* EVENTS
1837 Victoria becomes Queen of United Kingdom
1840 Penny post founded
1846 Potato blight leads to Irish Famine
1850 Alfred, Lord Tennyson succeeds William Wordsworth as poet laureate (right)
1854 Florence Nightingale reforms nursing practices and cuts war deaths
1861 American civil war begins
1869 Papal infallibility decreed at First Vatican Council
1870 Education act establishes state schools in England and Wales
1876 Victoria becomes Empress of India
1880 Thomas Edison invents the light bulb
1884 Friedrich Nietzsche declares God is dead in Thus Spake Zarathustra
1895 Lumiere brothers show first moving pictures
1896 First modern Olympics held in Athens
1899 Boer war begins
* IDEAS
1807 German idealist philosopher GWF Hegel publishes Phenomenology of Mind
1830 Botanist Robert Brown discovers nucleus is the basis of cells
1834 Mathematician Charles Babbage invents principle of the computer (left)
1837 Charles Dickens chronicles social abuses in Oliver Twist
1848 Karl Marx finalises Communist Manifesto
1859 Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection
1861 Louis Pasteur's bacteria experiments make pasteurisation possible
1869 Developer of eugenics Francis Galton publishes Hereditary Genius
1876 Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone
1896 X-rays discovered by Willhelm Rontgen (above)
1899 Film-maker Sir Alfred Hitchcock is born