Media History Timeline: 1880s

19th Century: Ninth Decade

Gallery

Twin-lens reflex
camera, 1881

Disguised spy
camera, Germany
1885

Folding camera
England, 1885

Magneto crank
phone, Sweden
1885

Gramophone
pl,ayed flat discs, 1887

Vincent Van Gogh's
Sidewalk Cafe, 1888

1880-81

1880: Civil War General Lew Wallace's novel, Ben Hur.

1880: Muybridge's Zoopraxiscope projects photographic images in motion.

1880: Advertising copywriter becomes an occupation.

1880: Tchaikovsk's 1812 Overture.

1880: Emile Zola's realistic novel, Nana.

1880: Telephone pay stations are opened in New York.

1880: Sculptor Auguste Rodin begins Gates of Hell, never completes it.

1880: A halftone photograph, "Shantytown," appears in a newspaper.

1880: Offenbach dies before completing Tales of Hoffmann.

1880: France's Leblanc theorizes transmitting a picture in segments.

1880: Antonin Dvorak's 1st Symphony.

1880: First parcel post.

1880: The U.S. has about 50,000 telephones.

1880: From Italy, Carlo Collodi's tale for children, Pinocchio: the Story of a Puppet.

1880: Dostovesky's The Brothers Karamazov.

1880: Birth of Helen Keller, who will learn to communicate by sign language.

1880: John Powers, the first skilled ad copy writer.

1880: Richard Strauss, age 16, wins acclaim with Symphony in D Minor.

1880: A dispatch is telegraphed from a field of battle (the Second Afghan War).

1881: Brahms completes the 2nd Piano Concerto.

1881: Paris Exposition lets visitors listen to opera over telephone headsets.

1881: Bell and Tainter's graphophone has better sound than Edison phonograph.

1881: Selford Bidwell sends electronic image by telegraph using photoelectric cell.

1881: Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D.

1881: The Los Angeles Times.

1881: The first photographic roll film.

1881: The Electric Telescope, a book about television, intrigues readers.

1881: In London, the Savoy Theater is built to house Gilbert & Sullivan's operas.

1881: Women enter the business world via the typewriter.

1881: A revised edition of the New Testament is published.

1881: Business offices begin to look modern.

1882-84

1882: Mark Twain's novel, The Prince and the Pauper.

1882: Gilbert & Sullivan's operetta, Iolanthe.

1882: Wagner's final opera, Parsifal.

1882: Emma Lazarus' sonnet is inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.

1882: In England, the first wirephotos.

1882: Etienne-Jules Marey designs a rifle-like camera that shoots 12 photos per second.

1882: Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass is banned in Boston.

1883: Brahms' 3rd Symphony.

1883: After many rejections, Anton Bruckner succeeds with 7th Symphony.

1883: Annie Besant, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, exposes industrial poverty.

1883: Edison stumbles onto "Edison effect"; later, basis of broadcast tubes.

1883: Stevenson's Treasure Island.

1883: Pulitzer buys the New York World from financier Jay Gould.

1883: Buffalo Bill Cody opens his Wild West Show.

1883: Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra,

1883: Brahms' 3rd Symphony.

1883: Mark Twain's recollections, Life on the Mississippi.

1883: Henrik Ibsen's play, An Enemy of the People.

1883: Thomas Edison invents the light bulb, a significant aid to communication.

1884: In Germany, Paul Nipkow's scanning disc, early version of television.

1884: People can now make long distance phone calls.

1884: The electric tabulator.

1884: The Stebbing Automatic Camera, first production model to use roll film.

1884: Jules Massenet's opera, Manon.

1884: Lewis Waterman designs a practical fountain pen that doesn't blot.

1884: The letter "A" of the Oxford English Dictionary is finished; volume published.

1884: Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

1885-86

1885: Fingerprints are used for identification.

1885: Dictating machines are bought for offices.

1885: American Bell Telephone Co. creates AT&T for its long distance business.

1885: H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines.

1885: Brahms' 4th Symphony.

1885: Mail rates for publications drop to a penny a pound.

1885: Transparent film negatives are sold.

1885: Tainter and Bell "graphaphone" uses wax-coated cylinders for better sound.

1885: U.S. Post Office offers special delivery.

1885: Franz Liszt completes 19 Hungarian Rhapsodies.

1885: Tchaikovsky's Manfred symphony.

1885: Vincent van Gogh paints The Potato Eaters.

1885: Richard Burton's The Arabian Nights sets imaginations aflame.

1885: Gilbert & Sullivan's operetta The Mikado. It will infuriate Japanese.

1885: Trains are delivering newspapers daily.

1885: "Nellie Bly" begins career as exposé reporter.

1885: Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses and Prince Otto.

1885: William Dean Howells' novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham.

1886: Sapphire stylus improve sound.

1886: Mark Twain's The Adventure's of Huckleberry Finn.

1886: Little Lord Fauntelroy, a novel by Francis Burnett.

1886: One-third of all books published in U.S. are cheap paperbacks.

1886: Pointillist painter George Seurat, Bathing at Asnires.

1886: Tokyo's Imperial University is founded.

1886: Berne Convention sets up international copyright agreements.

1886: Thomas Hardy's novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge.

1886: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.

1886: Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Kidnapped.

1886: Rudyard Kipling begins a long writing career with "Departmental Ditties".

1886: Ottmar Mergenthaler's Linotype at the N.Y. Tribune ends setting type by hand.

1886: Amos Dolbear gets patent for wireless communication using induction.

1887-89

1887: Cellulose photographic film is developed.

1887: William Randolph Hearst gets his first newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner.

1887: Montgomery Ward mails out a 540-page catalog.

1887: Annie Sullivan meets Helen Keller; will develop touch teaching for the blind.

1887: St. Nicholas Magazine, best of early children's magazines; will publish until 1943.

1887: Berliner gets music from a flat "gramophone" disc stamped out by machine.

1887: Thomas Edison assigns engineer W.L.K. Dickson to create a motion picture camera.

1887: Comptometer multi-function adding machine is manufactured.

1887: Impressionist Pierre Renoir, The Bathers.

1887: Alexander Borodin dies before finishing his opera, Prince Igor.

1887: Arthur Conan Doyle writes his first short story about Sherlock Holmes.

1887: In Chicago, with a broomstick and an overstuffed ball: softball.

1887: Ads appear in magazines.

1887: International parcel post system established.

1887: Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, calls for heroic morality, supermen.

1888: A new magazine: National Geographic.

1888: Wisconsin telegraphy teacher George Parker designs a new pen.

1888: Cesar Franck composes the Symphony in D Minor.

1888: Lehigh Valley Railroad adopts wireless telegraph; used induction coil.

1888: "Kodak" box camera makes picture taking simple. The "snapshot" is born.

1888: In London, the Financial Times.

1889: Eleven years after getting patent, Edison mass produces a phonograph doll.

1889: William Dickson reportedly synchronizes motion pictures with phonograph.

1889: John Philip Sousa's "Washington Post March" honors the newspaper.

1888: Considered an office machine, the phonograph is franchised in territories.

1888: Edison tries to record movies on a wax cylinder like his phonograph.

1888: A mortician, Almon Strowger, develops automatic phone switching exchange.

1888: Richard Strauss' tone poem, Don Juan.

1888: Printer's Ink, a magazine for the advertising industry.

1888: McGraw-Hill begins book publishing.

1888: Heinrich Hertz proves that radio waves exist.

1888: Experimental motion pictures are recorded on sensitized paper rolls.

1888: The first beauty contest is held in Spa, Belgium.

1888: The Kodak box camera, $25, takes 100 pictures on a roll.

1888: The coin-operated public telephone, patented by William Gray.

1888: Tchaikovsky's 5th Symphony.

1888: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's tuneful symphonic suite, Scheherazade.

1888: Edison's phonograph is manufactured for sale to the public.

1888: Oberlin Smith sets forth theory of magnetic recording.

1889: Andrew Carnegie, "The Gospel of Wealth"; endows 2,800 libraries, much else.

1889: Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

1889: Eastman's cellulose film can be bought on a roll.

1889: The Wall Street Journal.

1889: Coin-operated phonographs are placed in bars, arcades, the first jukeboxes.

1889: Richard Strauss' tone poem, Death and Transfiguration.

1889: Robert Louis Stevenson's The Master of Ballantrae.

1889: Columbia Phonograph Co. issues one-page music record catalog.