1840

• 1. Introduction

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  1840 was a year that minted the modern world in half a dozen different ways at once. On the 1st of May, Britain issued the Penny Black, the first postage stamp ever produced, making it possible for ordinary people to prepay a letter for a single penny. Six weeks earlier, on the 10th of January, the Uniform Penny Post had already changed how correspondence worked in the United Kingdom. Half a world away, on the 19th of January, Captain Charles Wilkes looked out from his ship and saw the frozen coastline of what would become known as Wilkes Land, providing some of the earliest evidence that Antarctica was a complete continent.

  On the 13th of January, the steamship Lexington caught fire and sank four miles off Long Island in icy waters. Of the 143 people aboard, only four survived. The story of 1840 is not one of steady progress. It is a year where the first public park in England, the first photograph of Niagara Falls, the first German steam locomotive, and the first transatlantic passenger mail service all arrived at once, alongside blood libels, massacres, and the return of Napoleon's bones from exile. A year like this raises a question: how do so many firsts arrive together, and what do they leave behind?

• 2. The Age of Firsts

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  On the 4th of March, Alexander S. Wolcott and John Johnson opened what they called their Daguerreian Parlor on Broadway in Manhattan, becoming the world's first commercial photography portrait studio. Within the same year, English chemist Hugh Lee Pattinson pointed a daguerreotype camera at Niagara Falls, producing what is believed to be the first known photograph of that landmark.

  On the 9th of March, the Wilmington and Raleigh Railroad was completed between Wilmington, North Carolina and Weldon, North Carolina. At 161.5 miles, it became the longest railroad in the world at that time. Just weeks later, the Raleigh and Gaston Railroad finished its own run from Raleigh to near Weldon, filling in the regional rail network further.

  On the 21st of July, August Borsig's steam locomotive, the first ever built in Germany, entered a race against a Stephenson-built locomotive on the Berlin-Jüterbog railroad. The Borsig locomotive won by ten minutes. That same summer, on the 4th of July, the Cunard Line's 700-ton wooden paddlewheel steamer departed Liverpool for Halifax, Nova Scotia, inaugurating the first steam transatlantic passenger mail service.

  On the 16th of September, Joseph Strutt handed over the deeds and papers for the Derby Arboretum, destined to become England's first public park. The Stockport Viaduct, completed on the 21st of December, ranked as one of the largest brick structures in Europe. By year's end, Kajima, a construction company based in Edo, the city now called Tokyo, had been founded in Japan.

• 3. Antarctica and New Worlds

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  Two Antarctic discoveries arrived within days of each other in January. On the 19th, Captain Charles Wilkes' United States Exploring Expedition spotted land in the southeast quadrant of Antarctica, claiming it for the United States. On the 21st, just two days later, French explorer Jules Dumont d'Urville found Adélie Land and planted France's flag.

  In March, Polish explorer Paweł Strzelecki reached the summit of Mount Kosciuszko, the highest point in Australia. He made the climb on the 12th.

  On the 22nd of January, British colonists landed in New Zealand and officially founded the settlement of Wellington. The Treaty of Waitangi, signed on the 6th of February, granted British sovereignty over New Zealand. By the 21st of May, New Zealand had been formally declared a British colony. The speed of these steps, from founding a settlement to asserting colonial rule, took less than four months.

• 4. Power and Its Discontents

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  On the 10th of February, Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom married her cousin Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. It was a union that would shape the British monarchy for decades.

  On the 7th of June, Frederick William III of Prussia died after ruling the Kingdom of Prussia for more than forty years. His eldest son Frederick William IV inherited the throne the same day. In the Netherlands, William II became king on the 7th of October.

  In Brazil on the 23rd of July, the young Pedro II was declared "of age" ahead of schedule and began reasserting central control over the country. Across the Ottoman Empire, on the 15th of July, Austria, the United Kingdom, Prussia and Russia signed the Convention of London with the Ottoman Sultan to address the ongoing Egyptian-Ottoman War. By September, Ottoman and British troops were bombarding Beirut and landing forces on the Lebanese coast to push Muhammad Ali of Egypt out of the region.

  On the 4th of November, William Henry Harrison defeated Martin Van Buren in the United States presidential election by a landslide. Harrison would die just a month into his presidency in 1841, having delivered the longest inaugural address in American history on a cold day.

  In France, on the 30th of September, the frigate Belle Poule arrived at Cherbourg carrying Napoleon's remains from the island of Saint Helena. On the 15th of December, the body was laid to rest at Les Invalides in Paris.

• 5. Justice, Injustice, and Abolition

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  In February, a Capuchin friar and his Greek servant were murdered in Damascus. The killing triggered a highly publicized blood libel case against the Jewish community of the city, an event known as the Damascus Affair. A separate blood libel was made against the Jews of Rhodes that same month.

  From the 12th to the 23rd of June, the World Anti-Slavery Convention met at Exeter Hall in London, organized by the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. Arguments during that convention over the exclusion of women from participation would carry direct consequences for the women's suffrage movement in the United States.

  On the 1st of August, remaining former slaves in the British Empire were released from a system of forced apprenticeships under the terms of the Slavery Abolition Act 1833. The transition from slavery to apprenticeship to freedom had taken seven years since the act's passage.

  On the 18th of June, the British brigantine Maria was wrecked off South Australia. All 26 passengers and crew reached shore alive. None of them survived the trek inland over the following two weeks, most killed in what became known as the Maria massacre. David Livingstone left Britain for Africa on the 7th of December, beginning a career that would eventually put him at the center of both exploration and abolitionism on the continent.

• 6. Births That Shaped the Century

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  Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born on the 7th of May. Auguste Rodin was born on the 12th of November. Claude Monet arrived on the 14th of November. Thomas Hardy was born on the 2nd of June. Émile Zola entered the world on the 2nd of April.

  John Boyd Dunlop, who would later invent the pneumatic tire, was born on the 5th of February. Hiram Maxim, who would develop one of the first automatic machine guns, was born on the same day. John Philip Holland, born on the 29th of February, would go on to invent the modern submarine.

  Sophia Jex-Blake, born on the 21st of January, would become a pioneering English physician in an era when women were largely excluded from the medical profession. Mary Jane Patterson, born on the 12th of September, would become the first African-American woman to receive a Bachelor of Arts degree, earning it in 1862. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, born on the 4th of August, would publish his landmark work on human sexuality later in the century.

  Crazy Horse, born at an unknown date in 1840 as the earliest probable estimate, would become Chief of the Oglala Lakota and one of the most prominent figures in the resistance against the expansion of the United States military into the Great Plains. Thomas Nast, born on the 27th of September, would become the American caricaturist whose illustrations helped define political cartooning.

• 7. Departures

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  Fanny Burney, the English novelist born in 1752, died on the 6th of January. Niccolò Paganini, the Italian violinist and composer, died on the 27th of May. Caspar David Friedrich, the German Romantic painter, died on the 7th of May.

  Anne Lister died on the 22nd of September. Born in 1791, she had kept detailed coded diaries of her life as an English landowner, mountaineer, and traveller. She has been described as "the first modern lesbian," a recognition that came long after her death when her diaries were finally decoded.

  Siméon Denis Poisson, the French mathematician and physicist, died on the 25th of April. His work in probability theory and mathematical physics left a permanent mark on both fields. José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, the first leader of independent Paraguay, died on the 20th of September.

  Gaetano Donizetti's opera La fille du régiment premiered in Paris on the 11th of February, one of the few debuts of the year that belonged to neither tragedy nor departure. The first English translation of Goethe's Theory of Colours, completed by Charles Eastlake, also appeared in 1840, bringing one of Europe's most unusual scientific texts to new readers.