1855

Centuries: 18th century - 19th century - 20th century

Decades: 1800s 1810s 1820s 1830s 1840s - 1850s - 1860s 1870s 1880s 1890s 1900s

Years: 1850 1851 1852 1853 1854 - 1855 - 1856 1857 1858 1859 1860

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Events

• March 2 - accession of Russian Tsar Alexander II
• March 30 - "Border Ruffians" from Missouri invade Kansas and force election of a pro-slavery legislature.
• July 4 - In Brooklyn, New York, Walt Whitman's first edition of his book of poem's titled Leaves of Grass is published.
• November - David Livingstone discovers the Victoria Falls
• accession of Emperor Theodore II of Ethiopia[?]

• Gustave Courbet sets up Pavilion of Realism[?] in protest against "official art" at Paris International Exhibition
• Daily Telegraph newspaper founded in London, England

Arts, Sciences, Literature and Philosophy

• 1855 in literature:

Births

• January 5 - King Camp Gillette, inventor (+ 1932)
• January 21 - John Moses Browning, inventor (+ 1926)
• January 28 - William Seward Burroughs, inventor of the calculator (+ 1898)
• March 13 - Percival Lowell, astronomer (+ 1916)
• March 24 - Andrew Mellon[?], financier (+ 1937)
• July 30 - Wilhelm von Siemens[?], German industrialist

Deaths

• February 23 - Carl Friedrich Gauss, mathematician, astronomer and physicist
• March 31 - Charlotte Bronte, author
• May 23 - Charles Robert Malden explorer
• November 11 - Søren Kierkegaard, philosopher

Science

• Maxwell unifies electricity and magnetism into a single theory, classical electromagnetism, thereby showing that light is an electromagnetic wave.