The World in 1859 the year oil came out of the ground

Light cost money after dark. A cottage burned tallow candles that guttered and smelled, while a rich house burned whale oil, clean but dear. Towns were laying gas pipes, and a lamplighter walked the streets each evening with a pole over his shoulder. Then came kerosene lamps, burning oil squeezed from coal or pumped out of the ground, bright enough to read by and cheap enough for a kitchen table.

The year in 8 events

The first printing of On the Origin of Species was 1,250 copies, and the booksellers took every one on the first day. That is about one copy for every 20,000 people in Britain.

• ⛏️Apr 25 The first spadefuls are dug at Port Said for a canal across the Suez desert.
• ⚔️Jun 24 French and Sardinian troops beat Austria at Solferino. A Swiss visitor, Henri Dunant, is so shaken that he later starts the Red Cross.
• 🎪Jun 30 Charles Blondin walks a tightrope across the gorge below Niagara Falls.
• ⛵Jul 1 Japan opens Yokohama, Nagasaki and Hakodate to foreign traders.
• 🛢️Aug 27 Edwin Drake strikes oil about 69 feet down near Titusville in Pennsylvania.
• ☀️Sep 1 A huge solar storm sets telegraph wires sparking and lights the sky as far south as the Caribbean.
• 🔫Oct 16 John Brown and about twenty men seize the federal armoury at Harpers Ferry, hoping to arm a slave revolt.
• 📗Nov 24 Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species.

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