1859
Origin of Species Published
Twenty years after his Beagle voyage, Charles Darwin finally published his careful, devastating argument that all life had evolved from common ancestors through natural selection. The first print run sold out in a day. Within a generation, no serious science could ignore him - and theology would never be the same.
First Oil Well
In Titusville, Pennsylvania, a former railroad conductor named Edwin Drake drilled sixty-nine feet through rock with a steam engine and struck oil. He had been trying to find an economical source of kerosene for lamps. He found, instead, the raw material for an entirely new civilization, and died poor, having forgotten to patent his method.
French Enter Indochina
French and Spanish forces seized Saigon, beginning France's thirty-year conquest of Indochina. The pretext was mistreatment of Catholic missionaries; the real motive was imperial competition and a port on the South China Sea. Within a generation, Cochinchina, Annam, Tonkin, and Cambodia would be painted the color of France on the atlas.
Battle of Solferino
On a long, murderous day in northern Italy, French and Piedmontese troops under Napoleon III beat the Austrians out of Lombardy. Forty thousand men fell. A passing Swiss businessman named Henry Dunant saw the dying lying untended on the field, went home, and wrote the book that would lead to the Red Cross and the Geneva Conventions.
John Brown's Raid
An abolitionist fanatic with a face like an Old Testament prophet led eighteen men in seizing the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, hoping to start a slave insurrection. Robert E. Lee, then a federal colonel, led the marines who captured him. Brown was hanged in December. Thoreau called him an angel. The South called him war.