Media History Timeline: 1860s

19th Century: Seventh Decade

Gallery

Leila T. Bauman's
U.S. Mail Boat,
1860

Single lens reflex
camera, England
1861

Honoré Daumier's
lithograph, 1862:
Nadar Elevating
Photography to a
High Art

Germany's Philip Reis
invented a telephone, but was
not taken seriously, 1863

1860-1869

1860: Dickens' Great Expectations.; 1860: Buckram, cloth stiffened with glue, is used for book covers.; 1860: 260 magazines are published in the United States.; 1860: "Dime novels," printed on cheap, rough paper, sell well.; 1860: New York Herald creates the first "morgue" of newspaper clippings.; 1860: Frenchman Rene Dagron invents "microfilm" technique using glass plates.; 1860: Eliot's The Mill on the Floss.; 1860: The first aerial photographs are taken from a balloon over Paris.
: 1861: Aerial balloonist sends telegraph message.; 1861: The first American Ph.D. is awarded by Yale University.; 1861: Charles Reade's picaresque novel, The Cloister and the Hearth.; 1861: Heliostat message, using sun and a mirror, sent 90 miles at Lake Superior.; 1861: Telegraph brings Pony Express to an abrupt end.; 1861: Kinematoscope by U.S. inventor Coleman Sellers, is a crude movie projector.; 1861: George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) publishes her best loved novel, Silas Marner.; 1861: First chemical means to color photography.; 1861: Mathew Brady and others begin to photograph the American Civil War.
: 1862: Verdi stages his opera La Forza del Destino.; 1862: In Italy, Caselli sends a drawing over a wire.; 1862: Ivan Turgenev's nihilist novel, Fathers and Sons.; 1862: In the U.S., paper money.; 1862: Jean-Auguste Ingres paints The Turkish Bath.; 1862: The first of philosopher Herbert Spencer's 10 volumes of Principles.; 1862: Victor Hugo's Les Misérables.
: 1863: Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, arguably history's greatest speech.; 1863: William Bullock invents the rotary web-fed letterpress.; 1863: Typotelegraph sends fax messages between London and Liverpool.
1863: Edward Everett Hale, The Man Without a Country.: 1863: Early phonograph: a machine that records what a piano plays.; 1863: Painter Edouard Manet shocks with nude Luncheon on the Grass.; 1863: Large U.S. cities get free home delivery of mail.; 1863: Uniform postal rates in U.S., regardless of distance.; 1863: German inventor J.P. Reis demonstrates an electric telephone.; 1863: First international postal conference held in Paris.
: 1864: "Railway post office" sorts mail on trains.; 1864: Dickens' Our Mutual Friend.; 1864: James Clerk Maxwell publishes theory that leads to radio wave discovery.; 1864: Postal money orders sold in U.S; $1.3 million in 6 months. Limited to U.S.; 1864: Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth.
: 1865: Experimental photograph is developed inside a camera.; 1865: "Lewis Carroll" publishes Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.; 1865: Mark Twain gets fame with "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County."; 1865: In Paris, the International Telegraph Union is founded.; 1865: Botanist Gregor Mendel writing on heredity begins science of genetics.; 1865: After adult novels mailed to Civil War troops, Congress votes obscenity law.; 1865: Most U.S. states have laws guaranteeing tax-based public education.; 1865: Paris and Berlin build networks of pneumatic tube telegram delivery.; 1865: Pantelegraph transmits faxes commercially between Paris and Lyon.; 1865: Louis Pasteur publishes his theory that germs spread disease.; 1865: West Virginian Mahlon Loomis manages a kind of wireless communication.; 1865: Web offset press prints both side of a continuous roll of paper at once.
: 1866: Western Union dominates U.S. wires.; 1866: Photos of Yosemite Valley will help pass laws to protect U.S. scenic places.; 1866: In Prague,The Bartered Bride, an opera by Bedrich Smetana, is staged.; 1866: Atlantic cable ties Europe and U.S. for instant communication.; 1866: Prussia uses telegraph to coordinate its armies in war against Austria.; 1866: Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.
: 1867: Christopher Sholes of Wisconsin builds a Type-Writer.; 1867: Karl Marx publishes Das Kapital.; 1867: Johann Strauss' waltz, "The Blue Danube."; 1867: The West sees Japanese art at the Paris Exposition.; 1867: Double-column advertising in newspapers.; 1867: Charles Gound's opera, Romeo and Juliet.; 1867: Louisa May Alcott's novel, Little Women.; 1867: Henrik Ibsen's drama, Peer Gynt.; 1867: Wagner's opera, Die Meistersinger von Nźrnberg.; 1867: The first Japanese magazine, Seiyo Zasshi (The Western Magazine).
: 1868: A communication necessity: the stapler.; 1868: Dostoevsky's The Idiot.; 1868: U.S. government for the first time tries to define obscenity.; 1868: Start of Allyn & Bacon, book publishers.; 1868: Edward Grieg's Piano Concerto in A Minor.; 1868: Brahms' A German Requiem.; 1868: Thomas Edison patents a vote recorder.; 1868: Tchaikovsky's 1st Symphony is well received. He is 28.
: 1869: From France, color photography, using the subtractive method.; 1869: The American Women's Home best-selling book of household advice.; 1869: John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, On the Subjection of Women.; 1869: "Cardiff Giant" hoax inspires comment, "There's a sucker born every minute."; 1869: The People's Literary Companion, the first mail-order periodical.; 1869: American Newspaper Directory estimates newspaper circulation.; 1869: Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace is published.; 1869: Horatio Alger begins publishing rags-to-riches novels.; 1869: Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy labels him "the apostle of culture."; 1869: From Austria, postcards.; 1869: Edison patents stock ticker and printing telegraph.; 1869: Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad.; 1869: James Russell Lowell, The Cathedral.; 1869: John Hyatt's invention of celluloid will lead to phonograph records, telephones.