1838

Centuries: 18th century - 19th century - 20th century

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

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

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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

• 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.

Arts, Sciences, Literature and Philosophy

• 1838 in literature:

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 phsycologist (+ 1917)
• February 18 - Ernst Mach, Austrian physicist and philosopher
• May 10 - John Wilkes Booth, assassin of Abraham Lincoln
• May 20 - Felix Jules Méline, French statesman (+ 1925)
• October 25 - Georges Bizet, French composer
• Ferdinand von Zeppelin

Deaths:

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