Years: 1835 1836 1837 - 1838 - 1839 1840 1841

Decades: 1800s 1810s 1820s - 1830s - 1840s 1850s 1860s

Centuries: 18th century - 19th century - 20th century 1838 in art 1838 in literature 1838 in rail transport 1838 in science 1838 in music 1838 in sports List of state leaders in 1838 List of religious leaders in 1838

Events

• January 6 - Samuel Morse first publicly demonstrates the telegraph.
• January 8 - Alfred Vail demonstrates a telegraph using dots and dashes (this is the forerunner of Morse code)
• January 12 - Joseph Smith, Jr. and Sidney Rigdon flee Ohio for Missouri
• March 7 – Jenny Lind, the "Swedish Nightingale" debuts at the Stockholm Opera
• April 30 - Nicaragua declares independence from the Central American Federation
• June 12 - Territory of Iowa established
• September 3 - Dressed in a sailor's uniform and carrying identification papers provided by a free Black seaman, future abolitionist Frederick Douglass boards a train in Maryland on his way to freedom from slavery
• October 16 - Date in the Bill Stump's Stone
• November 3 The Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce is founded. This paper was later renamed to The Times of India in 1861
• November 5 - Honduras separates from the Central American Federation, weakening the confederation.
• Proteins discovered by Jons Jacob Berzelius
• the Pastry War
• Start of First British-Afghan War
• Republic of Yucatan declares independence from Mexico
• Start of Central American Civil War
• Friedrich Bessel makes the first accurate measurement of distance to a star.
• Christian Hermann Weisse proposes the two-source hypothesis of gospel origins, which is held by a majority of biblical scholars to this day.
• Regular Atlantic steamship service begins
• Governor of Missouri order all the Mormons to leave the state
• Augustus Siebe invents a closed diving suit with a helmet
• Louis Daguerre develops Daguerreotype

Births

• January 4 - Charles Stratton ("General Tom Thumb"), circus performer, entertainer (+ 1883)
• January 6 - Max Bruch, composer (+ 1920)
• January 16 - Franz Brentano, German philosopher and psychologist (+ 1917)
• February 6 - Henry Irving, English actor (+ 1905)
• February 16 - Henry Adams, American historian (+ 1918)
• February 18 - Ernst Mach, Austrian physicist and philosopher
• March 3 - George William Hill, astronomer (+ 1914)
• April 8/ July 8 - Ferdinand von Zeppelin, founder of the Zeppelin airship company. (+ 1917)
• April 21 - John Muir, naturalist (+ 1914)
• May 10 - John Wilkes Booth, assassin of Abraham Lincoln
• May 20 - Jules Méline, French statesman (+ 1925)
• October 25 - Georges Bizet, French composer
• November 13 - Joseph Fielding Smith, president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (d. 1918)
• Cleveland Abbe, American meteorologist.

Deaths

• May 17 - Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, French diplomat (* 1754)
• July 4 - Colonel José Antonio Vidaurre and his accomplices, authors of The Riot of Quillota, Chile were shot.
• September 1 - William Clark, Co-captain (with Meriwether Lewis) of the U.S. Corps of Discovery's Expedition to the Pacific Northwest (or popularly called the Lewis and Clark Expedition) of 1803-06.