From Cave Paintings to the Internet A Chronological and Thematic Database on the History of Information and Media 1850 to 1875 Timeline

John and Jacob Brett lay the first telegraph cable between England and France.

After a French fisherman cut the cable, thinking it was a new kind of seaweed, they installed an armored cable in 1851 that lasted for many years.

Circulation of The Times of London newspaper is 38,000.

Paul Julius Reuter (originally named Israel Beer Josaphat) sets up an information service, later called Reuters, using a "fleet of 45 carrier pigeons",  to deliver news and stock prices between Brussels and Aachen, terminal points of the German and French-Belgian telegraph lines.

Reuter's pigeons carried the messages between Brussels and Aachen within two hours, beating the railroad by six hours.

The use of flong for stereotype printing plates provides an advantage for the publication of mathematical tables since stereotype plates represent “an immutable form of information capture that offered immunity from the inherent vulnerability of moveable type to derangement during printing or storage” (Doron Swade, “The ‘Unerring Certainty of Mechanical Agency’: Machines and Table Making in the Nineteenth Century,” Campbell-Kelly [ed.] The History of Mathematical Tables [2003] 148).

In his book, The Process of Thought Adapted to Words and Language, Alfred Smee suggests the possibility of information storage and retrieval by a mechanical logical machine operating analogously to the human mind.

This was an attempt to produce an artificial system of reasoning based upon neurological principles which were then primarily a matter of speculation. The problem was that Smee's hypothetical “electro-biological” machine, built out of mechanical parts, which he conceived in generality but had no way of engineering, might have occupied a space larger than London.

Paul Julius Reuter founds the Reuters news agency in London using telegraph lines, and a fleet of carrier pigeons that grows to exceed 200.

Reuter opened an office in London’s financial center close to the main telegraph offices. He transmitted stock market quotations and news between London and Paris over the new Dover-Calais submarine telegraph cable, using his "telegraph expertise."

American author, naturalist, transcendentalist, tax resister, development critic, abolitionist, surveyor, and philosopher Henry David Thoreau delivers an address to the Concord (Massachusetts) Lyceum declaring that "in Wildness is the preservation of the World."

In 1863, this address was published posthumously as the essay "Walking" in Thoreau's Excursions.

Impressed by the exhibition of photography at the Great Exhibition, English meterologist and aeronaut James Glaisher proposes that microphotography be used as a method for document preservation. 

According to the Wikipedia article on Microform, astronomer and photography pioneer Sir John Herschel supported this view in 1853.

Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations of 1851. Reports by the Juries (1852).

Carter & Muir, Printing and the Mind of Man (1967) no. 331.

Journalist and politician Henry Jarvis Raymond and former banker George Jones found The New-York Daily Times.

The newspaper changed its name to The New York Times in 1857

A fire in the Library of Congress destroys 35,000 books, about two-thirds of the Library's 55,000 book collection, including two-thirds of Thomas Jefferson's library. 

This was the largest fire in the history of the Library of Congress

"The Library of Congress suffered difficult times during the 1850s. The growing intersectional rivalry between North and South hindered the strengthening of any government institution. Furthermore, in late 1851 the most serious fire in the Library's history destroyed about two-thirds of its fifty-five thousand volumes, including two-thirds of Jefferson's library. Congress responded quickly and generously: in 1852 a total of $168,700 was appropriated to restore the Library's rooms in the Capitol and to replace the lost books. But the books were to be replaced only, with no particular intention of supplementing or expanding the collection. This policy reflected the conservative philosophy of Librarian of Congress John Silva Meehan and Sen. James A. Pearce of Maryland, the chairman of the Joint Committee on the Library, who favored keeping a strict limit on the Library's activities"( http://www.loc.gov/loc/legacy/loc.html, accessed 10-09-2009).

Charles C. Jewett, librarian of the Smithsonian Institution, publishes On the Construction of Catalogues of Libraries and Their Publication by Means of Separate Stereotyped Titles With Rules and Examples.

Jewett described a plan for a national union catalogue of public libraries.

"His [Jewett's] intention was to secure general uniformity of bibliographic records through a system of "stereotyping" each title. This plan would have made it possible for libraries to print annual editions of their catalogs, incorporating the titles acquired 'during the previous year in each new edition, and for the Smithsonian to print a general union catalog which would have included' both its own holdings and those of all the public libraries. The uniformity Jewett sought was to be achieved not just through stereotyping but also through use of a single set of general cataloging rule which would be used by all the libraries. In the same year Jewel published a report titled On the Construction of Catalogues of Libraries which, among other things, set forth the first American cataloging rules for establishing headings for author entries. The report contained thirty-nine rules which were based on those of Panizzi. In fact Jewett acknowledged outright that he used some of Panizzi's rules verbatim. And Jewett's stated goal of serving the needs of users also reflected Panizzi s ideas. Though his project never came to final fruition, years later his goal of compiling a union catalog was met in the United States when the National Union Catalog began publication in 1953 and in Germany as early as 1899 when the Prussian Instructions was compiled under Jewett's influence" (Huford, The Pragmatic Basis of Catalog Codes: Has the User Been Ignored [2007] 29).

Peter Mark Roget  publishes his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases Classified so as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and to Assist in Literary Composition, the manuscript for which he had originally written in 1805, nearly 50 years before publication. The 15,000 words it contained were arranged conceptually rather than alphabetically, incorporating 1002 concepts, in six classes derived from Aristotelian, Leibnizian principles of classification:

1. Abstraction Relations
2. Space
3. Matter
   
4. Intellect
5. Volition
6. Affections

The Thesaurus contained synonyms, in contrast to a dictionary, which contains definitions and pronunciations. 

"Roget's Thesaurus is composed of six primary classes. Each class is composed of multiple divisions and then sections. This may be conceptualized as a tree containing over a thousand branches for individual "meaning clusters" or semantically linked words. These words are not exactly synonyms, but can be viewed as colours or connotations of a meaning or as a spectrum of a concept. One of the most general words is chosen to typify the spectrum as its headword, which labels the whole group.

"Roget's schema of classes and their subdivisions is based on the philosophical work of Leibniz (see Leibniz — Symbolic thought), itself following a long tradition of epistemological work starting with Aristotle. Some of Aristotle's Categories are included in Roget's first class "abstract relations". The Wikipedia "category schemes" are also based on the same principles" (Wikipedia article on Roget's Thesaurus, accessed 11-28-2008).

"In information technology, a thesaurus represents a database or list of semantically orthogonal topical search keys. In the field of Artificial Intelligence, a thesaurus may sometimes be referred to as an ontology.

"Thesaurus databases, created by international standards, are generally arranged hierarchically by themes and topics. Such a thesaurus places each term in context, allowing a user to distinguish between "bureau" the office and "bureau" the furniture. A thesaurus of this type is often used as the basis of an index for online material. The Art and Architecture Thesaurus, for example, is used to index the national databases of museums" (Wikipedia article on Thesaurus, accessed 11-28-2008).

The printing of the first edition was 1000 copies. The original manuscript for Roget's Thesaurus is preserved in the Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum. 

Kendall, The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget's Thesaurus (2008).

The Scheutz team produce their second difference engine—an improvement over the first.

The first use of wood pulp instead of linen rags for paper making occurs in England.

English mathematician and philosopher George Boole publishes An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, on Which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities. This work contains the full expression of the first practical system of logic in algebraic form.

"He [Boole] did not regard logic as a branch of mathematics, as the title of his earlier pamphlet [The Mathematical Analysis of Logic (1847)] might be taken to imply, but he pointed out such a deep analogy between the symbols of algebra and those which can be made, in his opinion, to represent logical forms and syllogisms, that we can hardly help saying that (especially his) formal logic is mathematics restricted to the two quantities, 0 and 1. By unity Boole denoted the universe of thinkable objects; literal symbols, such as x, y, z, v, u, etc., were used with the elective meaning attaching to common adjectives and substantives. Thus, if x=horned and y=sheep, then the successive acts of election represented by x and y, if performed on unity, give the whole of the class horned sheep. Boole showed that elective symbols of this kind obey the same primary laws of combination as algebraic symbols, whence it followed that they could be added, subtracted, multiplied and even divided, almost exactly in the same manner as numbers. Thus, (1 - x) would represent the operation of selecting all things in the world except horned things, that is, all not horned things, and (1 - x) (1 - y) would give us all things neither horned nor sheep. By the use of such symbols propositions could be reduced to the form of equations, and the syllogistic conclusion from two premises was obtained by eliminating the middle term according to ordinary algebraic rules.

"Still more original and remarkable, however, was that part of his system, fully stated in his Laws of Thought, formed a general symbolic method of logical inference. Given any propositions involving any number of terms, Boole showed how, by the purely symbolic treatment of the premises, to draw any conclusion logically contained in those premises. The second part of the Laws of Thought contained a corresponding attempt to discover a general method in probabilities, which should enable us from the given probabilities of any system of events to determine the consequent probability of any other event logically connected with the given events" (Wikipedia article on George Boole, accessed 01-09-2008).

Though the audience for Boole's highly specialized work would have been judged to be small, and the edition size reduced accordingly, the existence of three issues of the first edition, all dated 1854, would suggest that the edition may have required several years to sell. The points of the issues are as follows:

1. Probable first issue: London: Walton and Maberly, Upper Gower-Street, and Ivy Lane, Paternoster-Row. Cambridge: Macmilan and Co., errata leaf bound in the back, and binding of black zigzag cloth with blindstamped border, panel, central lozenge and corner and side ornaments.

2. Probable second issue: London: Walton and Maberly as above, but with the errata after the last numbered leaf of preliminaries, an additional printed "Note" leaf following 2E4 concerning a more complex error, an eight-page Walton and Maberly catalogue of "Educational Works and Works in Science and General Literature" and a binding of black blind-panelled zigzag cloth without the central lozenge.

3. Third issue: London: Macmillan and Co. Errata on recto of last unsigned leaf, and bound in green cloth, gilt-lettered spine. This may be a later, or remainder binding

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 266.

Paris and London are connected by telegraph.

Cyrus Field organizes the New York, Newfoundland, and London Electric Telegraph Company with the intention of laying an Atlantic Cable.

Paul Pretsch patents a process called "photo-galvanography" for the printed reproduction of photographs.

The first print that Pretsch issued was called "Scene in Gaeta after the Explosion." It was "the first relief half-tone and the first commercial use of half-tone" (Printing and the Mind of Man. Catalogue of the Exhibitions Held at the British Museum and at Earls Court, London [1963] no. 629).

David Edward Hughes invents the first perfected mechanism for printing telegraph messages, using a keyboard in which each key causes the corresponding letter to be printed at a distant receiver.

Hughes's printing mechanism worked something like a "golfball" typewriter, but it was produced before the typewriter was invented.

American astronomer, oceanographer, meteorologist and cartographer, Matthew Fontaine Maury, publishes The Physical Geography of the Sea.

Maury's book was most widely read study of the oceans published in the nineteenth century, and the first book to deal exclusively with marine science since Marsigli's Histoire physique de la mer (1725). The book grew out of Maury's work as superintendent of the Naval Observatiory and Hydrographic Office in compiling observations, mostly of wind and weather, for use in the navigation of sailing ships. Paying more attention to the atmosphere than to the waters of the sea, Maury presented the first attempt at forumulating a general system of circulation of the atmosphere, and derived from it many features of the climates of the earth.

However, Maury was not a professionally trained scientist, and his system was not acceptable to the professional scientists of his day, but by provoking refutations his book did bring about valuable advances toward understanding the mechanism of the atmosphere. From a "scientific" standpoint, the most worthwhile part of Maury's book was his account of observations of the temperature of the surface of the sea and of the relief and sedments of its bed, largely made under his direction on vessels of the U.S. Navy.

Deacon, Scientists and the Sea 1650-1900 (1971) 293-295.  Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 1463.

English physician Thomas Addison publishes On the Constitutional and Local Effects of Disease of the Suprarenal Capsules. 

This beautiful monograph in small folio format with 11 hand-colored lithographs inaugurated the study of diseases of the ductless glands and the disturbances in chemical equilibrium known as pluriglandular syndromes.

Addison chanced upon adrenal disease while searching for the causes of pernicious anemia. His initial paper on the subject. entitled "On Anemia: Disease of the Suprarenal Capsules" (1849), attempted to link the two diseases. 

Addison's 1855 monograph focused on diseases of the suprarenal capsules and contains the classic description of the endocrine disturbance known as "Addison's disease" (also known as chronic adrenal insufficiency, hypocortisolism, and hypocorticism). Addison was also the first to suggest that the adrenal glands are essential for life, and his monograph inspired a burst of experimental research that led, among other things, to Edmé Félix Alfred Vulpian's discovery of adrenalin one year later, in 1856.

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 8.

The Atlantic Telegraph Company is formed by Cyrus Field in the United States and Charles Bright, John Brett, and Jacob Brett in England.

George Parker Bidder, an engineer and one of the most remarkable human computers of all time, publishes his paper on Mental Calculation. (See Reading 3.1)

Paul Pretsch, inventor (1854) of the half-tone process, which he calls photo-galvanography, issues a book entitled Photographic Art Treasures.

This was the first book of printed reproductions of photographs as distinct from a book illustrated with pasted-in original photographs.

Bibliographer Andrea Crestadoro, an acquaintance of Anthony Panizzi, exasperated with delays in production of the British Museum Catalogue of Printed Books, publishes anonymously The Art of Making Catalogues of Libraries, or a Method to Obtain a Most Perfect Complete and Satisfactory Printed Catalogue of the British Museum Library by a Reader Therein.

Crestadoro's booklet served as basis for a catalogue code. "In it he advocated the idea of the 'inventorial' catalog which would have detailed entries arranged in order of accession. The library patron was to be provided access to the entries through an alphabetical index of names and subjects. The Public Library of Manchester, England adopted this approach for its catalog and hired Crestadoro to implement it there in 1864. Like Panizzi, Crestadoro intended to have his catalog serve the needs of catalog users, but the rules of his code were not based on an empirical investigation of those needs" (Huford, The Pragmatic Basis of Catalog Codes: Has the User Been Ignored [2007] 29).

At the end of his pamphlet Crestadoro advocated production of a universal catalogue of all publications.

Biographers and historians Philip Henry Stanhope, Thomas Babington Macaulay and Thomas Carlyle found the National Portrait Gallery in London as:

" '...a gallery of original portraits, such portraits to consist as far as possible of those persons who are most honourably commemorated in British history as warriors or as statesmen, or in arts, in literature or in science' " (http://www.npg.org.uk/about/history.php, accessed 02-25-2009).

Among the founder Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery were Stanhope as Chairman, Macaulay, Benjamin Disraeli and Lord Ellesmere, a former Trustee of the National Gallery, who offered to the nation the so-called Chandos portrait of Shakespeare, which became the first picture to enter the Gallery's collection. On Ellesmere's death in 1857 Carlyle became a Trustee.

"The National Portrait Gallery was established with the criteria that the Gallery was to be about history, not about art, and about the status of the sitter, rather than the quality or character of a particular image considered as a work of art" (from the link cited above).

The first attempt to lay the Atlantic Cable using the American sailing ship Niagara and the British sailing ship Agamemnon fails.

Self-taught Scottish geologist and writer, folklorist and evangelical Christian Hugh Miller publishes The Testimony of the Rocks; or, Geology in its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed. 

Miller's book was the first to include a photograph of its author, and only a small portion of the edition contained the photograph. The portrait shows the bearded and extremely hirsute Miller seated at a table reading. Miller believed that the fossil record confirmed, in broad outline, the cosmic drama depicted symbolically in the Bible. He opposed evolutionary theory, and argued vehemently for man's separation from the lower animals. This was Miller's last work; he committed suicide while seeing it through the press.

"For most of the year 1856, the brilliant researcher and speaker had been bothered by terrible headaches that seemed to burn inside his head. Had he lived in the 20th century, Miller's doctors could have diagnosed the problem. Perhaps it was a tumor that caused the headaches, and later, the awful hallucinations. Victorian-era medicine could not help. He feared that he might harm his wife or children during his delusions in which he pursued imaginary robbers with his gun. Miller committed suicide the night he finished checking printers' proofs for his book on Scottish fossil plants and vertebrates, The Testimony of the Rocks. Before his death, he wrote a poem called Strange but True" (Wikipedia article on Hugh Miller, accessed 10-26-2009)

Gernsheim, Incunabula of British Photographic Literature, 67.

According to Mark R. Godburn, the earliest jackets in the flap-style— as opposed to all-enclosing sealed wrapping style on English annuals that are reported on books printed in English— are on a four volume set of The Comprehensive History of England, by Charles MacFarlane and Thomas Thomson, published in London by Blackie & Sons in 1857. "The printing on the jackets (reported by the indefatigable John Carter in 1968) includes the price of the books."

Reuters opens offices all over Europe, following telegraph lines.

Queen Victoria charters the University of London's  External Programme making it the first university to offer distance learning degrees by mail to students.

Charles Dickens referred to the non-denominational University of London as the "People's University" because it provided access to higher education to students from less affluent backgrounds,

The second attempt to lay the first Atlantic Cable using the American sailing ship Niagara and the British sailing ship Agamemnon initially succeeds.

Communication is established on the Atlantic Cable but it fails within three weeks.

Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace publish  "On the tendency of species to form varieties; and on the perpetuation of varieties and species by natural selection"  in the Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society.

This was the first printed formal exposition of the theory of evolution by natural selection.  Darwin had developed the essential elements of his theory by 1838 and set them on paper in 1844; however, he chose to keep his work on evolution unpublished for the time, instead concentrating his energies first on the preparation for publication of his geological work on the Beagle voyage , and then on an exhaustive eight-year study of the barnacle genus Cirripedia.

In 1856, at the urging of Charles Lyell, Darwin began writing a vast encyclopedic work on natural selection; however, it is possible that the extremely cautious Darwin might never have published his evolutionary theories during his lifetime had not Alfred Russel Wallace, a naturalist born in New Zealand, independently discovered the theory of natural selection. Wallace conceived the theory of natural selection during an attack of malarial fever in Ternate in the Mollucas, Indonesia (Febuary, 1858) and sent a manuscript summary to Darwin, who feared that his discovery would be pre-empted.

In the interest of justice Joseph Dalton Hooker and Charles Lyell suggested joint publication of Wallace's paper prefaced by a section of a manuscript of a work on species written by Darwin in 1844, when it was read by Hooker, plus an abstract of a letter by Darwin to Asa Gray, dated 1857, to show that Darwin's views on the subject had not changed between 1844 and 1857. The papers by Darwin and Wallace were read by Lyell before the Linnean Society on July 1, 1858 and published on August 20.

J. Norman (ed.), Morton's Medical Bibliography[1991] no. 119.  Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 591.

The British government, long after refusing funding to complete Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 1, or to construct his Analytical Engine, paid for the construction of the Scheutzes' third difference engine.

Medical statistician William Farr first used the Engine in 1859 to print a table for his paper, published in Philosophical Transactions, “On the Construction of Life-Tables, Illustrated by a New Life-Table of the Healthy Districts of England.”

On his third visit to the Monastery of Saint Catherine on Mount Sinai in Egypt, Constantin von Tischendorf discovers the Codex Sinaiticus .

"The first two trips [in 1844 and 1854] had yielded parts of the Old Testament, some from a rubbish bin. The emperor Alexander II of Russia sent him to search for manuscripts, which he was convinced were still to be found in the Sinai monastery."

"The story of how von Tischendorf found the manuscript, which contained most of the Old Testament and all of the New Testament, has all the elements of a romance. Von Tischendorf reached the monastery on January 14; but his inquiries appeared to be fruitless. On February 4, he had resolved to return home without having achieved his goal.

"On that day, when walking with the provisor of the convent, he spoke with much regret of his ill-success. Returning from their promenade, Tischendorf accompanied the monk to his room, and there had displayed to him what his companion called a copy of the Septuagint, which he, the ghostly brother, owned. The manuscript was wrapped up in a piece of cloth, and on its being unrolled, to the surprise and delight of the critic the very document presented itself which he had given up all hope of seeing. His object had been to complete the fragmentary Septuagint of 1844, which he had declared to be the most ancient of all Greek codices on vellum that are extant; but he found not only that, but a copy of the Greek New Testament attached, of the same age, and perfectly complete, not wanting a single page or paragraph."

"After some negotiations, he Tischendorf] obtained possession of this precious fragment. James Bentley gives an account of how this came about, prefacing it with the comment, 'Tischendorf therefore now embarked on the remarkable piece of duplicity which was to occupy him for the next decade, which involved the careful suppression of facts and the systematic denigration of the monks of Mount Sinai.' He conveyed it to Tsar Alexander II, who appreciated its importance and had it published as nearly as possible in facsimile, so as to exhibit correctly the ancient handwriting. The Tsar sent the monastery 9 000 rubles by way of compensation.

"Regarding Tischendorf's role in the transfer to Saint Petersburg, there are several views. Although when parts of Genesis and Book of Numbers were later found in the bindings of other books, they were amicably sent to Tischendorf, the codex is currently regarded by the monastery as having been stolen. This view is hotly contested by several scholars in Europe. Kirsopp Lake wrote: 

"Those who have had much to do with Oriental monks will understand how improbable it is that the terms of the arrangement, whatever it was, were ever known to any except of the leaders.

In a more neutral spirit, New Testament scholar Bruce Metzger writes:

Certain aspects of the negotiations leading to the transfer of the codex to the Tsar's possession are open to an interpretation that reflects adversely on Tischendorf's candour and good faith with the monks at St. Catherine's. For a recent account intended to exculpate him of blame, see Erhard Lauch's article 'Nichts gegen Tischendorf' in Bekenntnis zur Kirche: Festgabe für Ernst Sommerlath zum 70. Geburtstag (Berlin, c. 1961); for an account that includes a hitherto unknown receipt given by Tischendorf to the authorities at the monastery promising to return the manuscript from Saint Petersburg 'to the Holy Confraternity of Sinai at its earliest request'.

"In 13 September 1862 Constantine Simonides, a forger of manuscripts who had been exposed by Tischendorf, by way of revenge made the claim in print in The Guardian that he had written the codex himself as a young man in 1839.

"Henry Bradshaw, a [librarian and] scholar, contributed to exposing the frauds of Constantine Simonides, and exposed the absurdity of his claims in a letter to the Guardian (January 26, 1863). Bradshaw showed that the Codex Sinaiticus brought by Tischendorf from the Greek monastery of Mount Sinai was not a modern forgery or written by Simonides. Simonides' "claim was flawed from the beginning" (Wikipedia article on Codex Sinaiticus, accessed 08-08-2009).

Book Trade notes:

♦ "In 1931 Ernest Maggs had travelled to the Soviet Union with a colleague, Maurice Ettinghausen, who was both a bookseller and a scholar. When they saw the priceless Codex Sinaiticus, Ettinghausen remarked to his hosts, “If you ever want to sell it, let me know." Some time later, Maggs received a postcard saying that the Soviet government would be prepared to sell the Codex Sinaiticus for 200,000 pounds. The British group countered with 40,000 pounds. Finally, a price of 100,000 pounds was agreed upon. This was the largest price that had ever been paid for a book. It was an enormous sum at the time. [In 1933] The British government agreed to pay half the amount and guaranteed the remainder if it were not raised by public subscription." (Wikipedia article on Maggs Bros., accessed 08-02-2009).

♦ From Rosenbach: A Biography by Wolf & Fleming (1960)367-68:

"Some preliminary negotiations were under way with Amtorg [in 1932] for the Codex Sainaiticus, the fourth-century manuscript of the Bible which had been in Russia since its discoverer, Tischendorf, acquired it for the Czar in 1869, and which the Communists, interested in neither its contents nor its provenance, wanted to sell. It was a volume before which the the Doctor's flow of words was inadequate. It was simply the most important, exciting, and valuable book in existence; except for fragments, it was one of the three oldest manuscripts of the Bible known. To have handled it would have added luster to any reputation. In the dickering stage, Dr. Rosenbach told the Russians that the asking price of $1,600,000 was too high, but he hung on the fringes of the deal by assuring them in confidence, 'that I might interest some of our wealthy clients in its purchase for presentation purposes, if the price could be lowered considerably.'

"Ah, perfidious Moscow! Before the end of the next year Ramsay MacDonald announced the purchase of the Codex by the British Museum for £100,000. The news found the Doctor astonished and disappointed. It had been offered to him for $1,250,000, he told the Herald Tribune, and he could not understand how the British Museum had obtained it for less than half that figure. . . ."

[In July 2008 it was stated on the Codex Sinaiticus website that the "recent" history of the manuscript would be revised in light of previously unavailable documents.]

Isabella Mary Beeton, publishes through the firm of S.O. Beeton, owned by her husband Samuel Orchart Beeton, Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management Comprising information for the Mistress, Housekeeper, Cook, Kitchen-Maid, Butler, Footman, Coachman, Valet, Upper and Under House-Maids, Lady’s-Maid, Maid-of-all-Work, Laundry-Maid, Nurse and Nurse-Maid, Monthly Wet and Sick Nurses, etc. etc.—also Sanitary, Medical, & Legal Memoranda: with a History of the Origin, Properties, and Uses of all Things Connected with Home Life and Comfort.

Intended as a guide of reliable information about every aspect of running a house for the aspirant middle classes, its 2,751 entries on 1,112 pages included in addition to 900 recipes and a wealth of cooking advice, tips on how to deal with servants' pay and children's health. Many of the recipes were illustrated with colored engravings, and it was also one of the first cookbooks to show recipes in the modern format with all the ingredients listed at the start, a format that Mrs. Beeton borrowed from Eliza Acton's Modern Cookery for Private Families (1845) along with some of the recipes. However, the Beetons never claimed that the book's contents were original. and Mrs. Beeton may perhaps be designated more accurately as its compiler and editor, rather than its author, as many passages were not in her own words.

The work first appeared in a series of 24 monthly parts issued as supplements to the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine published by Samuel O. Beeton. Previously portions of the text had appeared as columns on such topics as "Cooking, Pickling and Preserving,"  "The Management of Children," etc. in the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, to which Isabella began contributing after her marriage to Samuel Beeton in 1856.  The edition in book form was "one of the major publishing success stories of the nineteenth century, selling over 60,000 copies in its first year of publication in 1861, and nearly two million by 1868" (Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management. Abridged Edition, edited with an Introduction and Notes by Nicola Humble [2000] viii).

Charles Darwin issues through the London publisher, John Murray, his book entitled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. 

The idea of species evolution can be traced as far back as the ancient Greek belief in the "great chain of being". Darwin's great achievement was to make this centuries-old "underground" concept acceptable to the scientific community and educated readers by cogently arguing for the existence of a viable mechanism— natural selection— by which new species evolve over vast periods of time.  Though Darwin stated his case persuasively and in the most diplomatic of tones, the work evoked a storm of controversy, causing Darwin to revise it through six editions during his lifetime. Since its publication the scientific evidence supporting evolution by natural selection has reached a massive—even overwhelming— preponderance, yet the controversy over evolution has never abated.

There is only one issue of the first edition of On the Origin of Species, and although three cloth binding and advertisement variants have been identified, no priority has been established. 1250 copies were printed, of which about 1,170 were available for sale; the remainder consisted of 12 author's copies, 41 review copies, 5 copyright copies, and "Darwin required ninety copies to be sent as presentations to friends, family, and scientists [Correspondence, 8: 554-6]" (Kohler & Kohler, see below, 333). Following Darwin's instructions, these presentation copies were sent out by the publisher, usually inscribed "From the Author" by the publisher's clerk.  The book was offered to booksellers two days earlier on November 22, and oversubscribed by 250 copies causing John Murray to propose a new edition immediately.

On the Origin of Species is undoubtedly the most famous book in the history of the life sciences, and one of the world's most famous books on any subject. It is also perhaps the most published book in the history of science and the most translated book originally published in English. As a result of this fame, a great deal of historical research has been concentrated on this work. Early in 2009 Cambridge University Press published The Cambridge Companion to the "Origin of Species," edited by Michael Ruse and Robert J. Richards. Most pertinent to book collecting and book history is the excellent chapter on "The Origin of Species as a Book" by Michèle Kohler and Chris Kohler.

Among the many very informative details the Kohlers include, of particular interest to the history of collecting rare books in the history of science is their observation that the first edition may have first been offered as collectable "rare book" by Bernard Quaritch Ltd in 1903 for £2-10-0, "a premium on the price of a new copy, not a discount." (p. 345). They also observe that the price of the first edition remained essentially static in the rare book trade until it began to rise in the 1920s, after which it very gradually moved upward. When I first opened my shop at the beginning of 1971 the price of a fine copy of the first edition in the original cloth was $1000. At this time the work was relatively common, and there were usually several copies of the first edition on the market at one time.

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) No. 593.

In this year 100,000 tons of paper are produced in the United Kingdom, almost a tenfold increase since 1800.

Only 4% was made by hand. Because of reduction in labor costs the average cost of paper fell 60% in the period from 1800-1860 (Twyman).

The Parisian typesetter and tinkerer, Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville produces the earliest known recording of the human voice and the earliest known recording of music on his phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually but not to play them back.

"In 2008, the New York Times reported the discovery of a phonautogram from 9 April 1860. The announcement of the discovery was accompanied by an announcement that the visual recording was made playable — 'converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California.' The phonautogram was one of Leon Scott's forgotten images in Paris; they were scanned then processed by a sophisticated computer program developed a few years earlier by the Library of Congress.

"The recording was a ten-second snippet of a singer, probably a daughter of the inventor performing the French folk song 'Au Clair de la Lune'. This phonautograph recording is now the earliest known recording of a human voice and the earliest known recording of music in existence, predating, by twenty-eight years, the longest surviving Edison phonographic recording of a Handel chorus, made in 1888" (Wikipedia article on Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, accessed 04-18-2009).

You can listen to the earliest known music recording at the Wikipedia article on Scott.

Henry David Thoreau delivers an address to the Middlesex (Massachusetts) Agricultural Society, entitled "The Succession of Forest Trees."

In this speech Thoreau analyzed aspects of what later came to be understood as forest ecology and urged farmers to plant trees in natural patterns of succession. The address was later published in (among other places) Excursions, becoming "perhaps his most influential ecological contribution to conservationist thought." 

Telegraph lines connect New York and San Francisco.

During the American Civil War, President Lincoln and the United States Congress and pass the Revenue Act of 1862, creating the office of Commissioner of Internal Revenue and enacting a progressive rate income tax to pay war expenses.

"Annual income above $600 was taxed at a 3% rate, but those earning over $10,000 per year were taxed at a 5% rate. This Act repealed the flat rate income tax that had been established by the Revenue Act of the previous year."

"To assure timely collection, income tax was 'withheld at the source' by the employer, with the Act specifying that Federal income tax was a temporary measure that would terminate in 'the year eighteen hundred and sixty-six' " (Wikipedia article on Revenue Act of 1862, accessed 12-27-2008).

Johann Philipp Reis, a German schoolteacher and physicist, announces his invention of the telephone in a lecture before the Physical Society of Frankfurt. He publishes "Ueber Telephonie durch den galvanischen Strom" in Jahres-Bericht des physikalischen Vereins zu Frankfurt am Main fur des Rechungshahr 1860-1861 (1861). 

Reis' transmitter worked by alternatively making and breaking connection with a battery, while his receiver was designed to operate on the principle of magnetorestriction -- the property of ferromagnetic material such as iron to change shape on applicate of a magnetic field. Neither of these principles was adequate for constructing a successful speech-transmitting telephone, which requires continous contact and an undulating current; however,

"If the sound entering a Reis transmitter is not too strong, contact between the metal point and the metal strip will not be broken. Instead, the pressure of the former on the latter will fluctuate with the sound causing fluctuations in the electrical resistance and therefore in the current. Similarly the receiver will respond to continuously fluctuating as well as to intermittent currents (but not by magnetorestrction). The sensitivity, however, is extremely low. . . ." (Encyclopedia Brittanica, 15th edition.)

This may explain the partial but real success of Reis's telephone in transmitting intelligible speech.

Between 1858 and 1863 Reis constructed three different models of his telephone, the third and best-known of which was demonstrated to scientific societies throughout Europe and America. One of those who saw Reis's machine was Alexander Graham Bell, who was shown Reis's telephone at the Smithsonian Institution in March 1875, and who might have seen an earlier model demonstrated in Edinburgh as early as 1862.

Reis had no interest in profiting from his telephone, freely giving out information on it to anyone who asked, and selling models of it at a reasonable price. Reis died of tuberculosis in 1874 at the early age of 40.

U.S. Army Surgeon General William A. Hammond establishes the Army Medical Museum during the American Civil War as a center for the collection of specimens for research in military medicine and surgery.

Hammond directed medical officers in the field to collect "specimens of morbid anatomy ... together with projectiles and foreign bodies removed" and to forward them to the newly founded museum for study. The Army Medical Museum's first curator, John Brinton, visited mid-Atlantic battlefields and solicited contributions from doctors throughout the Union Army.

During and after the war, AMM staff photographed wounded soldiers showing effects of gunshot wounds as well as results of amputations and other surgical procedures.

Austrian musicologist, writer, composer, botanist and publisher Ludwig Ritter von Köchel publishes Chronologisch-thematisches Verzeichnis sämmtlicher Tonwerke W. A. Mozart's (Chronological-thematic Catalogue of the Complete Musical Works of W. A. Mozart).

The Köchel-Verzeichnis of the compositions of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was the first comprehensive chronological and thematic catalogue of the compositions of a major composer. Köchel included the opening bars of each piece. In organizing the Verzeichnis Köchel arranged Mozart's works into twenty-four categories or themes, which were used by Breitkopf & Härtel when they published the first complete edition of Mozart's works from 1877 to 1910. This publishing venture was partly funded by Köchel.

"Köchel attempted arranging the works in chronological order, but the compositions written before 1784 could only be estimated. Since Köchel's work, many more pieces have been found, re-attributed, and re-dated, requiring three catalogue revisions. These revisions, especially the third edition by Alfred Einstein (1937), and the sixth edition by Franz Giegling, Gerd Sievers, and Alexander Weinmann (1964), incorporated many corrections" (Wikipedia article on Köchel catalogue, accessed 09-04-2010).

The first fascicule (A-Aanhaling) of the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal (English: "Dictionary of the Dutch language") is published during this year.

This became the largest dictionary in the world in print, eventually containing over 430,000 entries of Dutch words from 1500 to 1921 in 43 volumes and close to 50,000 pages. The last fasciculde (Zuid-Zythum) was published in 1998. Three supplements containing modern Dutch words were published in 2001.

Since 27 January 2007, the dictionary has been available online. There is no charge for access but registration is required.

English geologist Charles Lyell publishes in London The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man with Remarks on Theories of the Origin of Species by Variation. The publisher's advertisements inserted at the back of the first edition are dated January 1863.

Though he had been slow to accept evolutionary theory, and long remained skeptical about the question of human origins, Lyell became convinced in the late 1850s of the antiquity of man by the increasing number of discoveries of man-made flint tools found alongside the fossil remains of extinct animals. After collecting and analyzing the evidence for several years, Lyell made the case for human antiquity in his Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, a work in which he also announced his acceptance of Darwin’s theory of evolution as “the best explanation yet offered of the connection between man and those animals which have flourished successively on the earth.” Lyell’s decision to include in this work the argument for evolution by natural selection, as well as information concerning the relationship between man and the primates, raised the level of scientific controversy concerning the whole issue of human antiquity, which had previously been developing mainly on the basis of geological, paleontological, and archaeological evidence without direct reference to the larger issues of evolution. The book also took the topics out of the confines of scientific journals and brought them to a much larger audience through Lyell’s superb powers of exposition.

Through the many reviews of this book published in popular magazines and newspapers, the public was treated to even more information on the topic. It is probably because of the success of Lyell’s work, along with those of Huxley, John Lubbock, that Darwin chose to bypass the subject of human antiquity in the Descent of Man (1871), writing:

“The high antiquity of man has recently been demonstrated by the labours of a host of eminent men, beginning with M. Boucher de Perthes; and this is the indispensable basis for understanding his origin. I shall, therefore, take this conclusion for granted, and may refer my readers to the admirable treatises of Sir Charles Lyell, Sir John Lubbock, and others.”

English biologist, paleontologist  and evolutionist Thomas Henry Huxley publishes in London Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature. The first issue of the edition contained publisher’s advertisements dated February 1863.

On February 18, 1863, Darwin wrote to Huxley, “Hurrah the monkey book has come!” (quoted in Desmond, Huxley, The Devils’ Disciple [1994] 312). Man’s Place in Nature was the first book to directly address the evidence for human evolution from primates. Together with Lyell’s Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, which was published a few weeks earlier, Man’s Place in Nature was also the first book to consider the role of prehistoric human remains as evidence for human evolution. While Lyell approached the topics primarily from the geological point of view, Huxley approached the subjects mainly from the point of view of comparative anatomy.

Concerning Huxley’s work, Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man: “Prof. Huxley, in the opinion of most competent judges, has conclusively shewn that in every visible character man differs less from the higher apes, than these do from the lower members of the same order of primates.” (p.3).

Sometimes called “Darwin’s bulldog”, Huxley enjoyed involvement in scientific controversy that more cautious scientists such as Darwin preferred to avoid. Like Lyell’s Antiquity of Man, Huxley’s book took topics which had previously been confined mostly to scientific journals and brought them to the attention of the reading public. Because Huxley’s and Lyell’s books were often reviewed together in popular magazines, this tended to generate even further controversy.

English statistician and epidemiologist William Farr uses the third Scheutz difference engine in the calculation of his English Life Table—the first instance of a printing calculator used extensively to do original work.

However, the machine was very troublesome, and the tables were completed by human computers. (See Reading 4.2)

English mathematician, engineer and computer designer Charles Babbage publishes his autobiography, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, in which he presents the most detailed descriptions of his Difference and Analytical Engines published during his lifetime, and writes about his struggles to have his highly futuristic inventions appreciated by society.

In the wording of his title Babbage used the word philosopher in its now obsolete sense of what we call a "scientist." The word scientist coined by William Whewell was not widely used until the end of the 19th or early 20th century. (See Reading 6.2.)

Diplomat, philologist and environmentalist George Perkins Marsh publishes Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action. 

Called "the fountainhead of the conservation movement" (Mumford, The Brown Decades, 78), Marsh's pioneering work gave a comprehensive scientific account of man's enormous and often destructive impact on the physical world.  Marsh warned of the dangers of the reckless misuse of land then endemic in the United States, pointing to the ruined lands of the Mediterranean region as an example of America's probable future, and called for a program to restore and rebuild the land.  His work had a significant influence on conservation movements both in the United States and in Europe, in part because of his practical orientation: he recognized the role that science must play in any rational program of land management, and believed that natural resources could be used under proper limits to improve the lot of humankind. 

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 1443.

French lawyer archaeologist and paleontologist Edouard Lartet and English banker ethnologist Henry Christy publish "Cavernes du Périgord. Objets gravés et sculptés des temps pré-historiques dans l’Europe occidentale" in Revue archéologique. 

In 1863 Lartet and Christy began systematically examining the caves in the Périgord region of France, and found incontrovertible evidence for the existence of Paleolithic mobiliary art. This 37-page paper with two lithographed plates and illustrations within the text, describing the results of those researches, is the founding work on Upper Paleolithic art, and one of the earliest publications to illustrate Paleolithic mobiliary art. It may also be the only joint publication of Lartet and Christy issued before Christy’s premature death at the age of 55.

In two papers published in 1861 Lartet had illustrated two prehistoric bones with carved representations of animals that had for many years been considered “Celtic”. In those papers, which reflect Lartet’s earliest interest in this topic, he argued that these carvings, which had been previously discovered by others, were indeed examples of prehistoric art.

James Clerk Maxwell publishes "A Dynamical Theory of the Electro-Magnetic Field" in the Transactions of the Royal Society of London.

The paper provided a theoretical framework, based on experiment and a few general dynamical principles, for the propagation of electromagnetic waves through space.

American journalist, landscape architect and planner Frederick Law Olmsted submits a "Preliminary Report upon the Yosemite and Big Tree Grove" to the Commissioners of California's new Yosemite park. 

This was the first work to establish the philosophical justification for public preservation of great natural scenery on the basis of its unique capacity to enhance human psychological, physical, and social health.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amrvhtml/cnchron1.html

According to Mark R. Godburn's website for his forthcoming Nineteenth Century Dust Jackets: An Illustrated History, "In the United States, the earliest known publisher-issued dust jacket is on a copy of The Bryant Festival at 'The Century' (1865) published by D. Appleton & Co. This jacket was printed on the front and rear panels with the same design as the binding."

English banker, politician, naturalist and archaeologist John Lubbock publishes in London Pre-Historic Times, as Illustrated by Ancient Remains, and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages.

After delivering a series of lectures at the Royal Institution on “The Antiquity of Man” in the summer of 1864, Lubbock organized his material into a book that addressed not only the topic of human antiquity but the larger issues of the lives and cultures of people in the Stone Age. A masterpiece of scientific exposition, Pre-historic Times became his best-known work, in which he coined the terms “Paleolithic” and “Neolithic” to distinguish between the earlier and later Stone Age periods. He wrote:

"From the careful study of the remains which have come down to us, it would appear that Pre-historical Archaeology may be divided into four great epochs.

"First, that of the Drift; when man shared the possession of Europe with the Mammoth, the Cave bear, the Wooly-haired rhinoceros, and other extinct animals. This we may call the ‘Paleolithic’ period.

"Secondly, The later or polished Stone age; a period characterized by beautiful weapons and instruments made of flint and other kinds of stone, in which, however we find no trace of the knowledge of any metal, excepting gold, which seems to have been sometimes used for ornaments. This we may call the ‘Neolithic ‘period.

"Thirdly The Bronze age, in which bronze was used for arms and cutting instruments of all kinds.

"Fourthly, The Iron age, in which that metal had superseded bronze for arms, axes, knives, etc; bronze, however still being in common use for ornaments, and frequently also for the handles of swords and other othersm, but never for the blades. Stone weapons, however, of many kinds were still in use during the age of Bronze, and even during that of Iron. So that the mere presence of a few stone implements in not in itself sufficient evidence, that any given ‘find’ belongs to the Stone age" (p. 3).

In contrast to some of the other early researchers in these fields who focused on the geology of the prehistoric sites, in finding the artifacts, and in studying the artifacts themselves, Lubbock studied the artifacts of Stone Age cultures in order shed light on the function of ancient implements as part of an overall attempt to reconstruct what life might have been like in the Stone Age. In order to gain further insight into life in prehistoric times he also studied the lives of a wide variety of non-western peoples, some of whose lives and cultures appeared to him to provide strong analogs to life during the Stone Age.

His book incorporates five earlier published papers, all of which appeared in The Natural History Review: “On the Kjökkenmöddings: Recent geological-archaeological researches in Denmark” (October 1861); “On the evidence of the antiquity of man, afforded by the physical structures of the Somme Valley” (January 1862); “On the ancient lake habitations of Switzerland” (July 1862); “North American archaeology” (January 1863); and “Cave-men” (July 1864). To these previously published papers Lubbock added three chapters devoted to the customs and beliefs of primitive races. In a final chapter he summed up his conclusions on the origins of man and of civilization.

Pre-Historic Times may be the most influential work on archaeology of the nineteenth century. It remained a standard work for over 50 years, with the seventh and final edition appearing just after Lubbock’s death in 1913.

Using the Great Eastern steamship, the attempt to lay the second Atlantic Cable takes place.

The cable snapped after twelve hundred miles.

Osman Zeki Bey, an Ottoman calligrapher, opens his printing office called Matbaa-i Osmaniye in Constantinople.

Osman Zeki Bey was the first printer authorized by the Ottoman Palace to print the Qur'an (Koran).

Kuran-Burcoglu, "Osman Zeki Bey and his Printing Office the Matbaa-i-Osmaniye, Sadgrove" (ed) History of Printing and Publishing the Languages and Countries of the Middle East (2005) 35-58.

Benjamin Tilghman of the United States develops the sulfite pulping process for the manufacture of paper.

The first mill using this process was built in Sweden in 1874.

Throughout the 19th century it was increasingly necessary to find workable substitutes for scarce linen rags, the supply of which could not possibly keep up with the growing demands for paper. While the production of paper from wood pulp enabled greatly increased production, the bleaching agents used in this new process reduced the longevity of paper. The pulping, bleaching, and sizing processes generated hydrochloric and sulfuric acids, which over time resulted in brittleness and deterioration of paper, and the possible loss of information.

The Great Eastern lays the third and successful Atlantic Cable, connecting the cable at Heart’s Content, a fishing village in Newfoundland.

Communication by electric telegraph between Europe and America was finally established. The first message sent over the cable was “A treaty of peace has been signed between Austria and Prussia."

Edward A. Calahan of the American Telegraph Company invents the first stock telegraph printing instrument.

The distinct sound of this telegraph printing instrument eventually earned it the name of “stock ticker.”

At the end of the American Civil War, The Library of the Surgeon General's Office, along with the new Surgeon General's office, is, perhaps with some irony, moved to Ford's Theater, site of the tragic assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in April 1865.

The theater had been closed and remodelled in the intervening two years. The new Office/Library site was taken over by the U.S. Army to house important post-Civil War medical activities of the Surgeon General's Office. These included the archive of Civil War medical records (essential for verification of veterans' pension claims) and the Army Medical Museum. The archive of case records, pathological specimens and photographs gathered by the Army Medical Museum was compiled by Joseph J. Woodward, Charles Smart, George A. Otis, and David Huntington under the direction of then Surgeon General of the Army, Joseph K. Barnes, into the six massive volumes of The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, which were published between 1870 and 1888. This encyclopedic work has been called the "first comprehensive American medical book."

The Times of London newspaper installs a Walter press, developed by the owner of the newspaper, John Walter, that prints on continuous paper, further increasing the speed of production.

James Clerk Maxwell publishes “On Governors,” a classic paper on feedback mechanisms

Newspaper editor Christopher Latham Sholes and Samuel Soule and Carlos Glidden invent the first practical typewriter.This was the first device to allow the operator to write faster than a person writing by hand.

"Following a strike by compositors at his printing press, he tried building a machine for typesetting, but this was a failure and he quickly abandoned the idea. He arrived at the typewriter through a different route. His initial goal was to create a machine to number pages of a book, tickets, and so on. He began work on this at Kleinsteubers machine shop in Milwaukee, together with a fellow printer Samuel W. Soule, and they patented a numbering machine on November 13, 1866.

"Sholes and Soule showed their machine to Carlos Glidden, a lawyer and amateur inventor at the machine shop working on a mechanical plow, who wondered if the machine could not be made to produce letters and words as well. Further inspiration came in July 1867, when Sholes came across a short note in Scientific American describing the "Pterotype", a prototype typewriter that had been invented by John Pratt in England. Sholes decided that the pterotype was too complex and set out to make his own machine, whose name he got from the article: the typewriting machine, or typewriter.

"For this project, Soule was again enlisted, and Glidden joined them as a third partner who provided the funds. The Scientific American article had described a "literary piano"; the first model that the trio built had a keyboard literally resembling a piano. It had black keys and white keys, laid out in two rows. It did not contain keys for the numerals 0 or 1 because the letters O and I were deemed sufficient:

3 5 7 9 N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

2 4 6 8 . A B C D E F G H I J K L M

"with the first row made of ivory and the second of ebony, the rest of the framework being wooden. It was in this form that Sholes, Glidden and Soule were granted patents for their invention on on June 23, 1868 and July 14. The first document to be produced on a typewriter was a contract that Sholes had written, in his capacity as the Comptroller for the city of Milwaukee. Machines similar to Sholes's had been previously used by the blind for embossing, but by Sholes's time the inked ribbon had been invented, which made typewriting in its current form possible" (Wikipedia article on Christopher Sholes, accessed 05-22-2009).

British naturalist, explorer, and evolutionist Alfred Russel Wallace publishes The Malay Archipelago.

"The preface summarizes Wallace’s travels, the thousands of specimens he collected, and some of the results from their analysis after his return to England. The first chapter describes the physical geography and geology of the islands with particular attention to the role of volcanoes and earthquakes. It also discusses the overall pattern of the flora and fauna including the fact that the islands can be divided, by what would eventually become known as the Wallace line, into 2 parts, those whose animals are more closely related to those of Asia and those whose fauna is closer to that of Australia. The following chapters then describe in detail the places Wallace visited. Wallace includes numerous observations on the people, their languages, ways of living, and social organization, as well as on the plants and animals found in each location. He talks about the biogeographic patterns he observes and their implications for natural history, both in terms of biology (evolution ) and the geologic history of the region. He also narrates some of his personal experiences during his travels. The final chapter is an overview of the ethnic, linguistic, and cultural divisions among the people who live in the region and speculation about what such divisions might indicate about their history. The book is dedicated to Charles Darwin" (Wikipedia article on The Malay Archipelago, accessed 05-08-2009).

William Stanley Jevons constructs his “logical piano,” the first logic machine to solve complicated problems with superhuman speed.

There are over 6000 miles of railroad track in England.

9,158,000,000 telegraph messages are sent in the United States.

Circulation of The Times of London newspaper is 70,000.

British telegraph systems are nationalized.

During the four and a half months Siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian War normal channels of communication were interrupted and the only way for the provincial government in Tours to communicate with Paris was by pigeon post.

French photographer and inventor René Dagron "proposed to the authorities to use his microfilming process to carry the messages by carrier pigeons. Rampont, the man in charge of the carrier pigeon program, agreed and a contract was signed on 11 November. According to the contract Dagron was to be paid 15 francs per 1000 characters photographed. A clause in the contract, signed by an official named Picard, gave Dagron the title of "chief of the photomicroscopic correspondence postal service" mentioning in French: 'M. Dagron a le titre de chef de service des correspondences postales photomicroscopiques. Il relève directement du Directeur Général des Postes,' which translates as 'Mr. Dagron has the title of the chief of the photomicroscopic correspondence postal service. He reports directly to the Director General of the Post Office.'

"After a period of difficulties and through hardships brought on by the war and the lack of equipment, Dagron finally achieved a photographic reduction of more than 40 diameters. The microfilms so produced weighed approximately 0.05 grams each and a pigeon was able to carry up to 20 at a time. Up to that point a page of a message could be copied in a microfilm approximately measuring 37 mm by 23 mm but Dagron was able to reduce this to a size of approximately 11 mm by 6 mm which was a significant reduction in the area of the microphotograph.

"Dagron photographed pages of newspapers in their entirety which he then converted into miniature photographs. He subsequently removed the collodion film from the glass base and rolled it tightly into a cylindrical shape which he then inserted into miniature tubes that were transported fastened on the wings of pigeons. Upon receipt the microphotograph was reattached to a glass frame and was then projected by magic lantern on the wall. The message contained in the microfilm could then be transcribed or copied. By 28 January 1871, when Paris and the Government of National Defense surrendered, Dagron had delivered 115,000 messages to Paris by carrier pigeon" (Wikipedia article on René Dagron, accessed 04-26-2009).

J. D. Hayhurst, The Pigeon Post into Paris 1870-1871 (1970) provides a comprehensive account, and reproduces a number of original documents including photomicrographs.

Although many scholars believed that events in the Trojan War, as recorded in the Iliad, were non-historical, Heinrich Schliemann disagreed. He excavated a hill, called Hissarlik by the Turks, near the town of Chanak in north-western Anatolia. There he discoversed the ruins of a series of ancient cities, dating from the Bronze Age to the Roman period.

From this excavation and another in 1878-79 Schliemann declared one of these cities—at first Troy I, later Troy II—to be the city of Troy. This identification became widely accepted. Later excavations showed that at least nine cities were built, one on top of the other, at this site.

Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician and sociologist Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet publishes Anthropométrie ou mesure des différentes facultés de l'homme.

In Anthropmétrie and in  Physique sociale ou essai sur le developpement des facultés de l'homme (1869), Quetelet established the basis for mathematical study of anthropological data. "Quetelet showed that if a series of anthropological measurements of either physical or intellectual qualities were plotted on squared paper, allowing x to be the measurements and y to be their frequency, they formed a curve like that representing the expansion of the binomial, or like that formed by plotting the errors of a great number of observers [i.e., the Gaussian curve]" (Penniman, 105). By applying the mathematics of the Gaussian curve to anthropological data, it became possible to plot the average or "standard" deviation from the statistical average, and thus to interpret anthropological data with greater exactness.

Charles Darwin publishes a 2-volume work entitled The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. 

Twelve years after the publication of On the Origin of Species, Darwin made good his promise to “throw light on the origin of man and his history” by publishing The Descent of Man in which he compared man’s physical and psychological traits to similar ones in apes and other animals, and showed how even man’s mind and moral sense could have evolved through processes of natural selection.

In discussing man’s ancestry, Darwin did not claim that man was directly descended from apes as we know them today, but stated that the extinct ancestors of Homo sapiens would have to be classed among the primates. This statement was widely misinterpreted by the popular press, and caused a furor second only to that raised by the Origin. Darwin also added an essay on sexual selection, i.e. the preferential chances of mating that some individuals of one sex have over their rivals because of special characteristics, leading to the accentuation and transmission of those characteristics.

Darwin originated of the single-origin hypothesis in paleoanthropology.

"In paleoanthropology, the recent African origin of modern humans is the mainstream model describing the origin and early dispersal of anatomically modern humans. The theory is called the (Recent) Out-of-Africa model in the popular press, and academically the recent single-origin hypothesis (RSOH), Replacement Hypothesis, and Recent African Origin (RAO) model. The hypothesis that humans have a single origin (monogenesis) was published in Charles Darwin's Descent of Man (1871). The concept was speculative until the 1980s, when it was corroborated by a study of present-day mitochondrial DNA, combined with evidence based on physical anthropology of archaic specimens" (Wikipedia article on Recent African origin of modern humans, accessed 05-15-2010).

Darwin wrote in a section of The Descent of Man entitled "On the Birthplace and Antiquity of Man":

"In each great region of the world the living mammals are closely related to the extinct species of the same region. It is, therefore, probable that Africa was formerly inhabited by extinct apes closely allied to the gorilla and chimpanzee; and as these two species are now man's nearest allies, it is somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere. But it is useless to speculate on this subject, for an ape nearly as large as a man, namely the Dryopithecus of Lartet, which was closely allied to the anthropomorphous Hylobates, existed in Europe during the Upper Miocene period; and since so remote a period the earth has certainly undergone many great revolutions, and there has been ample time for migration on the largest scale."

In spite of Darwin's suggestion, few if any 19th century researchers on human origins searched in Africa for evidence. It was not until Raymond Dart's highly controversial discovery of the first African hominin (hominid), Australopithecus africanus, in 1925 that serious attention began to paid to the African origins of mankind.

Charles Babbage’s scientific library is sold at auction. The auction catalogue, containing over two thousand items on topics such as mathematical tables, cryptography, and calculating machines, and including many rare volumes, may be the first catalogue of a library on computing and its history.

Willoughby Smith discovers that the electrical resistance of selenium varies dramatically with the amount of light falling on it.

The photoconductivity of selenium eventually provided a method for converting images into electrical signals-- the basis for photoelectric cells and a theoretical basis for television. 

American anthropologist, historian, naturalist, and writer George Bird Grinell becomes founding editor and publisher of Forest and Stream magazine. "It was dedicated to the conservation of wild life, induced the birth of the National Association of Audubon Societies, sponsored the National Park Movement, the U. S.- Canada treaty on migratory birds, lately the Migratory Bird Sanctuary Bill in Congress" (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,739586,00.html, accessed 01-18-2009).

In 1872 the patent on the Sholes & Glidden Type Writer was sold to E. Remington & Sons, then famous as manufacturers of sewing machines.  Remington started production of their first typewriter on March 1, 1873 in Ilion, New York. The machines, as first produced, were problematic in their operation.

The action of the type bars in the early typewriters were very sluggish and tended to jam frequently. To fix this problem, Christopher Sholes obtained a list of the most common letters used in English, and rearranged his keyboard from an alphabetic arrangement to one in which the most common pairs of letters were spread fairly far apart on the keyboard. Because typists at that time used the "hunt and peck" method, Sholes' arrangement increased the time it took for the typists to hit the keys for common two letter combinations enough to ensure that each type bar had enough time to fall back into place before the next one came up. This new arrangement, which Sholes invented in 1873, was named the Sholes QWERTY keyboard, and is still used today. Though Sholes had never imagined that typing would ever be faster than handwriting, which is usually 20 words per minute (WPM) or less, his invention with the QWERTY keyboard was the first machine to allow the operator to write faster than a person writing by hand.

When produced  by Remington & Sons in 1874 Scholes improved machine was called the “Sholes & Glidden Type Writer.” It had a keyboard with letters and numbers arranged in a four-line pattern (known as QWERTY from the first six letters in the top row), a wooden spacer bar, and a vulcanized india-rubber platen or roller. It only printed capital letters.

About 5000 of the Sholes & Glidden Type Writers were sold between 1874 and 1878, when Remington & Sons introduced the Remington 2.

Travel agent Thomas Cook introduces "circular notes."

This financial product became much better known through the American Express brand of traveler's cheques which were introduced in 1891.