Africa - Cape Colony passes under British control

UK - Louis Nicolas Vauquelin and Pierre Jean Robiquet isolated the first amino acid, asparagine' from asparagus.

UK - Sir Humphry Davy discovers sodium, magnesium, potassium, many other metals, and chlorine

UK - Battle of Trafalgar, Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson trounces French and Spanish fleets for Britain, is mortally wounded; John Wilkinson expires, buried in iron coffin

UK - Ludolf Christian Treviranus said that spermatozoa were analogous to pollen

France - Napoleon crowned Emperor of France

UK - John Dalton establishes atomic theory

UK - Richard Trevithick, an English mining engineer, developed the first steam-powered locomotive.

UK - Freidrich Winzer (Winsor) was the first person to patent gas lighting.

UK - Beginning of the Napoleonic Wars. Britain declares war on France. Parliament passes the General Enclosure Act, simplifying the process of enclosing common land

UK - Parliament passes the General Enclosure Act, simplifying the process of enclosing common land

UK - Threat of French invasion causes flood of volunteers, army of half a million fielded during period to 1805

UK - Peace with France is established. Peel introduces the first factory legislation

UK - Ineffective Treaty of Amiens signed with French

UK - The first British Census is undertaken

UK - Population of England and Wales now 10 million, Great Britain estimated at 11 million, biggest increases in North and West Midlands, London now 1 million plus, Manchester 137,201, Glasgow and Edinburgh 100,000 plus, England has 8 towns larger than 50,000, 6 of them in the North; Lord Dundas travels on Scottish canal in small steamboat - beginning of steamboat travel

UK - Tripolitan War 1801-1805. Barbary Wars: also fought in 1815. United States vs Morocco, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli 1801-1805.

USA - Thomas Jefferson president of the USA 1801-1809.

UK - Act of Union with Ireland unites Parliaments of England and Ireland

UK - Battle of Copenhagen, Napoleon's Danish fleet decimated

Ireland - After Catholic rebellion in Ireland Pitt proposes one Parliament for both countries, but King George refuses, Pitt resigns; Sir Joseph Banks introduces voltaic battery

UK - Sir Joseph Banks introduces voltaic battery

UK - Robert Owen buys mills at New Lanark, turns into successful humane model

France - Frenchman J.M. Jacquard invents the Jacquard Loom.

UK - Over 20 miles of railway tracks laid

UK - Over a ten year period, 30 acres of new docks are built in London, which becomes the greatest port in the world

UK - Over the coming century, approx. 1 million people emigrate from Britain. 50,000 are prisoners transported to Maryland or Botany Bay

USA - William Young in Philadelphia offers shoes made for the left and the right foot.

Great Britain - Trade Unions are suppressed. Napoleon is appointed First Consul in France

France - Napoleon is appointed First Consul in France

Great Britain - Three-year commercial boom in Britain begins

France - Napoleon becomes President of France; amendments to Treason and Sedition Act

Great Britain - Alessandro Volta invents the battery.

Great Britain - Louis Robert invents the Fourdrinier Machine for sheet paper making.

Great Britain - Deaths among women 1 in 913, children 1 in 115. For the first time London birth rate passes death rate, continues until introduction of water closet deposits effluence in Thames (source of potable water) and typhoid returns

Great Britain - Eliza Acton Born. She wrote the first cookbook for the housewife, rather than for the professional chef.

France - Joseph-Louis Proust, a French chemist, extracted sugar from grapes, and proved it identical to sugar extracted from honey.

Great Britain - Thomas Robert Malthus, in his Essay on the Principle of Population, contended that population increses by a geometric ratio whereas the means of subsistence increase by an arithmetic ratio.

Great Britain - Introduction of An income tax of ten percent on incomes over £200.

Egypt - Battle of the Nile, Napoleon's Mediterranean fleet smashed

Ireland - Catholic uprising

Great Britain - Wordsworth and Coleridge publish Lyrical Ballads

Great Britain - Franco-American Naval War: United States vs France 1798-1800.

Great Britain - Aloys Senefelder invents lithography.

Great Britain - The first soft drink id invented.

Europe - All Europe makes peace with France save Britain, sea battle off Cape St. Vincent (off Spanish coast), Jervis and Nelson (then Captain) utterly defeat big French and Spanish fleet

Great Britain - Royal Navy sailors at Spithead and the Nore mutiny over deplorable conditions

USA - John Adams president of the USA 1797-1801.

Great Britain - A British inventor, Henry Maudslay invents the first metal or precision lathe.

Great Britain - Wittemore patents a carding machine.

Great Britain - John Hetherington in London develops the top hat.

Great Britain - Major Dubied purchased the formula for an 'absinthe elixir' and together with his son, Henri-Louis Pernod sets up an absinthe factory in Switzerland.

Great Britain - Edward Jenner investigated the folk tale that milk maids were immune to small pox, the virus variola major, and in a brief series of experiments confirmed that exposure to cow pox, the virus vaccinia, rendered immunity

Italy - General Napoleon Bonaparte appears on scene, attacks Austrian armies

Ceylon - British conquer Ceylon

Great Britain - The 'Speenhamland' system of outdoor relief is adopted, making wages up to equal the cost of subsistence

Ireland - Near-civil war between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland, erupts in 1798, takes nearly a year to suppress

Great Britain - New Treason and Sedition Act passed

Great Britain - Francois Appert invents the preserving jar for food.

Great Britain - Howe defeats French fleet at Ushant

Great Britain - Erasmus Darwin, Charles' grandfather, proposed that 'warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament...possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering those improvements by generation to its posterity.'

Great Britain - Metric system introduced in France

Great Britain - More lower-class radicalism, Habeas Corpus suspended again, instigators charged with treason, in Scotland found guilty and transported

Great Britain - Welshman Philip Vaughan invents ball bearings.

Great Britain - Total of 40,000 British troops die in West Indies in war with France over two year period

Great Britain - France declares war on Britain

Great Britain - Economic depression

Great Britain - Speculative 'Canal Bubble' bursts

Great Britain - Board of Agriculture formed to popularise new methods and machinery

Great Britain - Britain becomes foremost world trader during period to 1815

Great Britain - Eli Whitney invents the cotton gin which efficiently separates cotton fibers from the seeds, allowing one person to do a job once done by 50 people. This profoundly changes the economics of raising cotton, revitalizing slavery in the American South.

Italy - Volta discovered he could arrange metals in a series in such a way that chemical energy is converted into electrical energy; that is, two dissimilar metals are submerged in an electrolyte and connected by an circuit and thereby exchange electrons. By 1800, he had invented the so-called voltaic cell, a pile of such metals 'consisting of pairs of silver and zinc disks separated by pieces of moist cardboard'

Great Britain - Coal gas is used for lighting for the first time. Mary Wollstonecraft publishes her Vindication of the Rights of Women

Great Britain - Cartwright invents steam-powered weaving loom

Great Britain - The first ambulance.

Great Britain - The Celerifere, an early version of the bicycle, was built by Comte Mede de Sivrac. It was basically a scooter with a high seat

Great Britain - James Boswell publishes his Life of Johnson and Thomas Paine, his Rights of Man

Great Britain - John Barber invents the gas turbine.

Great Britain - Edmund Burke publishes his Reflections on the Revolution in France

Great Britain - Lower-class radicalism increases, Habeas Corpus Act temporarily suspended

USA - The United States issued its first patent to William Pollard of Philadelphia for a machine that roves and spins cotton.

USA - Samuel Slater opens the first U.S. cotton mill in Rhode Island. Thomas Saint in England invents the first cloth-stitching machine.

Great Britain - Marie, Vicomte de Botherel, born. He installed kitchens on buses in Paris suburbs in 1839, the first restaurant cars.

Great Britain - Marie Harel is said to have developed Camembert cheese in Normandy.

USA - George Washington first president of the United States 1789-1797.

France - French Revolution, Louis XVI, many aristocrats and others executed, France declares war on European monarchies

France - The guillotine is invented.

Great Britain - The French Revolution sounded the death knoll toward elaborate and affected dress and hairdos. The powdered wig and towering women's hair styles passed from fashion. Simpler, more practical clothes emerged. Boys wore the skeleton suit, often with a comfortable open collar, and by the end of the century with plebian long trousers.

USA - Thomas Jefferson brought a pasta making machine back with him when he returned to America after serving as ambassador to France.

Switzerland - Dr. Pierre Ordinaire creates an absinthe elixir

Great Britain - Birth of Lord Byron (died 1824)

Great Britain - Time to travel from London to Manchester reduced from 4.5 days to 28 hours

Windsor, Great Britain - In Windsor Great Park, King George III alights from carriage and addresses oak tree as King of Prussia, but eventually recovers from this attack of dementia; first colonies in Australia, first iron boat launched

Great Britain - The Eden commercial treaty with France is drawn up

Pennsylvania, USA - John Fitch invents a steamboat.

Great Britain - William Pitt's motion for Parliamentary Reform is defeated

Great Britain - Charles-Augustin de Coulomb invents the torsion balance.

Great Britain - Blanchard invents a working parachute.

Great Britain - Edmund Cartwright invents the power loom.

France - Claude Berthollet invents chemical bleaching.

Scotland - Glasgow triples in size, has 54 cotton mills in full work during period to 1818

USA - Oliver Evans of Newport, Delaware invented the automatic flour-milling machinery that revolutionized the industry.

Great Britain - First edition of The Times newspaper

Great Britain - Introduction of mail coach

Great Britain - Andrew Meikle invents the threshing machine.

Great Britain - Joseph Bramah invents the safety lock.

USA - Benjamin Franklin develops bifocal eyeglasses.

Great Britain - William Bentinck, Duke of Portland Prime minister (Whig)

Great Britain - Joseph Michel and Jacques Étienne Montgolfier invented the first practical hot air balloon.

Great Britain - Fox-North coalition established

Great Britain - Britain recognises American independence at the Treaty of Paris.

Ireland - Act of Renunciation gives Ireland rights in legislation and judication

Great Britain - William Pitt the Younger becomes Prime Minister, simplifies taxes and customs duties, tries to pacify Ireland, abolish slave-trading and laws preventing Catholics holding office; returns Florida and Minorca to Spain and Senegal to France

Great Britain - Englishman Henry Cort invents the Rolling Mill for steel production.

Great Britain - Sébastien Lenormand demonstrates the first parachute.

Great Britain - Benjamin Hanks patents the self-winding clock.

Great Britain - Lord North's government collapses

Ireland - Ireland obtains short-lived parliament

USA - The Americans obtain a great victory of British troops at the Siege of Yorktown

Great Britain - Frederick William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus by its movement, although at the time he supposed it to be a comet

Great Britain - Matthew Boulton and James Watt produce an improved steam engine with rotary motion achieving significant impact - it means that manufacturers are no longer restricted to site with natural power (i.e., water, wood for charcoal)

Great Britain - The Gordon Riots develop from a procession to petition parliament against the Catholic Relief Act (1778)

Southampton, England - Gervinus invents the circular saw.

Great Britain - Country banks rise in number from less than 300 to over 700 in period to 1815

Great Britain - The Bowler Hat appears in England.

Great Britain - The rise of Wyvill's Christopher Wyvill's radical Yorkshire Association Movement

Great Britain - James Cook explores Hawaiian Islands. He fails to locate Northwest Passage from Alaskan side and is killed in Hawaii the following year

Europe - Naval war with France, Spain and Holland ally with France during period to 1783

Great Britain - Samuel Crompton in England invents the spinning mule capable of spinning cloth in great quantity.

USA - The American Congress passes their Declaration of Independence from Britain.

England - Common Sense published by Tom Paine

Great Britain - Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, advanced the idea that businesses survive through successful trading in pursuit of their self-interest, and that the resulting equilibrium was not by design.

Great Britain - Wilkes introduces bill for universal male suffrage

Great Britain - David Bushnell invents a submarine.

Great Britain - Edward Gibbon authors Decline and Fall of Roman Empire in period to 1788

British North America - American War of Independence begins when colonists fight British troops at Lexington.

Great Britain - Alexander Cummings invents the flush toilet.

Great Britain - Jacques Perrier invents a steamship.

Great Britain - Franz Anton Mesmer began the psychotherapeutic practice of hypnotism, which he called 'animal magnetism' and conceived it to be an actual fluid. Apparently he had some success with psychosomatic illnesses. Part of his technique seems to have been used earlier by exorcists.

Great Britain - Parliament passes the Coercive Acts in retaliation for the Boston Tea Party

Great Britain - Joseph Priestley isolates oxygen

Great Britain - Georges-Louis Le Sage patents the electric telegraph.

British North America - Colonists protest at the East India Company's monopoly over tea exports to the colonies, at the so-called Boston Tea Party

Coalbrookedale, England - The world's first Cast Iron bridge is constructed over the River Severn

Great Britain - Benjamin Delessert was born. French industrialist who developed the first successful process to extract sugar from sugar beets.

Great Britain - Lord Mansfield makes slavery illegal

Great Britain - James Burgh publishes Political Disquisitions, advocates universal male suffrage

Great Britain - The Encyclopedia Britannica is first published

Great Britain - Richard Arkwright builds the first spinning mill

Great Britain - Lord North begins service as Prime Minister. The Falkland Island Crisis occurs. Edmund Burke publishes his Thoughts on the Present Discontents

Australia - James Cook documents the location of Australia

Great Britain - Gum pencil eraser invented

Great Britain - Early skeleton suits begin to appear - the first specialized children's clothing. The earliest were still worn with knee breeches, but by the 1780s they were warn with long trousers.