1856
Bessemer Steel Process
Henry Bessemer announced a process for making steel cheaply by blowing air through molten pig iron. A ton of steel that had cost forty pounds could now be made for six. The Bessemer converter made steel rails, steel ships, and eventually steel-framed skyscrapers possible. The age of iron quietly became the age of steel.
Sumner Caned in Senate
After Charles Sumner's vicious anti-slavery speech insulted a South Carolina senator, Representative Preston Brooks walked onto the Senate floor and beat him unconscious with a gold-headed cane. Sumner took three years to recover; Brooks received new canes from admirers. Political violence had reached the chamber itself. The republic was coming apart.
Arrow Incident
Qing officials boarded a Chinese-owned lorcha flying, illegally, a British flag and arrested its crew. Britain declared war for the second time in fifteen years. The Second Opium War would bring French, American, and Russian appetite to the feast, and end with the sack of the Summer Palace and another round of unequal treaties.
Treaty of Paris
The Crimean War ended with a treaty in Paris that neutralized the Black Sea, confirmed Ottoman territorial integrity, and prohibited privateering. Russia was humiliated but intact, and turned its imperial ambitions east toward Central Asia. France had her prestige. The Concert of Europe, battered, kept playing. The war's true legacy was the nursing reforms of Florence Nightingale and the journalistic revolution of William Howard Russell's dispatches from the front.
Flaubert's Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert's novel about a provincial doctor's wife who poisons herself after squalid adulteries was serialized in the Revue de Paris and promptly prosecuted for obscenity. Flaubert was acquitted. The book - exact, pitiless, perfectly written - is usually cited as the first modern novel, and the one that taught fiction how to look at the middle class.