Street lighting by gas comes to London in 1807.

Acknowledgements

Lambert: by the English painter Benjamin Marshall (1768-1835), c1806 – original at Leicestershire Museums and Galleries, England. Considered to be in the public domain – http://commons.wikimedia.org. Rip Van Winkle: licensed under Creative Commons – http://kdoylewsps.wikispaces.com.

The US Military Academy is established at West Point in the state of New York in 1802. The French academy is founded by Napoleon at Fontainebleau the following year, but has been at St. Cyr in Brittany since 1946.

The French physician René Laennec (1781-1826) invents the stethoscope in 1817 and, after using it, publishes his findings

two years later.

In 1803 the Press are allowed into the House of Commons and a report of the debates is given in

Hansard, the work of the printer Thomas Hansard.

ThexBritish diplomat Lord Amherst, sent on a commercial mission to Peking in 1816, refuses to kowtow to the Emperor (bow low in

an act of submission) and the mission is a failure.

ThexPrado in Madrid is completed under Ferdinand VII in 1819 and is opened to the public as the Royal Museum of Painting. It becomes known as the National Museum of Spain in 1868.

In 1803 a large fireball is seen hurtling over the town of L’Aigle in Normandy, France.

There follows a violent explosion and thousands of fall to the ground.

One weighs eight pounds.

In 1803 the English amateur metereologist Luke Howard (1772-1864) makes the first successful classification of clouds, naming four distinctive groups: cumulus, stratus, cirrus and nimbus.

AND …. in 1806 Commander Francis Beaufort of the British Royal Navy (1774-1857) devises a scale to estimate the force of the wind.

Ranging from 0 to 17 (with hurricanes 12 and above),

the “Beaufort Scale” is adopted by the navy in 1838.

A carriage way across the Simplon Pass, ordered by Napoleon, is completed 1807.

The Englishman Daniel Lambert, famous for his size (52 stone) and a

waistline of 112 inches, dies in 1809. His coffin had to be mounted on wheels. His gravestone stated that in personal greatness he had no equal!

In 1810 the English eccentric Lady Hester Stanhope

(1776-1839) gives up her comfortable life and goes to live among the Druzes of western Syria (in today’s Lebanon).

The Krupp iron works, destined to become famous for its production of German armaments, is founded at Essen in 1811.

InxEngland, the prime minister, , is shot dead in the lobby of the House of

Commons by John Bellingham, a man with a grudge against the government - 11th May, 1812.

A short tale by the American story-teller Washington Irving (1783-1859) published in his Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. in 1819, introduces the henpecked husband known as Rip Van Winkle. Chased from home by his wife, he steals a drink and this puts him to sleep for twenty years. He sleeps through the American War of Independence and wakes up to find that his wife is dead and

and no one in his village recognises him.

Whilexstudying at Oxford in 1815, John Russell (born in Dartmouth, England, in 1795), acquires a terrier dog named Trump from a milkman. He crossed it with a Devon hunt terrier and created the Jack Russell breed. Later in life he became a parson so the breed is sometimes known as a Parson Russell. A founder member

of the Kennel Club in 1873, he died in 1883.

1814 Missionaries arrive in New Zealand to convert the natives.

Aprilx1815. The eruption of Tambora volcano on Sumbawa Island Indonesia, the greatest ever recorded, kills some 100,000 people, mainly by famine and disease. Ash fills the skies, and for many

parts of the world 1816 becomes “a year without summer”.

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