1859

1859 is a common year starting on Saturday.

Years: 1856 1857 1858 - 1859 - 1860 1861 1862
Decades: 1820s 1830s 1840s - 1850s - 1860s 1870s 1880s
Centuries: 18th century - 19th century - 20th century

Contents

1 Events

Events

January 2 - Erastus Beadle publishes The Dime Book of Practical Etiquette .
January 24 - Wallachia and Moldavia are united under Alexander John Cuza under the name Romania (see December 1 1918 for the final unification, Transylvania and other regions were still missing at this time).

February 14 - Oregon is admitted as the 33rd U.S. state.
February 16 - George Washington Gale Ferris Jr born February 16, 1859 Galesburg, Knox, IL

March 26 - French amateur astronomer claims to have noticed a planet closer to the Sun than Mercury - later named Vulcan

April 25 - Ground is broken for the Suez Canal
April 26 - Austro-Sardinian War - Giuseppe Garibaldi's Hunters of the Alps confront Austrian forces led by Field Marshal-Lieutenant Carl Baron Urban at Varese.

June 4 - Battle of Magenta in Austro-Sardinian War - French and Sardinians defeat Austrians
June 21/June 24 - Battle of Solférino (Battle of the Three Sovereigns ) Kingdom of Sardinia and Napoleon III of France armies defeat Franz Josef I of Austria in northern Italy. Battle also reputedly inspires Henri Dunant to found Red Cross

July 6 - Queen Victoria signs Letters Patent making Queensland into a separate colony.
July 11 - Austrian Emperor Franz Josef, faced with expensive war against Kingdom of Sardinia and revolution in Hungary, meets Napoleon III at Villafranca . Since the death of Metternich in 1859, he negotiates "personally". Hostilities ceases, partly due to Napoleon's fear of the Nationalism in Italy.

October 12 - Self-described "Emperor of the United States" Joshua A. Norton 'orders' the U.S. Congress to dissolve.
October 16 - John Brown raids Harper's Ferry in Virginia, the signal for a general slave rebellion.
October 18 - Federal Troops under Colonel Robert E. Lee overpower Brown at the Federal arsenal .

November 1 - The current Cape Lookout , North Carolina, lighthouse was lighted for the first time. Its first-order Fresnel lens can be seen for nineteen miles.
November 19 - Opera "Genevieve de Brabant ", composed by Jacques Offenbach, debuts at the Theatre de Bouffes Parisians in Paris.
November 24 - British naturalist Charles Darwin publishes The Origin of Species, a book which argues that organisms gradually evolve through natural selection (it immediately sold out its initial print run).

Island of Timor is divided between Portugal and the Netherlands
Trinity College in Cambridge UK bans Origin of Species
Paraguay mediates a truce between Buenos Aires government and the Argentinean Confederation
Farmer introduces 24 rabbits to Australia - they multiply in huge numbers
Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies is succeeded by his 13-year-old son Francesco I of the Two Sicilies
Charles Blondel crosses Niagara Falls on a tightrope
Karl XV succeeds Oskar I as Swedish King
Codex Sinaiticus found by Constantin von Tischendorf on his third visit to the monastery of Santa Katerina, on Mount Sinai
Bernhard Riemann formulates the Riemann hypothesis, one of most important open problems of contemporary mathematics
Solar flares first observed on the Sun by English astronomer Richard Carrington.
Brisbane declared the capital of newly-made-separate colony Queensland, Australia
University of Michigan Law School founded

January 11 - Lord George Nathaniel Curzon, British statesman, Viceroy of India (d. 1925)
January 13 - Karl Bleibtreu , critic (d. 1928)
January 27 - Wilhelm II of Germany, last German Emperor and Prussian king (d. 1941)
February 1 - Victor Herbert, composer (d. 1924)
February 3 - Hugo Junkers, industrialist and aircraft designer (d. 1935)
February 6 - Elias Disney, American farmer and father of Walt Disney (d. 1941)
February 14 - Henry Valentine Knaggs, English physician and author (d. 1954)
February 18 - Sholom Aleichem, Ukrainian Yiddish writer (d. 1916)
February 28 - Florian Cajori, Swiss historian of mathematics (d. 1930)
March 2 - Sholom Aleichem, Yiddish novelist (d. 1916)
March 8 - Kenneth Grahame, author (d. 1932)
March 26 - Alfred Edward Housman, English poet (d. 1936)
May 15 - Pierre Curie, French physicist and recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics 1903 (d. 1906)
May 22 - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, British writer (d. 1930)

July 22 - Emma Lazarus, American poet (d. 1887)
August 4 - Knut Hamsun, Norwegian author, recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature (d. 1952)
October 9 - Alfred Dreyfus, French military officer (d. 1935)
October 18 - Henri Bergson, French philosopher and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature (d. 1941)
October 21 - Francesc Macià, President of the Catalan Generalitat (d. 1933)
December 15 - L. L. Zamenhof, Russo-Polish initiator of Esperanto (d. 1917)