1866
Battle of Königgrätz
In a single day on a Bohemian plain, Prussian armies armed with breech-loading needle-guns shattered Austria and ended the German question in Berlin's favor. The Seven Weeks' War was over. Austria was ejected from German affairs; Bismarck had his North German Confederation; and Napoleon III was out of excuses to intervene.
Transatlantic Cable
After several fiascos, the steamship Great Eastern laid a working telegraph cable the whole way from Ireland to Newfoundland. Messages that had taken ten days by ship now took minutes. Queen Victoria and President Johnson exchanged polite telegrams. The oceans of the world had, for communication, been quietly and permanently shrunk.
Nobel's Dynamite
In a Swedish laboratory, Alfred Nobel discovered that nitroglycerin absorbed into kieselguhr could be handled, packed, and detonated safely. He patented it as dynamite. It would make him rich from mines and tunnels - and guilty enough, after a premature obituary called him a merchant of death, to leave his fortune to five annual prizes.
Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment
Serialized in a Russian literary magazine, Dostoevsky's feverish novel about a St. Petersburg student who murders a pawnbroker on a philosophical theory - and then cannot live with it - was a sensation. It was also an argument: that ideas had consequences, that utopian reasoning could kill, and that only suffering could save a soul.