English-born US photographer Eadweard Muybridge publishes closely linked photographs revealing how a horse goes through its paces

Stanley agrees to work for Leopold II in opening up the Congo river to commerce

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

21-year-old Joseph Conrad, a Polish subject, goes to sea with the British merchant navy

The ancient Irish game of hurling is formalized by the newly founded Irish Hurling Union

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

An entire train, full of passengers, falls into the river Tay in Scotland when a bridge collapses in a winter gale

Henry James's story Daisy Miller, about an American girl abroad, brings him a new readership

For the second time Gladstone replaces Disraeli as Britain's prime minister, following a Liberal election victory over the Conservatives

The Tynwald in the Isle of Man becomes the first parliament to give women the vote

London's new Savoy Theatre is the first public building in the world to be lit throughout by electricity

The Aesthetic Movement and 'art for art's sake', attitudes personified above all by Whistler and Wilde, are widely mocked and satirized in Britain

Eadweard Muybridge projects slow-motion images of a trotting horse as a demonstration at London's Royal Institution

Irish chief secretary Lord Frederick Cavendish and a colleague are assassinated in Phoenix Park in Dublin

When Australia win the second Test match, in London, the Sporting Times declares that they will take home with them 'the ashes of English cricket'

English polymath Francis Galton publishes Inquiries in Human Faculty, developing the theme of eugenics and coining the term

Robert Louis Stevenson's adventure story, Treasure Island, features Long John Silver and Ben Gunn

The British empire is first described as a 'Commonwealth of Nations', by Lord Rosebery speaking in Australia

English socialists, including Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb, found the Fabian Society as part of a long-term political strategy

A new Reform Act in Britain further reduces the financial threshold for voters in Britain, in effect extending the franchise to male workers in rural areas

Greenwich becomes accepted internationally as the prime meridian, or 0° longitude

The newly founded Fabian Society publishes Manifesto by George Bernard Shaw

The Gaelic Athletic Association is founded in Ireland to promote indigenous games such as hurling

Oxford University Press publishes the A volume of its New English Dictionary, which will take 37 years to reach Z

Explorer and orientalist Richard Burton begins publication of his multi-volume translation from the Arabic of The Arabian Nights