Staffordshire potter Josiah Wedgwood sets up a factory of his own in his home town of Burslem

Frederick the Great suffers his first major defeat, by a Russian and Austrian army at Kunersdorf

Laurence Sterne publishes the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy, beginning with the scene at the hero's conception

A succession of victories cause 1759 to be known in Britain as annus mirabilis, the wonderful year

German painter Johann Zoffany moves to England to find work as a painter of conversation pieces and portraits

On the death of his grandfather, George II, George III becomes king of Great Britain

Joseph Haydn enters the service of the Esterházy family, and stays with them for twenty-nine years

Scottish chemist and physicist Joseph Black observes the latent heat in melting ice

Austrian physician Joseph Leopold Auenbrugger describes his new diagnostic technique – percussion, or listening to a patient's chest and tapping

John Harrison's fourth chronometer is only five seconds out at the end of a test journey from England to Jamaica

Italian anatomist Giovanni Battista Morgagni publishes De Sedibus, the work that introduces scientific pathology

Johann Sebastian Bach's youngest son, Johann Christian, moves to London and becomes known as the English Bach

Two books in this year, Émile and Du Contrat Social, prompt orders for the arrest of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The intensely dramatic music of Gluck's Orfeo ed Eurydice introduces a much needed reform in the conventions of opera

Fingal, supposedly by the medieval Celtic poet Ossian, has a huge and fashionable success but is revealed to be a forgery by James Macpherson

6-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart plays for the Habsburg empress Maria Theresa

A treaty signed in Paris ends the Seven Years' War between Britain, France and Spain

The Treaty of Hubertusburg, between Prussia and Austria, increases the power of Prussia among the many separate states of Germany

English journalist John Wilkes is arrested for publishing seditious libel in issue no 45 of his weekly magazine The North Briton

James Boswell meets Samuel Johnson for the first time, in the London bookshop of Thomas Davies

7-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart begins a three-year concert tour of Europe

American artist Benjamin West settles in London, where he becomes famous for his large-scale history scenes

The Russian empress Catherine the Great secures the throne of Poland for one of her lovers, as Stanislaw II

James Watt ponders on the inefficiency of contemporary steam engines and invents the condenser

Catherine the Great founds the Hermitage as a court museum attached to the Winter Palace in St Petersburg