1838

Decades: 1780s 1790s 1800s 1810s 1820s - 1830s - 1840s 1850s 1860s 1870s 1880s

Years: 1833 1834 1835 1836 1837 - 1838 - 1839 1840 1841 1842 1843

Events

• January 6 - Samuel Morse first publicly demonstrates the telegraph.
• January 8 - Alfred Vail demonstrates a telegraph using dots and dashes (this is the forerunner of Morse code)
• January 12 - Joseph Smith and one of his followers flee Ohio for Missouri
• June 12 - Territory of Iowa established.
• September 3 - Dressed in a sailor's uniform and carrying identification papers provided by a free Black seaman, future abolitionist Frederick Douglass boards a train in Maryland on his way to freedom from slavery.
• November 5 - Honduras separates from the Central American Federation, weakening the confederation.

• Proteins discovered by Jons Jacob Berzelius
• the Pastry War
• Start of First British-Afghan War
• Republic of Yucatan declares independence from Mexico
• Start of Central American Civil War
• Friedrich Bessel makes the first accurate measurement of distance to a star.
• Christian Hermann Weisse proposes the two-source hypothesis of gospel origins, which is held by a majority of biblical scholars to this day.

Year in topic

• 1838 in literature
• 1838 in music
• 1838 in science

Births

• January 4 - Charles Stratton ("General Tom Thumb"), circus performer, entertainer (+ 1883)
• January 6 - Max Bruch, composer (+ 1920)
• January 16 - Franz Brentano, German philosopher and psychologist (+ 1917)
• February 16 - Henry Adams, american historian
• February 18 - Ernst Mach, Austrian physicist and philosopher
• March 3 - George William Hill, astronomer (+ 1914)
• May 10 - John Wilkes Booth, assassin of Abraham Lincoln
• May 20 - Jules Méline, French statesman (+ 1925)
• October 25 - Georges Bizet, French composer
• Ferdinand von Zeppelin

Deaths

• May 17 - Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, French diplomat (* 1754)
• July 4 - Colonel José Antonio Vidaurre and his accomplices, authors of The Riot of Quillota, Chile were shot.

Heads of states

• Ottoman Empire - Mahmud II Sultan of the Ottoman Empire (1808-1839)
• Prussia - Frederick William III King of Prussia (1797-1840)

Referenced By