Media History Timeline: 1870s

19th Century: Eighth Decade

Gallery

Zoopraxiscope,
forerunner of movies
1870s

Early typewriter had
foot treadle carriage
return, 1873

Afghanistan postage
stamp, Kingdom of
Kabul, 1874

Claude Monet's
Arrival of the
Normandy Train, 1877

Bell's telephone
1876

Magneto hand telephone
1878

1870-1872

1870: Stock ticker comes to Wall Street.

1870: Two from Jules Verne: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Mysterious Island.

1870: Léo Delibes' ballet, Coppélia.

1870: French postal authorities use hot air balloons during siege of Paris.

1870: William Jackson's Yellowstone photographs aid efforts to preserve U.S. heritage.

1870: Once and future prime minister Benjamin Disraeli publishes last novel, Lothair.

1870: More than 5,000 newspapers are published in the U.S.

1870: Dickens does not live to complete The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

1870: Bret Harte writes Western stories, like "The Luck of Roaring Camp."

1870: Wood pulp is widely used to make paper.

1870: Pigeons carry microphotographed secret messages in Franco-Prussian War.

1870: Telegraph across Europe and Asia connects London with Calcutta, 11,000 km.

1871: The first formal advertising agency.

1871: Japan gets a newspaper, Yokohama Mainichi Shimbun (Daily Newspaper).

1871: Verdi's opera, Aida.

1871: Arguably the toughest newspaper interview ever, Stanley meets Livingston.

1871: Wagner's opera, Siegfried.

1871: Darwin's scholarly Descent of Man raises indignation about monkey ancestors.

1871: Eliot begins serialization of her Middlemarch.

1871: In Boston, the Globe publishes.

1871: Lewis Carroll (mathematician Charles Dodgson) writes Through the Looking Glass.

1871: Jules Verne's novel, Around the World in 80 Days.

1871: Louisa May Alcott's novel, Little Men.

1871: P.T. Barnum opens a circus, calls it "The Greatest Show on Earth."

1871: Afghanistan issues postage stamps, but good only wiithin the territory.

1872: James McNeill Whistler paints a portrait of his mother.

1872: Simultaneous transmission from both ends of a telegraph wire.

1872: The Montgomery Ward mail order catalog.

1872: Under Meiji Restoration, Japan embarks on drive to expand book publishing.

1872: Mark Twain, Roughing It.

1872: George Smith deciphers cuneiform tablets containing the epic of Gilgamesh.

1872: Susan B. Anthony casts a ballot and is arrested for it.

1872: Erewhon (anagram of "Nowhere"), Samuel Butler's satire of English life.

1872: Bruckner's 2nd Symphony.

1873-74

1873: U.S. postcard debuts; costs one penny.

1873: Illustrated daily newspaper appears in New York.

1873: A photograph is reproduced using halftone method.

1873: Anthony Comstock gets government O.K. to inspect mails for vice.

1873: Report about selenium, resistance and light is a step toward television.

1873: British children are required to go to school.

1873: Typewriters get the QWERTY pseudo-scientific keyboard.

1873: Lord Kelvin calculates the tides with a machine.

1873: In Ireland, May uses selenium to send a signal through the Atlantic cable.

1873: Remington starts manufacturing Christopher Sholes' typewriter.

1874: Pictures from an Exhibition by Modest Moussorgsky.

1874: Quadriplex telegraph system allows four messages to travel over single wire.

1874: Baudot telegraph code prints using five channels of paper tape.

1874: A Civil War Union Army bugle tune is officially named "Taps."

1874: Verdi's Requiem is performed.

1874: After much rejection, Modest Mussorgsky's opera, Boris Godunov performed.

1874: The peak of Viennese operetta: Johann Strauss II's, Die Fledermaus.

1874: Wagner's Gštterdţmmerung completes The Ring of the Nibelungen.

1874: 2nd Symphony wins Peter Tchaikovsky public acclaim.

1874: In France, the first show of the impressionist painters.

1874: Thomas Hardy's novel, Far from the Madding Crowd, appears serially.

1875-77

1875: Universal Postal Union formed in Berne, Switzerland.

1875: In England, William Crookes builds a forerunner to the cathode ray tube.

1875: In France, the praxinoscope, an optical toy, a step toward movies.

1875: U.S. has 257 public libraries.

1875: Cheap book reprints published in series called "libraries."

1875: Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health, cornerstone of Christian Science.

1875: Edison invents the mimeograph while trying to improve telegraph tape.

1875: French composer Georges Bizet's opera Carmen has unsuccessful opening.

1875: Gilbert & Sullivan's Trial by Jury.

1875: Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky's 3rd Symphony (Polish), 1st Piano Concerto.

1875: In the U.S., Carey designs a selenium mosaic to transmit a picture.

1876: "Mr. Watson, come here. I want you." Bell invents the telephone.

1876: French poet Stéphane Mallarmé's "The Afternoon of a Faun" will inspire Debussy.

1876: Feminist Annie Besant's The Legalisation of Female Slavery in England.

1876: Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the first typed novel.

1876: Amilcare Ponchielli's opera, La Gioconda.

1876: Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.

1876: Edgar Degas paints The Glass of Absinthe.

1876: The player piano.

1876: Herbert Spencer applies evolution to society, coins "the survival of the fittest."

1876: In Norway, Edvard Grieg composes the Peer Gynt Suite.

1876: Tchaikovsky's Marche Slav.

1876: National Baseball League is founded.

1876: Brahms' 1st Symphony. He labored over it for 15 years.

1877: Brahms' 2nd Symphony.

1877: Edwin Holmes builds a telephone switchboard.

1877: Bell "photophone" uses light to transmit audio, anticipates fiber optics.

1877: A weather map is printed in an Australian newspaper.

1877: Eadweard Muybridge photographs horse in motion, forerunner of movies.

1877: In France, Charles Cros invents the phonograph.

1877: In America, Edison also invents the phonograph.

1877: French composer Camille Saint-Sa‘ns' opera, Samson and Delilah.

1877: Impressionist Camille Pissarro, Red Roofs.

1877: The Fixation of Belief sets Charles Peirce as a founder of American pragmatism.

1877: Robert Louis Stevenson writes his first stories, many from a sick bed.

1877: In Japan, ten years after the first magazine is published, there are 200.

1877: Tchaikovsky's ballet, Swan Lake.

1877: The Washington Post starts printing.

1877: Emile Berliner invents the microphone. So does David Hughes.

1877: Anna Sewell's much loved novel, Black Beauty: The Autobiography of a Horse.

1878-79

1878: Brahms' Violin Concerto.

1878: Karl Klic produces a commercially successful means of photogravure printing.

1878: Portuguese professor Adriano de Paiva writes proposal for a video system.

1878: Edison invents a better microphone.

1878: Thomas Hardy's novel, The Return of the Native.

1878: Gilbert & Sullivan's operetta, HMS Pinafore.

1878: Telephone directories are issued.

1878: Thomas Edison gets a patent for a phonograph talking doll.

1878: First of 300 patents issued for acoustic "string" telephones.

1878: Quaker Oats, the first mass-marketed breakfast food.

1878: In New Haven, Connecticut, a telephone central exchange.

1878: Full page newspaper ads.

1878: Joseph Pulitzer begins empire with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

1878: Emma Nutt becomes the first woman hired as a telephone operator.

1878: Punch cartoon imagines "telephonoscope": global, interactive, flat-panel HDTV.

1878: Founding of Johns Hopkins University Press.

1878: Dry-plate photography replaces messy, inconvenient wet plates

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1879: Starting in Lowell, Massachusetts, telephone numbers replace names.

1879: Benday process aids newspaper production of maps, drawings.

1879: Brahms' Violin Concerto in D.

1879: Dostoevsky's novel, The Brothers Karamazov.

1879: George Eastman builds a machine to mass produce photographic dry-plates.

1879: Gilbert & Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance.

1879: Henry James' novel, Daisy Miller.

1879: Henry George, Progress and Poverty, calls for a single tax on land.

1879: Tchaikovsky's opera, Eugene Onegin, based on Pushkin.

1879: An electric telescope is designed to capture moving images.

1879: Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House shocks audiences when Nora leaves her husband.