From Cave Paintings to the Internet An Annotated Interactive Timeline on the History of Information and Media 1800 to 1850 Timeline

At this stage in the Industrial Revolution all phases of cloth production are performed by machines.

Around this time publication of scientific and medical books in Latin—the international language of science for about 2000 years—has for the most part ceased. Most scientific and medical books will henceforth be published in their language of authorship, or in French, German or English.

In this year 11,000 tons of paper are produced in the United Kingdom.

President John Adams signs legislation providing $5000 to purchase books as necessary for the “use of Congress.” This is the origin of the Library of Congress. The Library is originally housed in the Capitol building.

Gaspard Riche de Prony completes two manuscript sets of massive logarithmic and trigonometric tables calculated by employing systematic division of mental labor, including the use of mathematically untrained hairdressers unemployed after the French Revolution. The method of production of the tables will inspire Charles Babbage in the design of his Difference Engine No. 1 in 1822. Portions of de Prony's tables will be published for the first time in 1891.

The Qur'an first appears in a printed edition issued by Muslims in Kazan (today the capital of Tatarstan 800 km from Moscow). Prior to this date, and for most of the nineteenth century, the Qur'an is primarily transmitted by manuscript copying.

Following the passage of the Census Act or Population Act of 1800, for which he was large responsible for drafting, John Rickman supervises the first Census of England, Scotland and Wales.

"The 1801 census was in two parts: the first was concerned with the number of people, their occupations, and numbers of families and houses. The second was a collection of the numbers of baptisms, marriages and burials, thus giving an indication of the rate at which the population was increasing or decreasing. Information was collected by census enumerators who were usually the local Overseers of the Poor or (in Scotland) schoolmasters. They visited individual households and gathered the required information, before submitting statistical summaries. The details of households and individuals were important only in creating these local summaries and were destroyed in all but a few cases. The idea of a census had been championed, amongst others, by John Rickman who was a clerk in the House of Commons. He subsequently undertook the analysis of the results and the preparation of abstracts and reports from the 1801 census (and the three following censuses)."

Joseph-Marie Jacquard receives a patent for inventing his automatic loom, which uses punched cards to store patterns and reduces strenuous manual labor. In 1806 the loom is declared public property and Jacquard receives a pension. He is forced to flee from Lyons because of the anger of the weavers, who fear they will lose their jobs. However, Jacquard perseveres and by the time of his death there will be thirty thousand Jacquard looms installed in Lyons alone.

Alois Senefelder adapts printing by lithography to incorporate zinc plates instead of lithographic stones.

The Istanbul Engineering College Press in Istanbul issues the the Cedid Atlas Tercumesi (New Atlas). This is the first world atlas printed by Muslims. Only 50 copies are issued.

Henry and Sealy Fourdrinier buy the patents for the papermaking machine invented five years earlier in France by Louis-Nicolas Robert. Bryan Donkin, the Fourdriniers’ engineer, makes modifications to the Robert design. The machines become known as Fourdrinier machines, though some of the improvements will be due to other inventors. By 1838, over 100 Fourdrinier machines will be in operation throughout the United Kingdom. It will be claimed that the machines produce as much paper in minutes as had previously taken weeks to make by hand.

There are 185 paper mills in the United States.

Workers and craftsmen concerned about the loss of jobs due to automation found the Luddite movement. Among the examples of automation they destroy are Jacquard looms.

After two failed attempts, Friedrich Koenig of Suhl builds a steam operated twin cylinder printing press. This is the first printing press not powered by hand.

The Roxburghe Club is founded. It is the oldest society of bibliophiles in the world, with membership limited to 40.

"The Club came into existence on 16 June 1812 when a group of book-collectors and bibliophiles, inspired by the Revd Thomas Dibdin, panegyrist of Lord Spencer, the greatest collector of the age, dined together on the eve of the sale of John, Duke of Roxburghe’s library, which took place on the following day. This was the greatest private library of the previous age, and the sale was confidently expected to break all records, and it did. The first edition of Boccaccio (then believed to be unique) printed in 1471 made £2,260, a record that stood for more than sixty years, and the Duke’s Caxtons made equally high prices. The diners decided that this occasion should not be forgotten and so they dined again together the next year on June 17, the anniversary of the sale, and again the year after. So the Roxburghe Club was born and its members still dine together each year on, or about, that memorable day." (quoted from The Roxburghe Club website.)

The Times newspaper in London purchases a Koenig power press. The output of the new machine is 1,100 sheets an hour, more than four times higher than that of the manually operated press previously used by the newspaper. The machine is secretly installed in Printing House Square and on November 29 the first issue from the steam-driven machine is printed.

During the War of 1812 British Troops set fire to the U.S. Capitol building, burning, among other things, the Library of Congress, which at this time contains 3,000 volumes.

Within a month after the burning of the Library of Congress President Thomas Jefferson offers his personal library as a replacement. Jefferson has spent 50 years accumulating 6, 487 books, "putting by everything which related to America, and indeed whatever was rare and valuable in every science"; his library is considered to be one of the finest in the United States. Jefferson, who is heavily indebted, seeks to use the proceeds of the sale of his books to satisfy his creditors. He anticipates controversy over the nature of his collection, which includes books in foreign languages and volumes of philosophy, science, literature, and other topics not normally viewed as part of a legislative library. He writes: "I do not know that it contains any branch of science which Congress would wish to exclude from their collection; there is, in fact, no subject to which a Member of Congress may not have occasion to refer."

Congress appropriates $23,950 for Thomas Jefferson's books, laying a new intellectual foundation, universal in scope, for the Library of Congress.

Francis Ronalds builds the first working electric telegraph. This is the first "electronic" medium for communication.

Friedrich Koenig adds a perfector to The Times of London power press, allowing the press to print almost as many copies on both sides of the sheet on one pass through the press as had been previously printed on one side only.

Alois Senefelder publishes Vollstaendiges Lehrbuch der Steindruckerey (A Complete Course of Lithography), providing a practical manual as well as a history of lithography. In this book Senefelder describes his plans to print in color, but whether Senefelder is actually the first to develop a functioning method of chromolithography is unclear. 

Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar of Alsace invents the arithmometer, the first commercially produced adding machine. These machines, which use Leibnitz’s stepped drum technology, do not gain many applications until the 1860s or 1870s, by which time Thomas de Colmar has improved them considerably. They remain in relatively limited production through about the start of World War I.

About this time the American inventor Jacob Perkins develops the method of steel engraving. He introduces the process in England as a method of duplicating bank-notes.

Charles Babbage starts on a model of the Difference Engine, a special-purpose machine that links adding and subtracting mechanisms to one another to calculate the values of more complex mathematical functions. His goal is to produce more accurate mathematical tables, the most widely-used calculating aids in his day. Babbage announces his plan to build this machine in an open letter to Sir Humphry Davy, president of the Royal Society, and receives government funding. (See Reading 4.1)

A government press is set up at Bulaq, Egypt. to print manuals for the military, an official manual for the administration, and textbooks for the new schools. This is the first indigenous Arabic press set up in Egypt by Muslims. It is also the first government press on the African continent, apart from the short-lived presses briefly established by Napoleon. By 1851 it will issue 526 works.

Having examined texts brought back from Egypt, Jean-Francois Champollion publishes Lettre a M. d'Acier in which he begins to identify a relationship between hieroglyphic and non-hieroglyphic scripts, deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics, the meaning of which had been lost for over 1500 years.

According to the Wikipedia, the first known example of an opinion poll is a local straw vote conducted by The Harrisburg Pennsylvanian in 1824. It shows Andrew Jackson leading John Quincy Adams by 335 votes to 169 in the contest for the Presidency of the United States.

George Stephenson's Locomotion No. 1,the first steam engine to carry passengers and freight on a regular basis, begins operation. The Stockton and Darlington Railway opens for business.

The English Church Missionary Society establishes a press in Malta to publish books in Arabic and Turkish. These include Christian texts and also secular educational texts intended for Muslim, Christian and Jewish pupils in the new missionary schools and colleges of the Middle East. They also issue a periodical in the style of a newspaper. Through 1842 this press issues over 150,000 books for distribution throughout the Middle East and Turkey. Roper, Arabic Books Printed in Malta 1826-42, Sadgrove (ed) History of Printing and Publishing the the Languages and Countries of the Middle East (2005) 111-130.

In the first quarter of the nineteenth century roughly 600 new books per year are produced throughout the United Kingdom (Twyman, Printing 1770-1970, 10).

Cowper & Applegarth in England complete the design of a four cylinder steam-powered printing press with capacity of 4,000-5,000 impressions per hour.

Stephenson’s Rocket wins the Liverpool and Manchester Railway competition.

The first steam locomotive runs in the United States.

Louis Braille, blind from the age of 5, publishes the Braille system of printing and reading for the blind that will eventually become the standard method. The system represents letters and numbers by combinations of six dots. The title of his book, published in French, is translated as the Method of Writing Words, Music and Plain Song by Means of Dots, for Use by the Blind and Arranged by Them. Most of the text of this book is published through the traditional Hauy system of printing for the blind using raised letters. However, Braille introduces his new system briefly in this work. In 1837 Braille will add symbols for mathematics and music to his system.

William Austin Burt of Detroit, Michigan invents an early typewriter, called the Typographer. It is cumbersome and difficult to use. Writing a letter with this machine takes longer than writing by hand.

Circulation of The Times of London is 11,000.

Michael Faraday discovers electromagnetic induction, the basis for electricity generation.

Charles Babbage publishes his On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, the first work on operations research, partially based on data he accumulated in order to build his Difference Engine. Babbage orders construction of a small working portion of his Difference Engine no. 1, approximately one-ninth of the full machine. This will be the only portion of his “calculating engines” that he ever completes.

Yisrael Bak and his son Nissan open a printing press in the town of Safad (Safed) in northern Palestine (now Israel). This is the first press to operate in Palestine since about 1577. Ayalon, "The Beginnings of Publishing in pre-1948 Palestine, " in Sadgrove (ed) History of Printing and Publishing in the Languages and Countries of the Middle East (2005) 69.

William Whewell, one of the first historians of science, coins the term scientist to describe an expert in the study of nature. This term will not gain wide acceptance until the end of the ninteenth century. When Whewell coins the word people we now call scientists were often called "natural philosophers."

Charles Babbage conceives of the Analytical Engine, a general-purpose machine that embodies in its design most of the features of the programmed digital computer.

The Library of the Office of the Surgeon General of the Army is established. This will eventually be renamed the National Library of Medicine.

In Note sur un moyen de tracer des courbes données par des équations différentielles The french physicist Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis desribes a mechanical device to integrate differential equations of the first order.This is the beginning of researches on solution of differential equations using mechanical devices.

Samuel F. B. Morse invents a practical form of electromagnetic telegraph using an early version of his “Morse code.” (See Reading 5.2.)

Rowland Hill circulates his pamphlet, Post Office Reform: its Importance and Practicability, in which he lays out his principles for reforming the postal system.

"The penny post inaugurated and administered by Rowland Hill required the adoption of four novel principles: (1) prepayment of postage, (2) payment by weight instead of by the number of sheets, (3) the use of envelope, (4) the use of adhesive stamps on letters. Prior to this reform, for example, the use of an envelope would have been a novelty to most letter-writers and entailed double postage." (Carter & Muir, Printing and the Mind of Man [1967] 306a)

Before Hill wrote postage was generally paid for by the recipient who had the right to refuse delivery of any mail. Hill's 

"report called for 'low and uniform rates' according to weight, rather than distance. Hill's study showed that most of the costs in the postal system were not for transport, but rather for laborious handling procedures at the origins and the destinations. Costs could be reduced dramatically if postage were prepaid by the sender, the prepayment to be proven by the use of prepaid letter sheets or adhesive stamps (adhesive stamps had long been used to show payment of taxes -- for example, on documents). Letter sheets were to be used because envelopes were not yet common -- they were not yet mass-produced, and in an era when postage was calculated partly on the basis of the number of sheets of paper used, the same sheet of paper would be folded and serve for both the message and the address. In addition, Hill proposed to lower the postage rate to a penny per half ounce, without regard to distance."

Francois Arago makes the first brief announcement to the Academie des Sciences of the painter, Louis-Jacques Daguerre's, photographic process called Daguerreotype. Later this year Daguerre will publish in Paris his first account of the process in a pamphlet called Historique et Description des Procedes du Dagurreotype et du Diorama. Daguerre's method of fixing an image on a metal plate becomes the first commonly used photographic process. It produces a single positive image.

Upon learning of Arago's announcment of Daguerre's process, William Henry Fox Talbot reads a paper to the Royal Society entitled Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing, or the Process by which Natural Objects may be made to Delineate Themselves with the Aid of the Artist's Pencil. In 1835 Talbot had developed a method of fixing negative images on paper previously made light-sensitive by successive coats of sodium chloride and silver nitrate, thus becoming the first to produce permanent paper negatives. In his paper, printed and distributed to friends in February, Talbot suggests that fixed negatives might be used to produce multiple positive images.

As part of the postal reforms initiated by Rowland Hill, the world's first adhesive postage stamp is distributed. With an elegant engraving of the young Queen Victoria, the Penny Black is an immediate success. The first stamps are not perforated. Only a single example is known on cover with a postmark dated 1 May 1840.

Felix Mendelssohn's "Festgesang", a cantata for male chorus, brass, and
tympani, composed for the city of Leipzig's 1840 quadricentennial celebration of the invention of printing, is first performed in the town square by a chorus of 200 men, 16 trumpets, and 20
trombones, during ceremonies dedicating a new statue of Gutenberg.

The British government abandons financial support for the construction of Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 1.

Luigi Federico Menabrea, later to be prime minister of Italy, publishes the first description of the functional organization and mathematical operation of Babbage’s Analytical Engine, including the first published computer programs.

Edward Binn's The Anatomy of Sleep (London, 1842) is the first book to be typeset by the Young & Delcambre Composing Machine, the first composing machine known to have been used in a printing office. The Young & Delcambre machine sets a single continuous line of type; line breaking and justification are later done by hand.  "The use of the Young and Delcambre machine was opposed by the London Union of Compositors, particularly because female labour was employed to operate it" (Printing and the Mind of Man. Catalogue of the Exhibitions [1963] no. 463).

The British astronomer and photographer, Sir John Herschel, invents the cyanotype, a photographic process that results in a cyan-blue print.

"The photosensitive compound, a solution of ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide, is coated onto paper. Areas of the compound exposed to strong light are converted to insoluble blue ferric ferrocyanide, or Prussian blue. The soluble chemicals are washed off with water leaving a light-stable print."

The process will be used through the 20th century by architects and engineers for the production of blueprints.

Christian Doppler publishes Ueber das farbige Licht der Doppelsterne und einige andere Gestirne des Himmels. (On the coloured light of the binary stars and some other stars of the heavens). This is the first statement of the Doppler principle, which states that the observed frequency changes if either the observer or the source is moving. Doppler mentions the application of this principle to both acoustics and optics, particularly to the colored appearance of double stars and the fluctuations of variable stars and novae; however, his reasoning in the optical arguments was flawed by his erroneous belief that all stars were basically white and emitted light only or mostly in the visible spectrum. Five years later, the astronomer Hippolyte Fizeau will publish a paper announcing his independent discovery of the effect, noting the usefulness of observing spectral line shifts in its application to astronomy. This point was of such fundamental importance to Doppler's principle that it is sometimes called the Doppler-Fizeau principle. The acoustical Doppler effect will be verified experimentally in 1845, and the optical effect in 1901. Modified by relativity theory, it will become one of the major tools of astronomy. It also has numerous commerical applications beyond astronomy, such as in Doppler radar and in Doppler ultrasound to evaluate blood flow.

Doppler, [Johann] Christian. Ueber das farbige Licht der Doppelsterne und einige andere Gestirne des Himmels. Abhandlungen der k. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, Series 5, 2 (1842).

Herbert Ingram and Mark Lemon of Punch, publish the first issue of The Illustrated London News. "Costing sixpence, the magazine had 16 pages and 32 woodcuts. It included pictures of the war in Afghanistan, a train crash in France, a steamboat explosion in Canada and a fancy dress ball at Buckingham Palace."

It is probably the first attempt to publish an illustrated news publication. It will continue publication as a weekly until 1971.

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, translates Menabrea’s paper, adding annotations that provide further insight into Babbage's proposed Analytical Engine, a machine that incorporates many of the concepts of the programmed digital computer. Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage . . . with Notes by the Translator. (See Reading 6.1.)

In Germany ground wood pulp begins to be used in papermaking instead of linen rags. The acid used for bleaching wood pulp will eventually be a leading cause of the deterioration of lower quality paper over time.

Per and Georg Scheutz, inspired by Dionysius Lardner’s account of Babbage’s Difference Engine, construct the first working difference engine. One of the reasons they are able to build the engine is that they are willing to machine the parts to lower tolerances than Babbage will tolerate.

In a paper on Light and Ventilation delivered at the Royal Institution Michael Faraday attributes decay in leather bookbindings and chairs to the heat and sulphur fumes emanating from the illuminating gas then used. Faraday began his career as a bookbinder.

The anonymous author of the sensational evolutionary treatise Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation includes a lengthy quote from Babbage’s discussion of programming the Difference Engine from the Ninth Bridgewater Treatise to explain how evolutionary change might occur through time. This is one of the earliest references to computing within the context of biology.

Samuel F. B. Morse transmits the first message on a United States experimental telegraph line (Washington to Baltimore) using the “Morse code” that will become standard in the United States and Canada. The message, taken from the Bible, Numbers 23:23 and recorded on a paper tape, had been suggested to Morse by Annie Ellworth, the young daughter of a friend. It is “What hath God wrought?” The Morse Code will become the first widely used data code.

The Atlantic Cable is proposed.

William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone perfect a single-needle telegraph apparatus, soon adopted throughout England.

Richard Hoe of New York patents the horizontal rotary printing press, dramatically increasing the speed of printing.

George Boole publishes The Mathematical Analysis of Logic, leading to what eventually will be called Boolean algebra. Years later, in 1938, Claude Shannon in his master’s thesis will recognize that the true/false values in Boole’s two-valued logic are analogous to the open and closed states of electric circuits

Physicist Joseph Henry, first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution (founded in 1846), and a pioneer in telegraphic research, realizes that storms in the United States generally move from west to east. He writes in the Smithsonian's 1847 annual report that "the extended lines of telegraph will furnish a ready means of warning the more northern and eastern observers to be on the watch for the first appearance of an advancing storm." By 1849, Henry will work out an arrangement with a number of telegraph companies to allow free transmission of local weather data to the Smithsonian. He will propose to supply "the most important stations" with barometers and thermometers. By the end of the 1849 150 volunteers throughout the United States will report weather observations to the Smithsonian regularly by telegraph. This will become the basis for the first national weather service where weather observations from distant points can be "rapidly" collected, plotted and analyzed at one location -- the beginnings of "surface weather analysis".

The first WH Smith railway bookstall is opened. Railroad transportation provides a whole new market for printing, publishing, and bookselling. Inexpensive novels or "Yellowbacks" will be published to supply a wider range of society. It becomes a common practice to publish novels in weekly, fortnightly or monthly parts to spread the cost.

The Boston Public Library, founded this year, is the first publicly supported municipal library in the United States

The Associated Press (AP) is founded in the United States to reduce the high cost of telegraphic transmissions among six highly competitive newspapers.

The first mechanical printing press, using western style moveable type and western style printing ink, arrives in Japan for the use of the Japanese.

Though the Jesuits had operated a European style printing press in Nagasaki for a limited time in the sixteenth century, the Japanese favored woodblock printing as a way to reproduce their semi-cursive writing. Printing from woodblocks in East Asia remained an unmechanized, laborious process, in which printing was done on only one side of the paper because of the need to rub the back of the paper with a hand tool. This would have tended to spoil the other side of the paper, and the water-based inks used tended to soak through the paper.  Unlike Western printing which had used oil-based inks since Gutenberg's original invention of printing ink, only water-based inks were used in Asia.

The first western style printing presses will not be introduced in Korea until 1881-83.

The Prudential is founded. Its original name is The Prudential Mutual Assurance, Investment and Loan Association. It is the first of the great industrial life insurance companies that will handle the policies of millions of people, and process an immense amount of data.