1851
Great Exhibition Opens
In Paxton's enormous Crystal Palace, Queen Victoria opened a show of manufactures from every corner of the world. Reapers from Illinois stood beside Indian shawls, Krupp cannon, and the first fax machine. For a few months Hyde Park became the world's showroom, and industrial Britain was the headline act. Six million visitors attended, and the profits funded the South Kensington museums that still stand today.
Moby-Dick Published
Herman Melville's enormous, biblical, cetological novel about a mad captain and a white whale sold barely three thousand copies in his lifetime. Reviewers called it unreadable. Seventy years later the critics rediscovered it, and it became, improbably, the great American novel - a book about obsession, the sea, and the impossibility of knowing anything.
Louis-Napoleon's Coup
On the anniversary of Austerlitz, Louis-Napoleon - president of the Second Republic - dissolved the Assembly and called out the army. A year later he crowned himself Napoleon III. Victor Hugo called him "Napoleon le Petit" and went into exile. The Second Empire lasted until 1870 and the army of a better Prussian general.
Singer Sewing Machine
Isaac Merritt Singer patented a practical foot-treadle sewing machine and, crucially, an installment-plan scheme to sell it to American households. Domestic needlework - which had consumed women's hours for centuries - became faster and lonelier. Within thirty years the Singer was among the most recognizable machines on earth. The installment plan was as revolutionary as the machine itself, pioneering the consumer credit that would reshape American buying habits.