1731
Franklin Founds the Library Company
In Philadelphia, Franklin persuaded fifty members of his Junto to pool shillings and order books from London. The Library Company became the first subscription library in the colonies. Knowledge was becoming a civic asset, circulated and returned, not hoarded. American reading habits had taken a shape they would not lose.
Treaty of Vienna
Britain, Austria, and the Dutch Republic agreed to accept the Pragmatic Sanction and Maria Theresa's eventual inheritance in exchange for the dissolution of Charles VI's Ostend East India Company. Each side thought it had got the better bargain. Nine years later, every one of the signatories would be at war.
Treaty of Ahmet Pasha
The Ottomans signed a peace with Nader Shah's resurgent Persia, yielding back some of the territory taken during Safavid collapse. The Sublime Porte recognized that its eastern neighbor was reviving. Meanwhile in Istanbul the first Turkish-language printing press, run by Ibrahim Muteferrika, had begun producing books. Reform was happening in two directions at once.
Sextant Independently Invented
Thomas Godfrey, a Philadelphia glazier, and John Hadley, a London gentleman, independently built reflecting instruments that could measure the angle between the sun and the horizon from a rolling deck. Priority quarrels followed. The sea, indifferent to credit, gained the tool that would make longitude findable and ocean crossings calculable.