained dangerously high levels of mercury.
(Reported in world press on 21 July, 2001)

1865: 25 July: Death of Dr. Jane Barry, who became the first female doctor in Britain by disguising herself as a man. She became an inspector-general in the British Army in 1812 and truth of her identity was only discovered when she died.

1865: Maori War in New Zealand. Governor issues peace proclamation.

1865: "Well-informed people know that it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires, and, if possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value." The Boston Post, 1865.

1865: Gregor Mendel discovers laws of heredity (Genome mapping/technology/chronology ): - 1882: First observations on tiny thread in cells, later called chromosomes: (Genome mapping/technology/chronology ): - 1902: Connections made between chromosomes and Mendel's factors of "inheritance": (Genome mapping/technology/chronology ): - 1910: Researchers on flies discover trait-determining genes located on different chromosomes: (Genome mapping/technology/chronology ): - 1927: X-rays discovered to cause genetic mutations in flies: (Genome mapping/technology/chronology ): - 1944: DNA is proved to be an hereditary material: (Genome mapping/technology/chronology ): - Late 1940s: Four "letters" that make up DNA are found to be linked in pairs, C with G, and T with A: (Genome mapping/technology/chronology ): - 1952: Rosalind Franklin obtains X-ray diffraction picture of DNA: (Genome mapping/technology/chronology ): - 1953: James Watson and Francis Crick discover double helix structure of DNA. (They had international rivals for first to the discovery): (Genome mapping/technology/chronology ): - Mid-1960s: Scientists find how DNA instructs the body to make proteins: (Genome mapping/technology/chronology ): - 1969: First gene isolated, taken from a bacterium: (Genome mapping/technology/chronology ): - 1970: First gene is synthesized from scratch: (Genome mapping/technology/chronology ): - 1973: Scientists put gene from a toad into bacterial DNA and usher in new era of genetic engineering: (Genome mapping/technology/chronology ): - 1976: The first genetic engineering company, Genitech, is established: (Genome mapping/technology/chronology ): - 1983: Devising of method of replicating DNA (polymerase chain reaction): (Genome mapping/technology/chronology ): - 1983: Genetic marker for Huntington's disease discovered: (Genome mapping/technology/chronology ): - 1984: Discovery of methods of "genetic fingerprinting" of individuals is discovered: (Genome mapping/technology/chronology ): - 1987: First map of the human genome is completed, with 400 major signposts: (Genome mapping/technology/chronology ): - 1990: First attempt at gene therapy, on a four-year-old girl with an immune disorder: (Genome mapping/technology/chronology ): - 1990: Human Genome Program is officially launched in late 1990: It is publicly funded with $3 billion and a 15-year deadline for obtaining a highly accurate DNA sequence, with work conducted at the Sangar Centre in Cambridge, UK, but is later to be rivalled by the project to be run by a US company, Celera, headed by Dr Craig Venter at Rockville, Maryland. (Genome mapping/technology/chronology ): - 1990: Gene for breast and ovarian cancer is discovered: (Genome mapping/technology/chronology ): 1995: Genome is completed of a free-living organism: the bacterium Haemophilus influenzae (Genome mapping/technology/chronology ): - 1996: April, Human Genome Project scientists including Dr Craig Venter meet in Bermuda, and agree that much of their data will be freely released to other researchers. In 1996, Genome of yeast is completed: (Genome mapping/technology/chronology ): - 1998: Genome completed of the roundworm, C. elegans (Genome mapping/technology/chronology ): - April 1999: Chromosomes 5, 16, and 19 are sequenced: (Genome mapping/technology/chronology ): - December 1999: First human chromosome number 22 is sequenced: (Genome mapping/technology/chronology ): - March 2000: Genome of fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster is completed (Genome mapping/technology/chronology ): - May 2000: Chromosome 21, related to Down syndrome, is sequenced (Genome mapping/technology/chronology ): - June 2000: First draft is completed of human genome. Much new medical science expected to develop from this Book of Mankind as it is being billed in the world press. (Genome mapping/technology/chronology ). (Source: Science Journal)

1867: Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick form the confederation of Canada.

1866: More to come

1865: More to come

1864: Thomas Huxley as a defender of Charles Darwin and an evolutionist publishes Man's Place in Nature.

Circa 1864: The Essenes: Ginsburg writes on Essenes and their influence on the early development of Christianity.

1863: French writer Ernest Renan causes a major controversy with his bestseller, The Life of Jesus. His book influences the views of Albert Schweitzer. (Baigent/Leigh, Messianic Legacy, on revisions of the story of Jesus Christ)

1863: Irish scientist John Tyndall publishes paper describing how water vapour can be a greenhouse gas. (Greenhouse Timeline)

1862: US Congress prohibits slavery in US territories.

1862: India: British Raj in India outlaws slave owning. In a census in 1841 of India, British administrators found 10,000,000 slaves.

1862: French begin to occupy Indo-China (South-East Asia).

1861: Irish-Australian pioneer-explorer Robert O'Hara Burke dies of starvation at Cooper's Creek while returning from an expedition to the Flinders River.

1861: In England, the first fixing by officialdom of an age of consent for sexual intercourse. The first age so fixed is 12 years.

1861: Start of American Civil War. Ending 1865, when last of American slaves are also freed.

1859: Charles Darwin publishes Origin of the Species. In the same year, French anatomist Paul Broca asks to establish a Society of Anthropology and is able to do so only if a gendarme is present to ensure that nothing is said that is heretical, immoral, or politically seditious.

1859: In US, Elizabeth Merrell patents a washing machine.

1859: After years of indecision, Charles Darwin publishes his book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Controversy follows...still not settled...

1858-1859: How original was the work of Charles Darwin?: Charles Darwin is (late 2008) being rechecked for originality (Did he commit any plagiarism? Did he unjustly claim credit?) as the father of evolutionary theory. Rechecking are a group of critics who have commissioned computer experts in text-analysis to scour Darwin's published work for any similarities to a paper published before Darwin published by Alfred Russell Wallace, a scientist who had inspected Malaysia and Indonesia (the man for whom the Wallace Line in Indonesia is named). It is suspected that Darwin may have "echoed" Wallace in expression of ideas claiming that species with variation, and their descendants, will survive more successfully. Supporters of Darwin argue that it is quite possible for two thinkers to independently dream up similar propositions quite near in time. But it is claimed that Wallace had even once written on his own ideas to Darwin at a time when Wallace was recovering from malaria. And Darwin once did write, "I never did pick anyone's pocket." It is known that Darwin had long agonised over the implications of his theory for conventional Christian religion and its view of Creation. This website has no idea if Wallace agonised in any similar way. Any "computer evidence" will be submitted to a conference of International Assoc. of Forensic Linguists in Amsterdam in July 2009. (The Australian, 29 December 2008)

1858: Alfred Russell Wallace (1823-1913), British naturalist who discerned the existence of "the Wallace Line" (of Indonesia), inventor of the term, "survival of the fittest". In 1858, Wallace and Darwin co-operated with a joint reading of a paper to the Linnaean Society. Later came the logic of the theory of evolution.

1857: A tragic South African nation, the Xhosas, "tricked itself into suicide" after a 15-year-old girl-prophet, Nongqawuse, reported visions, with the result that the people killed 200,000 of their cattle and failed to plant crops. The expectation was that a great wind would come and blow the British into the sea. The Xhosas had recently suffered military defeat at the hands of the British, and an epidemic. Within two years, about 20,000 Xhosas had died of starvation.

1857-1858: Indian Mutiny shakes British rule in India; East India Company abolished in 1858.

1856: First NSW parliament formally opens.

1856: Near Dusseldorf, Germany, workers quarrying limestone hit their shovels on what they think are bear bones embedded in a thick layer of mud in a cave sixty feet above a valley floor - the valley is named Neandertal after an obscure C17th poet and composer named Joseph Neander. Hence the name for some old relatives of humanity, the Neandertals. Once the remains were examined properly, a noted German anatomist (Herman Schaafhausen) declared that if these were the bones of the oldest man, then the oldest man was a freak! (The post-cranial architecture seemed rather weird.) He did however believe in the idea of primitive man. The idea even then of an "oldest man" had its own history. In 1726, a Swiss physician Johann Scheuchzer claimed to have found a fossil representing "A Human Witness of the Deluge and Divine Messenger" on a hill in Franconia. This "antedeluvian man" turned out to be fossilised salamander. Perhaps, Scheuchzer began the habit of digging up old bones, a habit which would disprove his own views? (Shreeve, Neandertal).

July 30, 1856: English soldier John Hanning Speke finally finds the source of the Nile, Lake Victoria in Uganda. How/why did it take so long to find this out?

1855 or so: Time of California gold rush: The largest known gold bar arising was a bread-loaf sized item called "Eureka". It sold by November 2001 for a record US$8 million. (AUD$15.5 million). Buyer was described only as "a Forbes 400-type executive".

1854: Victoria, Australia: Government troops attack miners at Eureka Stockade at Ballarat, the dispute being over charges for licences to mine gold. About 30 miners and six soldiers are killed.

1854: Sir John "Quack Doctor" Bowring, becomes governor of Hong Kong, a former secretary of the Peace Society, helps precipitate the second Anglo-Chinese War. Bowring allegedly conspires with British consul at Canton, Sir Harry Parkes, to ripen the opening of hostilities.

1854: Treaty of Kanagawa; United States and Japan agree their first modern trade treaty.

1853: Charles Pravaz invents the hypodermic syringe.

1853-1878: Able king Mindon Min reigns in Burma.

1853: Ending 200 years of Japanese seclusion, US Commodore Matthew Perry arrives in Tokyo Bay - with armed frigates to force Japan to open up to the West.

1852: France: Commissioning of Devil's Island (it has two sister islands), as France's convict hell for transported prisoners. It was part of French Guiana, 13km from the South American mainland. Till 1946 it remained the most isolated prison in the French Empire, housing up to 70,000 prisoners.

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1852: Nasir-ud-Din (1848-96) takes personal power in Persia; major reforms of administration by Vizier Mirza Taki.

1851-1868: King Rama IV rules Thailand; opens the country to foreign trade.

1851: American Amelia Bloomer in 1851 begins to promote trousers of women with her "Bloomer costume", a revolution in women's dress style. New York Times reported that two women parading their Bloomer costumes were "conducting themselves in the most indecent and disorderly manner..." Two policemen arrested them for an overnight stay in the cells. Next day they were jailed. (See book, Catherine Smith and Cynthia Greig, Women in Pants. Abrams, 2003.)

1850-1864: Taiping rebellion in China; Nanking falls, 1853.

1850: Denmark cedes forts and property rights on the West African Gold Coast to Britain.

1850-1930: World Migration: One million Japanese migrate to North America and Brazil.(Source: 2003, UN, International Organisation for Migration)

1850: A short history of medicine
I have a headache...
2000 B.C. - Here, eat this root.
1000 A.D. - That root is heathen. Here, say this prayer.
1850 A.D. - That prayer is superstition. Here, drink this potion.
1940 A.D. - That potion is snake oil. Here, swallow this pill.
1985 A.D. - That pill is ineffective. Here, take this antibiotic.
2000 A.D. - That antibiotic is artificial. Here, eat this root.

1850: Re Balzac: The question becomes: Why did Rodin portray French writer Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) as an onanist, then place the statue in his own garden? The question comes from the national art correspondent of The Australian newspaper, Benjamin Genocchio, in The Weekend Australian Magazine, 23-24 February, 2002. Balzac wrote 90 novels and many short stories. Late in his life married Polish countess Eveline Hanska, a secret lover for 18 years, and died of kidney failure due to excessive coffee intake aged 51.

1849: USA: Tennessee State legislature decides that women cannot own property as they do not have souls.

1849: Year in which the existence of hormones is first found/suspected by French scientist Berthold, who grew the combs of castrated cockerels by implanting testicles in them.

1845-1849: Sikh Wars with Britain; Britain annexes Punjab.

1848: Accession of Nasir ud-din, ablest of the Kajar dynasty of Persia.

1848: Hungary: The revolutionary spirit of the spring of 1848 gives a tremendous impetus to the course of events in Hungary. Having swept Paris, Berlin and Milan, revolution erupts in Vienna as well. There follows the 1848-49 Hungarian revolution and war of independence.

1848: Serfdom is abolished in Austria.

1848: Revolutions across Europe: Marx and Engels publish the Communist Manifesto.

1848: Scottish clock and instrument-maker Alexander Bain invents the basis of facsimile production and transmission. His ideas were followed up in 1850 by an Englishman, Frederick Bakewell, and then in 1865 by an Italian in France, Giovanni Caselli.

1847: Coining of the term vegetarian to describe someone who avoids eating/using meat and/or meat products.

October 1846: First use of true surgical anaesthesia, by US dentist William Morton, giving ether to a patient needing removal of a neck tumour. By 1842, US surgeon Crawford Long has started using ether as an anaesthetic, but does not publish till 1949.

1845: Death in US of President Andrew Jackson (1767-1845).

1844: Cambodia becomes a Thai protectorate.

1844: Laughing gas, first used for dentistry by Horace Wells (1818-1897) of Hartford, Connecticut, in 1844.

1844, Samuel Morse on 24 May, 1844, builds a line from Baltimore to Washington, about 65km, and sent messages - His first official message was "What hath God wrought?" In the late 1830s, Morse had proved it was possible to send an electronic pulse over 16km of wire.

1843, Code-expert Samuel Morse obtains money from the US Government to build his first telegraphy system between Baltimore and Washington. In the same year, Bunsen improved wet-cell batteries, allowing "early digital communications".

1843 or earlier, Homeopathy, a therapeutic system devised by a doctor of Meissen, Germany, Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843), based on the law of similars, with some debt to earlier ideas of Hippocrates.

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1842: Establishment of Hong Kong on delta of Pearl River as a British "territory". British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston describes it as "a barren island, which will never be a mart of trade".

1841: Afghanistan, Appearance of a local liberator against the British, Akhbar Khan, who conducts "an orgy of blood" and evicts the British. Sole British survivor getting to Jalalabad is army surgeon Dr. Brydon. In 2001, the huge British forts "built to subdue the frontier tribes" still skirt the road to Peshawar.

1841, Charles Mackay writes his book on investment bubbles in history, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. (Often-quoted in later C20th)

1841: India: In a census in 1841 of India, British administrators found 10,000,000 slaves.

1840s: Introduction of use of anaesthetic for medical operations. Ether was used on 16 October 1846.

1840: Abolition of transportation of British convicts to New South Wales, Australia.

1839: Ottoman sultan Abdul Majid starts the "Tanzimat", a program of modernisation.

1839-1842: First Afghan War with British; a British army annihilated.

1839-1842: Opium War in China with Britain.

1838: Afghanistan, British army moves into Kabul in an awe-inspiring cavalcade of military might needing 30,000 camels for transport.

1838: Nakayama Miki founds faith-healing Tenri sect in Japan.

1837: New-fangled paddlesteamers in rivers in North America help spread smallpox to areas where Native Americans live. In one village, alone, 1600 out of 2000 people die.

1837, Louis Agassiz presents catastrophic theory of glaciation in book, D discourse of Neuchattel. Lyell finally accepted such ideas with enthusiasm. (Oppenheimer, Eden In The East).

1837-1853: Shogunate of Tokugawa Ieyoshi in Japan.

1836: Three sealers working into the Hopkins River, Victoria, where the Merri River meets Bass Strait, find a shipwreck later named "the Mahogany Ship". By 1843 or so, a local harbour master, Capt. Mill, inspects the wreck on behalf of government. He did not think it of Spanish or Portuguese build.
(Item from Gavin Menzies, 1421, The Year China Discovered the World. 2002 - hardcover edition)

1836: Founding of the city of Adelaide, by Colonel William Light, whose father had helped establish Penang in 1786 and earlier.

1835-1863: Dost Mohammed rules in Afghanistan.

1835: Justus von Liebig works out how to chemically coat glass with silver to make mirrors.

1834: Egypt: Mohammed Ali bans belly dancers and prostitutes from Cairo on pretext of not offending foreign visitors. Upsurge of tourism occurs, as more visitors go to Luxor and Aswan.

1830s-1852, Rise in US of the custom of polygamy - multiple wives - by Mormons, of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. (R. Brasch, How Did Sex Begin?)

1830s, Victory of Uniformitarianism in geology with Charles Lyell's book, Principles of Geology. (Oppenheimer, Eden In The East)

1832/1968: George W. Bush, (becoming president of US in 2000-2001) joins the secretive Skull and Bones Society at Yale University. Skull and Bones Society is founded in 1832 at Yale College, New Haven, Connecticut. "The oldest and most prestigious of Yale's seven secret societies". It has apparently had only about 2500 members in the following 168 years, or an average of 15 new members per year. It is said that only about 600 of its members are alive at any one time.

1832: The work of the American pioneer of contraception, Charles Knowlton. (use of sponges with a spermicide). By 700BC, midwives in Babylonia had devised a means of testing if a woman is pregnant.

1831: Mohammed Ali of Egypt seizes Syria; he rules it until 1840.

1830-1916: World Migration: Half a million people migrate from India to the Caribbean. (Source: 2003, UN, International Organisation for Migration)

1830: Views rise with the Colonial Office in London that in Tasmania, "extinction of the native race could not fail to leave an indelible stain upon the character of the British Government" if Governor Arthur there went ahead with his plan to manage a crisis in Black-White relations there. Which was to "confine the haunts of the native to particular limits", without "unnecessary harshness". Arthur wrote, "The species of warfare which we are carrying on with them is of the most distressing nature." G. A. Robinson was duly appointed Protector of Aborigines. Arthur assured the government that despite "the most barbarous outrages and murders... no means of reconciliation shall be sanctioned but such as are demanded for the common safety of the settler... The children have witnessed the massacre of their parents and their relations carried away into captivity... Can we wonder then at hatred they bear to the white inhabitants?" Arthur's solution since he disliked the idea of deportation was a "Black Line" military operation, which was intended to confine the Aboriginals to a reserve on the Tasman Peninsula. (As had happened with the Cherokee Indians in North America.) In 1831, Robinson was asked to induce the Aboriginals to join with other natives on an island in Bass Strait. In Tasmania, Governor Arthur had written in 1828 that "all aggression originated with the white inhabitants..." He tried and failed to conciliate in 1829 and then introduced martial law. The Black Line measure of 1830 failed and Aboriginals were then deported to Bass Strait.
See Historical records of Australia, Series III, Volume VIII. (Edited by Peter Chapman. Melbourne University Press, 2003-2004. (Seven more volumes are to follow)

1830: New Zealand has 300 Pakeha (whites); By 1840 - 2000 Pakeha. British rule is extended from NSW. British Resident (James Busby) is appointed in 1833 and increasing numbers of settlers arrive.

1830: Hong Kong: An English supercargo later to be a governor of Hong Kong is John Davis. A firm engaging in trade and also interpreting are the father-and-son, the Morrisons.

1829: England, Select Committee of House of Commons re opium sale in China, hears John Francis Davis, who had been a President of the Select merchants of Canton during his 17 years in Canton, say, "I never saw a chest of opium in my life; and therefore I cannot speak to it." A bookkeeper, Mr Henry, employed the large opium dealers, Dents (Thomas Dent), said much the same.

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1829-1832: Europe suffers from a cholera epidemic, killing eg. 7000 people in London.

1829: Practice of suttee (widow burning) made illegal in India.

1828: Melbourne, Victoria: The founder of Melbourne, John Batman, shoots several more Aboriginals as he occupies his chosen territory.

1828: Indian Hindu Raja Ram Mohan Roy founds reforming Hindu society, Brahmo Samaj.

In 1827, Death of English metaphysical poet, William Blake.

1826: More to come

1825: Scottish explorer Alexander Gordon Laing becomes the first European to reach Timbuktu, now in Mali, North Africa.

1825: The world's first photograph?: Experts may have to rewrite aspects of the history of photography after a find made in Paris by a rare-bookseller Andre Jammes, who has long collected old photographs. In his collection he came across an image of a boy leading a horse by its bridle, a photograph of a pen-and-ink drawing, taken by Nicephore Niepce in 1825 - though Niepce has long been recognised as the inventor of photography. Experts had thought he took his first images in 1826-1827. The 1825 print is accompanied by explanatory letters, etc. (Reported 23 March 2002)

1823: Death of Edward Jenner, (1749-1823), inventor of a vaccine for smallpox, saving millions of lives.

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5 May 1821:Was Napoleon poisoned?: Did Napoleon, captive of the British, die of stomach cancer on 5 May, 1821 on St Helena, or was he poisoned? The International Napoleonic Society now feels after surveying new scientific evidence from toxicologists, coroners, cancer specialists and police forensic workers that a fat Napoleon had no symptoms of cancer. His problems were consistent with long-term arsenic poisoning, and DNA research reveals his hair had high levels of arsenic present. An aide, Charles de Montholon, is suspected of killing Napoleon at the wish of Louis XVIII. (Lost Worlds has also read of a theory that the arsenic came from the paste of the wallpapers in Napoleon's last residence). Reported 6 May, 2000.

1820: Sinking of the whaleship Essex by an enraged sperm whale provides storyline for Herman Melville's classic, Moby Dick. See Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea . HarperCollins, 2000.

1820-1841: Minh Mang, emperor of Vietnam, reverses Gia-Long?s policies and expels Christians.

1819: Italian Freethinkers begin to commemorate the life of heretic Giordano Bruno (died 1600, burned at stake).

Circa 1819: Englishwoman Sarah Guppy invents the idea of the suspension bridge. She also invents a combined coffee-maker/ egg boiler/ toast warmer.

1819: Singapore founded by Stamford Raffles.

1819, Born, C. L. Sholes, inventor of the typewriter.

1818: Year in which Australia Day (January 26th) is first celebrated officially in Australia.

1818: Origins of Christmas carol Silent Night: In 1818, Franz Xavier Gruber an organist in Austria wrote music for a poem, Stille Nacht by Fr. Joseph Mohr. The carol was first sung by two men at Midnight Mass.

1817: Death of UK novelist Jane Austen: BBC Headlines during March 2017 reported a story that Austen may have died of arsenic poisoning at age 41. IN her time, arsenic was an ingredient in medicines she took, including one medicine for rheumatism from which she suffered. Her eyesight at the end was also poor. Austen died 18 July, 1817. In 2011, UK crime writer Lindsay Ashford speculated Austen died from arsenic poisoning and that murder could not be ruled out.

1817: US: Birth in a state of slavery, of later anti-slavery campaigner, Frederick Douglass, died 1905.

1817: Sydney, Australia: Governor Lachlan Macquarie, first military governor of New South Wales, formally adopts the name Australia for his British colony. The name earlier proposed by the first circumnavigator of Australia, Matthew Flinders.

1815: After Battle of Waterloo, France's Napoleon Bonaparte sails for St Helena to spend the remainder of his life in exile. He is later reputed by some to have died of "arsenic poisoning" due to arsenic from wallpaper.

10 April 1815, Volcanic explosion larger than that of Krakatoa, of Mount Tambora, Island of Sumbawa near Bali, Indonesia. Leaving a crater 6km across and 1km deep. This explosion was followed by two extremely cold winters ("nuclear winters"?) in 1816 and 1817. [See the "disaster issue" of New Scientist, 7 August, 1999.]

1815, End of war between Britain and France, Battle of Waterloo.

1814: More to come

1813, Formation of the United Grand Lodge of English Freemasonry, resolving long-term disputes with Scottish Freemasonry.

22 July 1812: Napoleon wins Battle of Salamanca.

1812: Napoleon Bonaparte invades Moscow. Russians set many fires in the city.

1811-1818: Mohammed Ali overruns much of Arabian peninsula; ends first Saudi empire.

1810: More to come

1809: More to come

1808: More to come

1807: Abolition of the slave trade in British Empire and the United States.

1807: Canton, China: Walter Stevenson Davidson, takes over opium business of George Baring (of the family of London bankers, Baring), and retains it till 1824 when Davidson sells it to Thomas Dent. (See Greenberg, p. 71m and Welsh, History of Hong Kong, p. 578, Note 19 to chapter 2.)

1806: More to come

1803: 12 September: John Bowen arrives in "the future Tasmania", Hobart, with convicts to set up a new British convict colony.

1803: US: Lewis and Clark Expedition. Sent by President Thomas Jefferson, up the Missouri and north into the wilderness of America in search of the fabled north-west passage, which had haunted the English since the 1500s. For 13,000 km and taking 28 months, from Pittsburgh to Fort Clapston on the Pacific Coast at mouth of the Columbia River, using a total of 25 vessels. Lewis in Tennessee finally committed suicide.
See Gary Moulton, The Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition. (13 Vols.) nd? (Moulton is professor of history at University of Nebraska.)

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1803: The man who named Australia: Matthew Flinders (died 1814), a "naval prodigy". Son of a Lincolnshire surgeon. By 1801 he had sailed to Tahiti with William Bligh, and sailed with Capt. John Hunter to NSW, later surveying Bass Strait with William Bass. Been first to circumnavigate Tasmania, and developed ambition of doing the same for the entire continent. (Flinders married Ann Chapell and had a daughter Anne who was mother of the explorer/Egyptologist, Flinders Petrie). By 1801, Flinders was sailing about Australia (Terra Australis. At Encounter Bay off South Australia he met French explorer Nicholas Baudin (who died of dysentery on Mauritius). Baudin was using a map Flinders himself had drawn! In 1803, Flinders' voyage home was interrupted, and he called in to Ile-de-France (Mauritius). The governor General de Caen imprisoned Flinders for seven years as a "spy". Flinders did not reach England till 1810, and almost killed himself with work on his discoveries, and met bureaucratic inertia from the Admiralty.

1802: First reference to Freemasonry in Australia as contained in a document dated 17 Sept., 1802, admitting Anthony Fenn Kemp (later of Tasmania) into grade of Ancient Masonry, signed by two Frenchman from Baudin's ship, Naturaliste, Jacques St. Cricq and Jerome Bellefin, plus the colony's artillery officer, George Bridges Bellasis. But this is "Continental Masonry". Australian Encyclopedia, 1925 entry Freemasonry,.

1802-1820: Emperor Gia-Long unites Vietnam.

1801: More to come

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