Events and ideas: 1800-1900

* 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