Robert Schumann's first published composition is Papillons ('Butterflies'), twelve short dance pieces for piano

The paddle steamer Alburkah becomes the first ocean-going iron ship, completing the journey from England to the Niger

Robert Schumann composes the song cycle Frauenliebe und -Leben ('Woman's Love and Life')

Robert Schumann marries the pianist Clara Wieck, daughter of his first teacher

Britain sends four naval ships up the river Niger to make anti-slavery treaties with local kings

The young Friedrich Engels is sent from Germany to manage the family cotton-spinning factory in Manchester

The Flying Dutchman is the first of Richard Wagner's major operas to be staged, with its premiere in Dresden

Mendelssohn's overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream, amplified now with incidental music, is greeted as a masterpiece at a performance of the play in Potsdam

The Prussian army is the first to adopt a breech-loading rifle, the 'needle-gun' developed by gunsmith Johann Nikolaus von Dreyse

Delegates of the German states offer the imperial crown of a united Germany to Frederick William IV, the king of Prussia, who rejects it

Expelled from Germany after the year of revolutions, Marx makes his home in tolerant London

Samson Raphael Hirsch becomes rabbi of a synagogue in Frankfurt, where he develops the theme of neo-Orthodoxy

German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz invents the ophthalmoscope, making it possible for a doctor to examine the inside of a patient's eye

Richard Wagner writes an anti-semitic tract, Jewishness in Music

Robert Schumann throws himself into the Rhine, in an attempt to commit suicide, and spends the last two years of his life in an asylum

Marian Evans and G.H. Lewes flout British convential morality by travelling openly to Germany together

William Baikie, on an expedition up the Niger, protects his men from malaria by administering quinine

The first Neanderthal man to be discovered is unearthed by quarry workers in the Neander valley, near Düsseldorf

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

Lagos, on the coast of Nigeria, is annexed as a British colony when the royal family prove unable or unwilling to end the slave trade

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

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

Richard Wagner's opera Tristan and Isolde has its premiere in the Munich court theatre

Prussia invades its neighbouring German states and launches the Seven Weeks' War

The Prussians achieve the first blitzkrieg in their Seven Weeks' War defeat of the Austrians