1855

Decades: 1800s 1810s 1820s 1830s 1840s - 1850s - 1860s 1870s 1880s 1890s 1900s

Years: 1850 1851 1852 1853 1854 - 1855 - 1856 1857 1858 1859 1860

Events

• January 28 - first locomotive runs from the Atlantic to the Pacific on the newly completed Panama Railway
• March 2 - accession of Russian Tsar Alexander II
• March 30 - "Border Ruffians" from Missouri invade Kansas and force election of a pro-slavery legislature.
• July 4 - In Brooklyn, New York, Walt Whitman's first edition of his book of poem's titled Leaves of Grass is published.
• September 3 - Indian Wars: In Nebraska, 700 soldiers under American General William Harney avenge the Grattan Massacre by attacking a Sioux village killing 100 men, women, and children.
• November - David Livingstone discovers the Victoria Falls
• accession of Emperor Theodore II of Ethiopia

• Gustave Courbet sets up Pavilion of Realism in protest against "official art" at Paris International Exhibition
• Daily Telegraph newspaper founded in London, England
• Sheffield F.C., the first ever football club is founded

Year in topic

• 1855 in literature
• 1855 in science
  • Maxwell unifies electricity and magnetism into a single theory, classical electromagnetism, thereby showing that light is an electromagnetic wave.

Births

• January 5 - King Camp Gillette, inventor (+ 1932)
• January 21 - John Moses Browning, inventor (+ 1926)

• January 28 - William Seward Burroughs, inventor of the calculator (+ 1898)
• March 13 - Percival Lowell, astronomer (+ 1916)
• March 24 - Andrew Mellon, financier (+ 1937)
• July 30 - Wilhelm von Siemens, German industrialist
• Marie Corelli

Deaths

• February 23 - Carl Friedrich Gauss, mathematician, astronomer and physicist
• March 31 - Charlotte Bronte, author
• May 23 - Charles Robert Malden explorer
• June 28 - Fitzroy Somerset, 1st Lord Raglan, commander of British forces in the Crimean War
• August 7 - Mariano Arista, president of Mexico
• November 11 - Søren Kierkegaard, philosopher

Referenced By