Media History Project
mediahst@umn.edu

1870-1879

  • 1870: More than 5,000 newspapers are published in the U.S.
  • 1870s: States pass laws to protect scenery from ad sign painters.
  • 1870: Stock ticker comes to Wall Street.
  • 1870: Two from Jules Verne: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Mysterious Island.
  • 1870: Léo Delibes’ ballet, Coppélia.
  • 1870: William Jackson’s Yellowstone photographs aid efforts to preserve U.S. heritage.
  • 1870: Once and future prime minister Benjamin Disraeli publishes last novel, Lothair.
  • 1870: Dickens does not live to complete The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
  • 1870: Bret Harte writes Western stories, like “The Luck of Roaring Camp.”
  • 1870: Wood pulp is widely used to make paper.
  • 1870: Pigeons carry microphotographed secret messages in Franco-Prussian War.
  • 1870: Telegraph across Europe and Asia connects London with Calcutta, 11,000 km.
  • 1870: French postal authorities use hot air balloons during siege of Paris.
  • 1871: Artist James Whistler, The Artist’s Mother.
  • 1871: Japan gets a newspaper, Yokohama Mainichi Shimbun (Daily Newspaper).
  • 1871: Verdi’s opera Aida premieres in Cairo.
  • 1871: Arguably the toughest newspaper interview ever, Stanley meets Livingston.
  • 1871: Wagner’s opera, Siegfried.
  • 1871: British Dr. Richard Maddox proposes gelatin from bones as photo emulsion.
  • 1871: Darwin’s scholarly Descent of Man raises indignation about monkey ancestors.
  • 1871: Eliot begins serialization of her Middlemarch.
  • 1871: In Boston, the Globe publishes.
  • 1871: Carroll (mathematician Charles Dodgson) writes Through the Looking Glass.
  • 1871: Jules Verne’s novel, Around the World in 80 Days.
  • 1871: Louisa May Alcott’s novel, Little Men.
  • 1871: P.T. Barnum opens a circus, calls it “The Greatest Show on Earth.”
  • 1872: Dentist Mahlon Loomis gets patent for wireless invention, but was it radio?
  • 1872: James McNeill Whistler paints a portrait of his mother.
  • 1872: Simultaneous transmission from both ends of a telegraph wire.
  • 1872: Under Meiji Restoration, Japan embarks on drive to expand book publishing.
  • 1872: Mark Twain, Roughing It.
  • 1872: George Smith deciphers cuneiform tablets containing the epic of Gilgamesh.
  • 1872: Susan B. Anthony casts a ballot and is arrested for it.
  • 1872: The Montgomery Ward mail order catalog.
  • 1872: Erewhon (anagram of “Nowhere”), Samuel Butler’s satire of English life.
  • 1872: Bruckner’s Second Symphony.
  • 1873: U.S. postcard debuts; costs one penny.
  • 1873: Illustrated daily newspaper appears in New York.
  • 1873: Report about selenium, resistance, and light is a step toward television.
  • 1873: British children are required to go to school.
  • 1873: Typewriters get the QWERTY pseudo-scientific keyboard.
  • 1873: Lord Kelvin calculates the tides with a machine.
  • 1873: In Ireland, May uses selenium to send a signal through the Atlantic cable.
  • 1873: Remington starts manufacturing Christopher Sholes’ typewriter.
  • 1873: Anthony Comstock gets government O.K. to inspect mails for vice.
  • 1873: French astronomer Pierre Janssen designs a photographic “revolver.”
  • 1874: Quadriplex telegraph system allows four messages to travel over single wire.
  • 1874: Baudot telegraph code prints using five channels of paper tape.
  • 1874: Pictures from an Exhibition by Moussorgsky.
  • 1874: A Civil War Union Army bugle tune is officially named “Taps.”
  • 1874: Verdi’s Requiem is performed.
  • 1874: After much rejection, Modest Mussorgsky’s opera, Boris Godunov, performed.
  • 1874: The peak of Viennese operetta: Johann Strauss II’s, Die Fledermaus.
  • 1874: Wagner’s Götterdämmerung completes the Ring of the Nibelungen.
  • 1874: Second Symphony wins Peter Tchaikovsky public acclaim.
  • 1874: In France, the first show of the impressionist painters.
  • 1874: Thomas Hardy’s novel, Far from the Madding Crowd, appears serially.
  • 1875: Universal Postal Union formed in Berne, Switzerland.
  • 1875: In England, William Crookes builds a forerunner to the cathode ray tube.
  • 1875: In France, the praxinoscope, an optical toy, a step toward movies.
  • 1875: Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health, cornerstone of Christian Science.
  • 1875: Edison invents the mimeograph while trying to improve telegraph tape.
  • 1875: French composer Georges Bizet’s opera, Carmen, has unsuccessful opening.
  • 1875: Gilbert & Sullivan’s Trial by Jury.
  • 1875: U.S. has 257 public libraries.
  • 1875: Cheap book reprints published in series called “libraries.”
  • 1875: Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Third Symphony (Polish), First Piano Concerto.
  • 1875: In the U.S., George Carey designs a selenium mosaic to transmit a picture.
  • 1876: “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you.” Bell invents the telephone.
  • 1876: Elisha Gray files phone patent application the same day Bell does.
  • 1876: National Baseball League is founded.
  • 1876: Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer considers fence painting.
  • 1876: French poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s “The Afternoon of a Faun” will inspire Debussy.
  • 1876: Feminist Annie Besant’s The Legalisation of Female Slavery in England.
  • 1876: Amilcare Ponchielli’s opera, La Gioconda.
  • 1876: Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.
  • 1876: Melvil Dewey develops a library book classification decimal system.
  • 1876: Edgar Degas paints The Glass of Absinthe.
  • 1876: The player piano.
  • 1876: Herbert Spencer applies evolution to society, coins “the survival of the fittest.”
  • 1876: In Norway, Edvard Grieg composes the Peer Gynt Suite.
  • 1876: Tchaikovsky’s Marche Slav.
  • 1876: Johannes Brahms’ First Symphony. He labored over it for 15 years.
  • 1877: Brahms’ Second Symphony.
  • 1877: Edwin Holmes builds a telephone switchboard.
  • 1877: Eadweard Muybridge photographs horse in motion, forerunner of movies.
  • 1877: Bell “photophone” uses light to transmit audio, anticipates fiber optics.
  • 1877: A weather map is printed in an Australian newspaper.
  • 1877: In France, Charles Cros invents the phonograph.
  • 1877: In America, Edison also invents the phonograph.
  • 1877: French composer Camille Saint-Saëns’ opera, Samson and Delilah.
  • 1877: Impressionist Camille Pissarro, Red Roofs.
  • 1877: The Fixation of Belief sets Charles Peirce as a founder of American pragmatism.
  • 1877: Robert Louis Stevenson writes his first stories; many written from a sick bed.
  • 1877: In Japan, ten years after the first magazine is published, there are 200.
  • 1877: Tchaikovsky’s ballet, Swan Lake.
  • 1877: The Washington Post starts printing.
  • 1877: Emile Berliner invents the microphone. So does David Hughes.
  • 1877: Anna Sewell’s much loved novel, Black Beauty: The Autobiography of a Horse.
  • 1878: Karl Klic produces a commercially successful means of photogravure printing.
  • 1878: Portuguese professor Adriano de Paiva writes proposal for a video system.
  • 1878: Edison invents a better microphone.
  • 1878: Thomas Hardy’s novel, The Return of the Native.
  • 1878: Gilbert & Sullivan’s operetta, HMS Pinafore.
  • 1878: Telephone directories are issued.
  • 1878: In New Haven, Connecticut, a telephone central exchange.
  • 1878: A photograph is reproduced using halftone method.
  • 1878: Full page newspaper ads.
  • 1878: A Cincinnati stenographer’s school teaches typing with ten fingers, not two.
  • 1878: Joseph Pulitzer begins empire with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
  • 1878: Emma Nutt becomes the first woman hired as a telephone operator.
  • 1878: Punch cartoon imagines “telephonoscope”: global, interactive, flat-panel HDTV.
  • 1878: Founding of Johns Hopkins University Press.
  • 1878: Dry-plate photography replaces messy, inconvenient wet plates.
  • 1878: Thomas Edison gets a patent for a phonograph talking doll.
  • 1878: First of 300 patents issued for acoustic “string” telephones.
  • 1878: Quaker Oats, the first mass-marketed breakfast food.
  • 1879: Starting in Lowell, Massachusetts, telephone numbers replace names.
  • 1879: Benday process aids newspaper production of maps, drawings.
  • 1879: Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov.
  • 1879: George Eastman builds a machine to mass produce photographic dry-plate film.
  • 1879: Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance.
  • 1879: Henry James, Daisy Miller.
  • 1879: National Bell Telephone Company is formed.
  • 1879: Henry George, Progress and Poverty, calls for a single tax on land.
  • 1879: Tchaikovsky’s opera, Eugene Onegin, based on Pushkin.
  • 1879: An electric telescope is designed to capture moving images.
  • 1879: Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House shocks audiences when Nora leaves her husband.
  • 1879: Addition to communication and culture: the electric light bulb.
  • 1879: Postal law separates periodical rates from advertising matter.