The Great Exhibition attracts six million visitors to London's new Crystal Palace in a period of only six months

Queen Victoria opens the new Houses of Parliament, designed by Charles Barry and Augustus Welby Pugin

Scottish physicist William Thomson formulates the second law of thermodynamics, concerning the transfer of heat within a closed system

London physician Peter Mark Roget publishes his dictionary of synonyms, the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases

The hypodermic syringe with a plunger is simultaneously developed in France and in Scotland

English physician John Snow proves that cholera is spread by infected water (from a pump in London's Broad Street)

Britain and France enter the war between Turkey and Russia, on the Turkish side

A London editor decides to send a reporter, William Howard Russell ('Russell of The Times'), to the Crimean front

Florence Nightingale, responding to reports of horrors in the Crimea, sets sail with a party of twenty-eight nurses

An inconclusive battle at Balaklava includes the Charge of the Light Brigade, with British cavalry recklessly led towards Russian guns

Within six weeks of the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimea, Tennyson publishes a poem finding heroism in the disaster

Jamaican-born nurse Mary Seacole sets up her own 'British Hotel' in the Crimea to provide food and nursing for soldiers in need

Roger Fenton travels out from England to the Crimea – the world's first war photographer

Lord Palmerston heads the coalition government in Britain after Lord Aberdeen loses a vote of confidence on his conduct of the Crimean War

David Livingstone, moving down the Zambezi, comes upon the Victoria Falls

English artist William Simpson sends sketches from the Crimea which achieve rapid circulation in Britain as tinted lithographs

The Christian Socialism of F.D. Maurice and others is mocked by its opponents as 'muscular Christianity'

The Christmas issue of the Illustrated London News includes chromolithographs, introducing the era of colour journalism

Tennyson publishes a long narrative poem, Maud, a section of which ('Come into the garden, Maud') becomes famous as a song

English author Anthony Trollope publishes The Warden, the first in his series of six Barsetshire novels

The treaty of Paris ends the Crimean War, limiting Russia's special powers in relation to Turkey

Victoria and Albert complete their fairy-tale castle at Balmoral, adding greatly to the nation's romantic view of Scotland

English chemist William Henry Perkin accidentally creates the first synthetic die, aniline purple (now known as mauve)

David Livingstone urges upon a Cambridge audience the high ideal of taking 'commerce and Christianity' into Africa

Russian exile Alexander Herzen, publishes in London a radical newspaper called Kolokol (The Bell)