1879
Battle of Isandlwana
Twenty thousand Zulu warriors overwhelmed a British camp at Isandlwana in Natal, killing over 1,300 soldiers in one of the worst defeats the British Empire ever suffered at the hands of an indigenous army. The Zulus fought with assegais and discipline against Martini-Henry rifles - and won. The empire's confidence in technological supremacy cracked, briefly.
Edison's Lamp Lights Up
At Menlo Park, Edison's carbonized cotton filament burned for thirteen and a half hours in a vacuum bulb. A month later a public demonstration drew three thousand people. Within three years lower Manhattan had its first direct-current power station, and the night began, street by street, to be banished from the industrial city.
Dual Alliance
Bismarck, alarmed by cooling Russo-German relations after the Congress of Berlin, signed a defensive alliance with Austria-Hungary. It was meant to be secret and defensive; it became the anchor of German foreign policy and, in 1914, one of the cables that dragged Germany into a world war over a Balkan assassination.
Pacific War Begins
Chile declared war on Bolivia and Peru over nitrate deposits in the Atacama Desert. Over the next four years, Chilean forces would occupy Lima, take Peru's southern province of Tarapaca and Bolivia's entire coastline. Bolivia has been landlocked ever since and has never forgiven it. The War of the Pacific reshaped South American borders and gave Chile the nitrate wealth that financed a generation of national development.
Isandlwana
In northeastern Zululand, a Zulu impi of twenty thousand warriors enveloped an exposed British camp and wiped it out - over thirteen hundred redcoats dead by early afternoon. It was the worst defeat the British Army suffered against an African force. The same day, 150 men at Rorke's Drift held off four thousand Zulus overnight.
Battle of Ulundi
Six months after Isandlwana, the British marched on the Zulu royal kraal in a hollow square formation bristling with Martini-Henrys and Gatling guns. The warriors charged, were shot down in windrows, and scattered. Ulundi was burned; King Cetshwayo was captured weeks later. The Zulu kingdom as an independent power was finished.