1880s

Events and Trends

Technology

• Development and commercial production of electric lighting
• Development and commercial production of gasoline-powered automobile by Karl Benz, Gottlieb Daimler and Maybach
• First commercial production and sales of phonographs and phonograph recordings.
• First steel frame construction of "sky-scrapers"
• American Society of Mechanical Engineers founded 16 February 1880, New York, N.Y.
• Construction begins on the Panama Canal by the French. This is the first attempt to build the Canal.
• Lewis Ticehurst invented the drinking straw

Science

• Heinrich Hertz discovers the photoelectric effect
• Michelson-Morley experiment, which suggested that the speed of light is invariant
• James-Lange theory of emotion

Literature and Arts

• Friedrich Nietzsche publishes Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
• Mark Twain publishes Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
• Fyodor Dostoevsky writes The Brothers Karamazov.
• Robert Louis Stevenson publishes Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
• First edition of Oxford English Dictionary published.
• Arthur Conan Doyle publishes his first Sherlock Holmes tale.

Other

• Krakatoa, a volcano in Indonesia, erupts cataclysmically; 36,000 people are killed, the majority by the resulting tsunami
• About 300,000 Swedes emigrate to the United States
• A major step in Seventh-day Adventist\'s understanding of Righteousness by Faith occurred in 1888.

People

• The last surviving person born in the 1880s, María Capovilla, died on August 27, 2006.

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