The Haughwout Store, a five-storey building in New York, instals the first Otis safety elevator

Brunel dies just before the maiden voyage of his gigantic final project, the luxury liner The Great Eastern

US entrepreneur Cyrus W. Field succeeds in laying a telegraph cable across the Atlantic, but it fails after only a month

Joseph Bazalgette is given the task of providing London with a desperately needed new system of sewers

German chemist Robert Wilhelm Bunsen and technician Peter Desdega perfect the non-luminous gas burner for use in the laboratory

It is discovered in the US that wood pulp can be used to make paper, and the Boston Weekly Journal is the first to use the new substance

The Metropolitan Railway, the world's first to go underground, opens in London using steam trains between Paddington and Farringdon Street

The invention of barbed wire is patented in the USA by Lucien Smith, designed to fence in cattle but also a protection for the wheat fields of the midwest plains

Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel patents dynamite, making the volatile explosive nitroglycerine safer by combining it with kieselguhr

The Union Pacific and the Central Pacific railroads meet at Promontory Summit in Utah, completing the first transcontinental line

Thousands of distinguished guests assemble at Port Said for the opening of the Suez Canal

The most famous of the three-masted tea-clippers, the Cutty Sark is launched at Dumbarton for service to and from China

Adelaide and Darwin are linked across the entire Australian continent by the Overland Telegraph Line

Italian US immigrant Antonio Meucci files a patent in New York for the invention of the telephone

William Crookes invents the radiometer, in which light causes four vanes to rotate in a bulb containing gas at low pressure

Andrew Carnegie's new steel mill near Pittsburgh prospers through automation, new technology and non-union labour

An agreement is signed between France and Britain to cooperate in the construction of a tunnel beneath the Channel

Alexander Graham Bell makes the first practical use of his telephone, summoning his assistant from another room with the words 'Mr Watson, come here. I want to see you.'

The US inventor Thomas Edison opens an experimental laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, calling it his 'invention factory'

Alexander Graham Bell demonstrates his new invention, the telephone, at the US Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia

The human voice is recorded for the first time when Thomas Edison recites 'Mary had a little lamb' into his newly patented phonograph

English physicist Joseph Swan demonstrates a practical electric light bulb, using an incandescent carbon filament in a vacuum

A congress in Paris, with Ferdinand de Lesseps as president, decides to construct a canal from coast to coast in Panama

English physicist Joseph Swan receives a patent for bromide paper, which becomes the standard material for printing photographs

Thomas Edison develops a long-lasting carbon filament light bulb (traditionally 40 hours) and is able to light his Menlo Park laboratory with 30 bulbs