1859

1859 is a common year starting on Saturday.

Events

January

• 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

• 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

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

April

• 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.

May

• May 21 – The bell of Big Ben activated
• May 30 – Sardinians defeat the Austrian army at battle of Palestro

June

• 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

• 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.

August

• August 27 – Edwin Drake drills the first oil well in the United States, near Titusville, Pennsylvania

September

• September 18 – Joshua A. Norton proclaims himself "Emperor of These United States"

October

• 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

• 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).

December

• December 2 – Militant abolitionist leader John Brown is hanged for his October 16th raid on Harper's Ferry.

Unknown Dates

• 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

Births

January-June

• January 11 – Lord George Nathaniel Curzon, British statesman and Viceroy of India (d. 1925)
• January 13 – Karl Bleibtreu, critic (d. 1928)
• January 27 – Wilhelm II of Germany, last Emperor of Germany and King of Prussia (d. 1941)
• February 1 – Victor Herbert, Irish-born composer (d. 1924)
• February 3 – Hugo Junkers, German 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 19 – Svante Arrhenius, Swedish chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1927)
• February 28 – Florian Cajori, Swiss historian of mathematics (d. 1930)
• March 2 – Sholom Aleichem, Ukrainian Yiddish novelist (d. 1916)
• March 8 – Kenneth Grahame, English author (d. 1932)
• March 26 – Alfred Edward Housman, English poet (d. 1936)
• April 8 – Edmund Husserl, Austrian philosopher (d. 1938)
• May 15 – Pierre Curie, French physicist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics (d. 1906)
• May 22 – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Scottish writer (d. 1930)

July-December

• 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, recipient 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)

Deaths

• April 16 – Alexis de Tocqueville, French historian (b. 1805)
• May 6 – Alexander von Humboldt, German naturalist and geographer (b. 1769)
• August 2 – Horace Mann, American educator and abolitionist (b. 1796)
• September 15 – Isambard Kingdom Brunel, British engineer (b. 1806)
• October 4 – Karl Baedeker, German author and publisher (b. 1801)
• October 22 – Louis Spohr, German violinist and composer (b. 1784)
• November 28 – Washington Irving, American author (b. 1783)
• December 2 – John Brown, American abolitionist (hanged) (b. 1800)
• December 8 – Thomas de Quincey, English writer (b. 1785)
• December 16 – Wilhelm Grimm, German writer (b. 1786)
• Abd ar-Rahman, Sultan of Morocco