1825
Stockton and Darlington Railway
George Stephenson's Locomotion No. 1 hauled a train of coal wagons and passengers - some riding atop the coal - twenty-five miles across County Durham. Crowds lined the track; a man on horseback raced the engine for a while. The world's first public steam railway was open, and the age of iron rails had arrived.
Java War Begins
Prince Diponegoro, a Javanese aristocrat steeped in Sufi mysticism, took to the hills with ten thousand followers against Dutch road-builders who had paved through his ancestors' graves. The guerrilla war he led would last five years, kill two hundred thousand Javanese, and end with Diponegoro's arrest at a peace conference.
Bolivian Independence
Upper Peru, liberated by Sucre's army after Ayacucho, held a congress in Chuquisaca and declared itself a separate republic rather than rejoin either Peru or Argentina. They named it Bolivia in honor of the Liberator, who accepted the honor graciously and wrote them a constitution that almost nobody followed. The new republic inherited the silver mines of Potosi, once the richest on earth, now largely exhausted.
Decembrist Uprising
On the day the new Tsar Nicholas I was to be crowned, three thousand guardsmen marched into Senate Square in St. Petersburg and refused to swear. They wanted a constitution. By nightfall the tsar had turned grapeshot on them. Five leaders would be hanged; the rest sent to Siberia, where their wives followed them.
Rainhill Trials
George Stephenson's locomotive Rocket ran away with the Rainhill Trials, the competition to choose engines for the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. Rocket averaged nearly thirty miles per hour. Spectators in crinolines fainted. The age of practical railways had arrived, and a new scale of speed was in the world. Within twenty years Britain would be laced with six thousand miles of track, shrinking distance and remaking commerce.