1859 is a common year starting on Saturday.

Events

January

• January 2 - Erastus Beadle publishes The Dime Book of Practical Etiquette .
• January 24 - Wallachia and Moldavia are united under Alexander John Cuza under the name Romania (see December 1 1918 for the final unification, Transylvania and other regions were still missing at this time).

February

• February 14 - Oregon is admitted as the 33rd U.S. state.
• February 16 - George Washington Gale Ferris Jr born February 16, 1859 Galesburg, Knox, IL

March

• March 26 - French amateur astronomer claims to have noticed a planet closer to the Sun than Mercury - later named Vulcan

April

• April 25 - Ground is broken for the Suez Canal
• April 26 - Austro-Sardinian War - Giuseppe Garibaldi's Hunters of the Alps confront Austrian forces led by Field Marshal-Lieutenant Carl Baron Urban at Varese.

May

• May 21 - The bell of Big Ben activated
• May 30 - Sardinians defeat the Austrian army at battle of Palestro

June

• June 4 - Battle of Magenta in Austro-Sardinian War - French and Sardinians defeat Austrians
• June 21/June 24 - Battle of Solférino (Battle of the Three Sovereigns ) Kingdom of Sardinia and Napoleon III of France armies defeat Franz Josef I of Austria in northern Italy. Battle also reputedly inspires Henri Dunant to found Red Cross

July

• July 6 - Queen Victoria signs Letters Patent making Queensland into a separate colony.
• July 11 - Austrian Emperor Franz Josef, faced with expensive war against Kingdom of Sardinia and revolution in Hungary, meets Napoleon III at Villafranca . Since the death of Metternich in 1859, he negotiates "personally". Hostilities ceases, partly due to Napoleon's fear of the Nationalism in Italy.

August

• August 27 - Edwin Drake drills the first oil well in the United States, near Titusville, Pennsylvania

September

• September 18 - Joshua A. Norton proclaims himself "Emperor of These United States"

October

• October 12 - Self-described "Emperor of the United States" Joshua A. Norton 'orders' the U.S. Congress to dissolve.
• October 16 - John Brown raids Harper's Ferry in Virginia, the signal for a general slave rebellion.
• October 18 - Federal Troops under Colonel Robert E. Lee overpower Brown at the Federal arsenal .

November

• November 1 - The current Cape Lookout , North Carolina, lighthouse was lighted for the first time. Its first-order Fresnel lens can be seen for nineteen miles.
• November 19 - Opera "Genevieve de Brabant ", composed by Jacques Offenbach, debuts at the Theatre de Bouffes Parisians in Paris.
• November 24 - British naturalist Charles Darwin publishes The Origin of Species, a book which argues that organisms gradually evolve through natural selection (it immediately sold out its initial print run).

December

• December 2 - Militant abolitionist leader John Brown is hanged for his October 16th raid on Harper's Ferry.

Unknown Dates

• Island of Timor is divided between Portugal and the Netherlands
• Trinity College in Cambridge UK bans Origin of Species
• Paraguay mediates a truce between Buenos Aires government and the Argentinean Confederation
• Farmer introduces 24 rabbits to Australia - they multiply in huge numbers
• Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies is succeeded by his 13-year-old son Francesco I of the Two Sicilies
• Charles Blondel crosses Niagara Falls on a tightrope
• Karl XV succeeds Oskar I as Swedish King
• Codex Sinaiticus found by Constantin von Tischendorf on his third visit to the monastery of Santa Katerina, on Mount Sinai
• Bernhard Riemann formulates the Riemann hypothesis, one of most important open problems of contemporary mathematics
• Solar flares first observed on the Sun by English astronomer Richard Carrington.
• Brisbane declared the capital of newly-made-separate colony Queensland, Australia
• University of Michigan Law School founded

Births

January-June

• January 11 - Lord George Nathaniel Curzon, British statesman, Viceroy of India (d. 1925)
• January 13 - Karl Bleibtreu , critic (d. 1928)
• January 27 - Wilhelm II of Germany, last German Emperor and Prussian king (d. 1941)
• February 1 - Victor Herbert, composer (d. 1924)
• February 3 - Hugo Junkers, industrialist and aircraft designer (d. 1935)
• February 6 - Elias Disney, American farmer and father of Walt Disney (d. 1941)
• February 14 - Henry Valentine Knaggs, English physician and author (d. 1954)
• February 18 - Sholom Aleichem, Ukrainian Yiddish writer (d. 1916)
• February 28 - Florian Cajori, Swiss historian of mathematics (d. 1930)
• March 2 - Sholom Aleichem, Yiddish novelist (d. 1916)
• March 8 - Kenneth Grahame, author (d. 1932)
• March 26 - Alfred Edward Housman, English poet (d. 1936)
• May 15 - Pierre Curie, French physicist and recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics 1903 (d. 1906)
• May 22 - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, British writer (d. 1930)

July-December

• July 22 - Emma Lazarus, American poet (d. 1887)
• August 4 - Knut Hamsun, Norwegian author, recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature (d. 1952)
• October 9 - Alfred Dreyfus, French military officer (d. 1935)
• October 18 - Henri Bergson, French philosopher and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature (d. 1941)
• October 21 - Francesc Macià, President of the Catalan Generalitat (d. 1933)
• December 15 - L. L. Zamenhof, Russo-Polish initiator of Esperanto (d. 1917)

Deaths

• April 16 - Alexis de Tocqueville, French historian (b. 1805)
• May 6 - Alexander von Humboldt, German naturalist and geographer (b. 1769)
• August 2 - Horace Mann, American educator and abolitionist (b. 1796)
• September 15 - Isambard Kingdom Brunel, British engineer (b. 1806)
• October 4 - Karl Baedeker, German author and publisher (b. 1801)
• October 22 - Louis Spohr, German violinist and composer (b. 1784)
• November 28 - Washington Irving, American author (b. 1783)
• December 2 - John Brown, American abolitionist (hanged) (b. 1800)
• December 8 - Thomas de Quincey, English writer (b. 1785)
• December 16 - Wilhelm Grimm, German writer (b. 1786)
• Abd ar-Rahman, sultan of Morocco