1738
John Wesley's Aldersgate Experience
A failed missionary, recently returned from Georgia, attended a Moravian meeting on Aldersgate Street in London and felt his heart strangely warmed. From that small interior flame would grow the Methodist movement, the abolition of the British slave trade, and a global Protestant revival. Evangelicalism had found its organizing genius.
Daniel Bernoulli's Hydrodynamica
The second of the Basel Bernoullis published his treatise on fluid motion at Strasbourg, introducing the principle that bears his name: as a fluid's speed increases, its pressure falls. Three centuries later, every airplane wing, every carburetor, every curveball, and every medical IV drip still obeys him without asking. His own father, Johann, published a rival treatise backdated to steal priority, adding domestic bitterness to scientific triumph.
Excavation of Herculaneum Begins
Workers digging a well shaft near Naples broke through into the buried theater of Herculaneum, entombed since Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD. Tunneling through hardened volcanic rock, they pulled out bronze statues, frescoes, and carbonized scrolls. The ancient world was literally underfoot. Pompeii's excavation, a decade later, would follow this first astonishing breach.
Herculaneum Rediscovered
Workmen digging a well for the new Bourbon king of Naples struck marble, then bronze, then a Roman theater buried in volcanic mud. The city of Herculaneum, entombed by Vesuvius in 79 AD, began to emerge. The rediscovery of classical antiquity under one's feet would help reshape European taste from Pompeii frescoes to Napoleon's columns.
Treaty of Vienna Ends Polish Succession War
Stanislaw Leszczynski gave up the Polish throne but received the Duchy of Lorraine, which would revert to France on his death. Austria got Parma. Spain's Don Carlos got Naples and Sicily. The marriage market of European princes had rearranged half the continent. Eighteenth-century diplomacy at its most characteristic: polite, cynical, and thorough.