50 Fun Facts About The 1830s

Which animal, pulling a rival carriage, outran the steam locomotive Tom Thumb in a famous 1830 race?

A horse won only because a belt slipped off the engine's blower and it lost power. The railroad was convinced anyway and dropped its animals for locomotives the next year.

Which London residence did Queen Victoria become the first monarch to live in on taking the throne in 1837?

Buckingham Palace was being rebuilt for George IV, who died before it was finished, so the 18-year-old Victoria was the first sovereign to move in.

What saved President Andrew Jackson when a house painter tried to shoot him at the US Capitol in 1835?

Both pistols misfired, and the 67-year-old Jackson then set about the gunman with his cane. It was the first known attempt to kill a sitting US president.

Which heavenly body did New York's Sun newspaper claim in 1835 was home to unicorns and bat-winged people?

The Moon was the setting of six hoax articles that falsely credited the real astronomer Sir John Herschel with spotting bison, two-legged beavers and temples through a giant telescope.

Which everyday abbreviation first appeared in print in 1839 during a Boston fad for comic misspellings?

OK is traced by most reference works to a jokey shortening of a misspelled "all correct". It caught on nationally a year later as a slogan in the 1840 presidential election.

Which former Tennessee congressman, famous as a frontiersman, was killed defending the Alamo in Texas in 1836?

Davy Crockett narrowly lost his seat in Congress in 1835 and left angrily for Texas, where he died at the Alamo only months later.

Which Royal Navy survey ship carried the naturalist Charles Darwin around the world between 1831 and 1836?

HMS Beagle was supposed to be away for two years and stayed out almost five, and Darwin spent most of that time exploring on land.

Which Native American nation was forced west from Georgia in 1838 along the Trail of Tears?

Cherokee families were driven out after gold was found near their Georgia land, and about 4,000 of them died on the journey to what is now Oklahoma.

Which Charles Dickens novel about a workhouse orphan began appearing in monthly magazine instalments in 1837?

Oliver Twist was a satire aimed at the harsh new Poor Laws, and it gave English the pickpocket nicknamed the Artful Dodger.

Which veteran campaigner died three days after learning that Britain's 1833 bill to end slavery would pass?

William Wilberforce lived just long enough to hear the news. The act's £20 million in compensation went to slave owners, while those freed had to serve on as unpaid apprentices.

Which invention did France buy from Louis Daguerre in 1839 and present as a gift free to the world?

Photography in its first practical form, the daguerreotype, was handed over in exchange for lifetime pensions for Daguerre and his late partner's son.

Which American portrait painter turned inventor first publicly demonstrated his electric telegraph in 1838?

Samuel Morse was turned down for federal funding that same year, and his famous first long-distance message did not go out until 1844.

Which enslaved preacher led an 1831 uprising in Virginia after reading a solar eclipse as a divine sign?

Nat Turner led the deadliest slave revolt in US history, and Southern legislatures answered it with laws banning the education of enslaved people.

Which country broke from the Netherlands after an 1830 revolt that began with a riot outside an opera house?

Belgium's revolt began when Brussels theatregoers left a patriotic opera and joined the mob outside. The new country installed Leopold I as its first king in 1831.

Which former governor of Tennessee won at San Jacinto and became first president of the Republic of Texas?

Sam Houston remains the only person ever elected governor of two different US states: Tennessee first, and Texas after it joined the Union.

Which locomotive fatally ran over MP William Huskisson when the Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened in 1830?

Rocket hit him after dozens of dignitaries climbed down onto the tracks during a stop. Huskisson is remembered as the first widely reported railway passenger casualty.

Which material did Charles Goodyear toughen in 1839 by heating it with sulfur over a hot stove?

Rubber goods had been turning sticky and rotting until Goodyear's discovery, a process later named vulcanization after Vulcan, the Roman god of fire.

Which American inventor patented his revolving handgun in 1836, an idea he said came from a ship's capstan?

Samuel Colt dreamed it up at sea on a voyage to Calcutta, then opened his first gun works in Paterson, New Jersey.

Which Illinois blacksmith built a successful steel plow in 1837 and gave his name to a tractor maker?

John Deere, a Vermont-born craftsman, polished the steel so highly that the sticky prairie clay slid off it, where cast-iron plows had struggled.

Which self-taught English physicist discovered electromagnetic induction, the effect behind generators, in 1831?

Michael Faraday had little formal schooling and started out at 14 as a bookbinder's apprentice, educating himself from the books in the shop.

Which Japanese artist, by then in his seventies, created the woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa in 1831?

Hokusai made it the first of his Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, a series whose Prussian blue pigment revolutionised Japanese prints.

Which French novelist published the tale of the bell-ringer Quasimodo and the dancer Esmeralda in 1831?

Victor Hugo saw the novel as a plea to preserve France's Gothic architecture, and was reportedly upset when its English title put the hunchback first.

Which writer's first fairy-tale booklet, published in Copenhagen in 1835, included The Princess and the Pea?

Hans Christian Andersen issued the tales in thin unbound booklets, and by 1837 the third one had added The Little Mermaid and The Emperor's New Clothes.

Which commodity did Chinese official Lin Zexu seize from foreign traders and destroy in 1839, starting a war?

Opium was destroyed in public on Humen Beach, after the emperor rejected proposals to legalise and tax the trade instead.

Which American author was born in 1835, two weeks after Halley's Comet's closest approach, and died as it returned?

Mark Twain predicted in 1909 that he would go out with the comet, and he died of a heart attack the day after it passed closest to the Sun.

Which American published the Book of Mormon in 1830, saying he had translated it from buried golden plates?

Joseph Smith said an angel named Moroni had told him the plates lay buried in a hill near his home in upstate New York.

Which London landmark burned down in 1834 after old wooden tally sticks were carelessly burned in its furnaces?

Houses of Parliament furnaces were stuffed with obsolete Exchequer accounting sticks, starting a chimney fire that spared little beyond the medieval Westminster Hall.

Which Thames crossing, opened in 1831, was sold in 1968 and rebuilt in Lake Havasu City, Arizona?

London Bridge, a five-arch granite design by John Rennie, was bought by an American entrepreneur, and its numbered facing stones were shipped out through the Panama Canal.

Which future abolitionist orator escaped slavery in Maryland in 1838 by boarding a train dressed as a sailor?

Frederick Douglass carried papers borrowed from a free Black seaman and reached New York, where days later he married the woman who had helped pay for the journey.

Which Pacific archipelago's mockingbirds and giant tortoises did Charles Darwin study on his 1835 visit?

Galápagos Islands mockingbirds differed from one island to the next, as Darwin happened to notice, and from then on he recorded where each mockingbird was caught.

Which president, inaugurated in 1837, is the only one to have spoken English as a second language?

Martin Van Buren grew up in Kinderhook, New York, where most residents were of Dutch descent and spoke Dutch as their first language.

What did the United States pay off in full under Andrew Jackson in January 1835, for the only time in its history?

The national debt stayed at zero for only about a year, the one stretch since 1789 in which the federal government has owed nothing.

Which Mexican general lost a leg to French cannon fire in 1838 and had the limb buried with full military honors?

Santa Anna's buried leg was later dug up by a mob and dragged through the streets, and American soldiers went on to capture his cork replacement in battle.

Which English mathematician first described his Analytical Engine, a forerunner of the computer, in 1837?

Charles Babbage never finished building any of his machines, and no general-purpose computer was completed until Konrad Zuse's Z3 in 1941.

Which American writer got himself deliberately court-martialed out of West Point in 1831 to pursue a life in poetry?

Edgar Allan Poe simply stopped turning up for formations, classes and church, was tried for neglect of duty, and left for New York to publish a volume of poems.

Which English word for a violent criminal comes from gangs of stranglers that British India pursued in the 1830s?

Thug comes from a Hindi word for a cheat or swindler, and the 1830s policing campaign against the gangs was led by the administrator William Henry Sleeman.

Which state declared federal tariffs null and void in 1832, prompting Andrew Jackson to threaten force?

South Carolina began military preparations to resist, until Congress passed both a Force Bill letting the president send troops and a compromise tariff the state could accept.

Whose looted shop near Mexico City gave the 1838 war between France and Mexico its popular nickname?

A pastry chef known only as Monsieur Remontel demanded 60,000 pesos for a shop valued at under 1,000, and his complaint was among those France sent warships to enforce.

Which future state lost the Toledo Strip to Ohio in a near-bloodless 1835 border war but gained the Upper Peninsula?

Michigan took the swap as the price of statehood. The war's one clash ended with shots fired into the air, and its only blood came from a penknife stabbing.

What name is given to the migration of Dutch-speaking settlers who left Britain's Cape Colony by wagon train from 1836?

The Great Trek's settlers called themselves voortrekkers, meaning pioneers or pathfinders, and headed inland to live beyond the reach of British colonial rule.

Which now-everyday job title was coined in 1833 by scholar William Whewell and first printed in a book review?

Scientist first appeared in Whewell's anonymous 1834 review of a book by Mary Somerville. He also came up with physicist, and suggested the words ion, anode and cathode.

Which long-sought Arctic prize did explorer James Clark Ross locate on Canada's Boothia Peninsula in 1831?

The North Magnetic Pole made Ross's name, and by the end of the decade he had been given command of his own expedition to chart the coast of Antarctica.

Which Russian poet, the author of Eugene Onegin, was fatally wounded in an 1837 duel with a French officer?

Alexander Pushkin faced his wife's alleged lover, who was also her sister's husband. He only lightly wounded the man in the arm, and died two days later.

Which name is given to the six Dorset farm labourers transported in 1834 for swearing a secret union oath?

The Tolpuddle Martyrs had formed a friendly society to fight wage cuts. Mass protests won them a pardon in 1836, and they came home from Australia.

What name was given to tiny electorates such as Old Sarum that Britain's 1832 Reform Act largely swept away?

Rotten boroughs kept their seats long after their people had left: deserted Old Sarum still elected two MPs, while booming Manchester had none of its own.

Which North African territory did France invade in 1830, after its ruler flicked a French consul with a fly whisk?

Algeria's ruler, Hussein Dey, had lost his temper while pressing France to settle a 28-year-old bill for army supplies, and the insult became the pretext for a blockade and then invasion.

Which German kingdom supplied newly independent Greece with its first king, the 17-year-old Prince Otto, in 1832?

Bavaria also sent the three court officials who governed Greece as his regents. Otto was deposed in 1862 and died in exile back in his homeland.

What name is given to the scandal in which Washington wives shunned Peggy Eaton, splitting Andrew Jackson's cabinet?

The Petticoat affair began when cabinet wives ostracised the wife of Secretary of War John Eaton, and it led in time to the resignation of all but one cabinet member.

Under which odd pen name, taken from his younger brother's nickname, did Charles Dickens publish his early sketches?

Boz was a nasal mangling of Moses, the pet name Dickens had given his brother Augustus, and the sketches collected under it in 1836 became his first book.

Which French composer premiered his Symphonie fantastique in 1830, inspired by his passion for an Irish actress?

Hector Berlioz had fallen for Harriet Smithson after watching her play Ophelia in Hamlet, and three years after the premiere she married him.