1874
First Impressionist Exhibition
Rejected by the official Salon, a group of Paris painters - Monet, Renoir, Degas, Pissarro, Cezanne, Morisot - rented Nadar's photography studio on the Boulevard des Capucines and hung their own show. Critics hated it. A handful of collectors didn't. It was the first group exhibition of what would become modernism.
Barbed Wire Patented
Joseph Glidden, an Illinois farmer, patented a practical twisted-wire fence with steel barbs - "the devil's rope." It cost a fraction of wooden fencing and made it possible to close the open range. Within a decade cattlemen and farmers were shooting at each other over it, and the open plains of the American West were quietly being fenced in.
Third Anglo-Ashanti Ends
Wolseley entered Kumasi, looted the royal palace, burned it, and dictated the Treaty of Fomena: fifty thousand ounces of gold in indemnity and a road to the coast. The Ashanti asantehene kept his throne. A generation later the British would come back for it and exile him to the Seychelles.
Universal Postal Union
In Bern, twenty-two countries signed the General Postal Union treaty, standardizing rates and guaranteeing that a letter stamped in one country would be delivered in another. International mail became cheap, predictable, and staggeringly fast. The union still exists, under a slightly different name, as a United Nations agency. It was one of the first truly global institutions, predating the League of Nations by nearly half a century.