Media History Timeline: 1840s

19th Century: Fifth Decade

Gallery

Daguerrotype sliding box
camera made in Glasgow
approx 1840

Voigtländer bellows
camera. 1841

George Cruikshank's
The New School
of Portrait-Painting,
1842

1840-1849

1840: Charles Darwin publishes Voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle.; 1840: German paper makers experiment with wood pulp.; 1840: Richard Henry Dana exposes seamen's life in Two Years Before the Mast.; 1840: Richard Wagner's first successful opera, Rienzi.; 1840: Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop.; 1840: Donizetti's opera, The Daughter of the Regiment.; 1840: Anarchist Pierre Proudhon opposes both property and equality for women.; 1840: In China, thousands of post offices handle letters, packages, remittances.; 1840: England starts penny post. Stamps sold. It's cheap, so people write more letters.; 1840: Among the new dances: the polka.
: 1841: Petzval of Austria builds an anachromatic portrait f/3.6 lens.; 1841: In the U.S., Volney Palmer is the first ad sales agent.; 1841: New York Tribune begins publication.; 1841: Dickens' Barnaby Rudge.; 1841: The satirical magazine Punch starts to publish.; 1841: Robert Browning's cynical poem, "Pippa Passes."; 1841: James Fenimore Cooper's adventure novel, The Deerslayer.; 1841: Edgar Allen Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" starts modern detective story.; 1841: Wagner's fourth opera, Der fliegende Hollţnder (The Flying Dutchman).; 1841: Ralph Waldo Emerson's humanistic essay, "Self-Reliance".; 1841: The first type-composing machine goes into use in London.; 1841: Phineas Barnum opens his museum in New York City.; 1841: First American women university graduates.
: 1842: Illustrated London News begins publication with engravings.; 1842: Cyanotype film printing: white image on blue background. Still used.; 1842: Charles E. Merrill, book publisher, opens for business.; 1842: In England, Alexander Bain demonstrates a crude fax machine.; 1842: Another use for paper: the first commercial Christmas card.; 1842: Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Morte de Arthur."; 1842: In Russia, Mikhail Glinka's opera, Russlan and Ludmilla, is hissed by audience.
: 1843: In the U.S., the photographic enlarger.; 1843: Donizetti's comic opera, Don Pasquale.; 1843: A photo portrait studio is opened in Edinburgh, Scotland.; 1843: John Stuart Mill publishes System of Logic.; 1843: Denmark's Sżren Kierkegaard's Either-Or will become a basis of existentialism.; 1843: Dickens' A Christmas Carol, a huge success, and Martin Chuzzlewit.; 1843: Byron's daughter, Ada Lovelace, explains concept of computer programming.; 1843: The Economist is founded.; 1843: On an American stage, the first blackface minstrel show.; 1843: British Algae, an album illustrated with photographs, is produced by Anna Atkins.; 1843: Congress gives Morse funds to build an experimental telegraph line.; 1843: Rubbery "gutta percha is" found in Malaya, a future submarine cable wrap.; 1843: Exchanging Christmas cards becomes popular.; 1843: Thomas Hood's "Song of the Shirt" stirs anger at working conditions of women.; 1843: Edgar Allen Poe writes the first modern mystery story, "The Gold Bug."
: 1844: William Makepeace Thackeray's novel, Barry Lyndon.; 1844: Samuel Morse's telegraph connects Washington and Baltimore.; 1844: Electrotyping in book printing makes plates of type and woodcuts.; 1844: A newspaper is published in Thailand.; 1844: Fox Talbot publishes The Pencil of Nature, a book with photographs.; 1844: Alexander Dumas' novel, The Three Musketeers.
: 1845: U.S. postal reform bill lowers rates, regulates domestic and international service.; 1845: The typewriter ribbon.; 1845: Mathew Brady opens a portrait studio in New York.; 1845: Telegraph message leads to capture of murderer in London.; 1845: Friedrich Engels, The Conditions of the Working Class in England.; 1845: Horace Mann leads movement to improve U.S. public education.; 1845: Wagner's opera, Tannhţuser.; 1845: Benjamin Disraeli begins career as a novelist, with Sibyl.; 1845: Edgar Allen Poe writes his most famous poem, "The Raven."; 1845: Dickens' The Chimes and The Cricket on the Hearth.
: 1846: In Germany, Zeiss begins manufacturing lenses.; 1846: In France, Prosper Merimee's play, Carmen; it will lead to Bizet's opera.; 1846: In a Massachusetts test, ether anesthesia ends the pain of surgery.; 1846: Richard Hoe's cylinder press produces 8,000 sheets an hour.; 1846: Herman Melville's first novel, Typee, life among South Seas cannibals.; 1846: Dickens' Dombey And Son.; 1846: Printing telegraph is forerunner of ticker tape.; 1846: Edward Lear publishes his Book of Nonsense.; 1846: Dumas' Man in the Iron Mask and Count of Monte Cristo.; 1846: Hector Berlioz' opera,Damnation of Faust.; 1846: Henry Rawlinson deciphers cuneiform writing, key to Babylonian history.
: 1847: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Poems.; 1847: U.S. starts selling postage stamps.; 1847: Honoré de Balzac's novel of deception, Cousin Bette; 1847: The first Merriam-Webster dictionary.; 1847: First use of telegraph as business tool.; 1847: In England, Bakewell constructs a "copying telegraph."; 1847: The Communist Manifesto, a pamphlet by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.; 1847: Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is greeted with success.; 1847: Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights is also immediately successful.; 1847: William Makepeace Thackery's Vanity Fair is serialized.; 1847: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic poem, "Evangeline."
: 1848: Forerunner of the Associated Press is founded in New York.; 1848: Wagner's opera Lohengrin.; 1848: Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton, reveals misery of industrial age England.; 1848: Egg whites are discovered to hold photo negatives on glass plates.; 1848: Spiritualism becomes popular; communication with the dead.; 1848: John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy.; 1848: Walt Whitman starts the newspaper Brooklyn Freeman.; 1848: The first two volumes of Thomas Babington Macaulay's History of England.; 1848: Dante Gabriel Rossetti begins England's Pre-Raphaelite poetry movement.
: 1849: The photographic slide.; 1849: Photographs of Egyptian pyramids begin travel photography.; 1849: Dickens' David Copperfield.; 1849: The term "advertising agency" is used by Volney B. Palmer.; 1849: Gustave Courbet paints The Stone Breakers.; 1849: Twin-lens camera can take pictures for stereoscopic viewing.; 1849: Henry David Thoreau's essay, "The Duty of Civil Disobedience."