English chemist and physicist William Crookes isolates a new element, thallium

Prince Albert dies of typhoid, plunging Victoria into forty years of widowhood and deep mourning

Hungarian physician Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis publishes his discovery that deaths from puerperal fever can be dramatically reduced by a strict hand-washing routine

Mrs Henry Wood publishes her first novel, East Lynne, which becomes the basis of the most popular of all Victorian melodramas

Louis Pasteur uses heat to destroy the micro-organisms in liquid food, in the process that becomes known as pasteurization

Victor Hugo publishes his novel Les Misérables, an immensely complex story about the adventures of ex-convict Jean Valjean

Oxford mathematician Lewis Carroll tells 10-year-old Alice Liddell, on a boat trip, a story about her own adventures in Wonderland

Swiss humanitarian Henri Dunant publishes A Memory of Solferino, proposing an international agency to cope with the battlefield casualties he has witnessed

Otto von Bismarck declares Blut und Eisen (blood and iron) to be the only policy by which Prussia can become strong

Dostoevsky publishes Notes from the House of the Dead, a semi-autobiographical novel about life in a Siberian labour camp

British architect George Gilbert Scott designs a memorial for Prince Albert in Kensington Gardens

English author Charles Kingsley publishes an improving fantasy for young children, The Water-Babies

Henri Dunant and others establish the Red Cross in Geneva, as a direct result of the battlefield casualties Dunant has witnessed at Solferino in 1859

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

48-year-old Julia Margaret Cameron is given a camera by her daughter, in the Isle of Wight, and decides to concentrate on portraits

The Marylebone Cricket Club, arbiter of cricket, finally rules that overarm bowling is legitimate

Prussia and Austria combine forces to seize Schleswig-Holstein, but soon fall out

The island of Corfu is ceded by Britain to the kingdom of Greece

The First International is established in London, with Karl Marx soon emerging as the association's leader

Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell presents to the Royal Society his discoveries in the field of electromagnetics, now known collectively as Maxwell's Equations

The first Geneva Convention establishes standards for the treatment of the wounded in war

Pope Pius IX includes socialism, civil marriage and secular education among eighty modern errors listed in his Syllabus

Dostoevsky publishes Notes from Underground, the bitter memories of a retired civil servant that is often described as the first existentialist novel

Gregor Mendel reads a paper to the Natural History Society in Brno describing his discoveries in the field of genetics

English surgeon Joseph Lister introduces the era of antiseptic surgery, with the use of carbolic acid in the operating theatre