June 21 - Machado de Assis, Brazilian writer (d. 1908)
August 30 - Gulstan Ropert, French Catholic prelate (d. 1903)
September 10 - Isaac Kauffman Funk, American publisher (d. 1912)
September 25 - Karl Alfred von Zittel, German palaeontologist (d. 1904)
November 16 - Louis-Honoré Fréchette, French Canadian poet (d. 1908)
Deaths
February 7 - Karl August Nicander, Swedish poet (b. 1799)
February 15 - Chevalier de Lorimier, Quebec notary (b. 1803)
May 3 - Ferdinando Paer, Italian composer (b. 1771)
May 17 - Archibald Alison, Scottish author (b. 1757)
July 15 - Winthrop Mackworth Praed, English poet (b. 1802)
August 3 - Dorothea von Schlegel, German novelist (b. 1763)
August 10 - John St Aubyn, British fossil collector (b. 1758)
Events
January 9 - The French Academy of Sciences announces the Daguerreotype photography process.
January 19 - The British East India Company captures Aden.
January 20 - In the Battle of Yungay, Chile defeats a Peruvian and Bolivian alliance.
February 24 - William Otis receives a patent for the steam shovel.
March 26 - The first Henley Royal Regatta is held.
April 19 - The Treaty of London establishes Belgium as a kingdom.
June 14 - Henley Royal Regatta: the village of Henley, on the River Thames in Oxfordshire, stages its first Regatta.
June 17 - In the Kingdom of Hawaii, Kamehameha III issues the Edict of toleration which gives Roman Catholics the freedom to worship in the Hawaiian Islands. The Hawaii Catholic Church and the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace is later established as a result.
July 2 - Twenty miles off the coast of Cuba, 53 rebelling African slaves led by Joseph Cinque take over the slave ship Amistad.
July 3 - The first state normal school in the United States, the forerunner to today's Framingham State College, opens in Lexington, Massachusetts with 3 students.
August 8 - Beta Theta Pi is founded in Oxford, Ohio.
August 19 - Presentation of Jacque Daguerre's new photographic process to the French Academy of Sciences.
August 23 - The United Kingdom captures Hong Kong as a base as it prepares to war with Qing China. The ensuing 3-year conflict will later be known as the First Opium War.
August 26 - The ship Amistad is captured off Long Island.
September 5 - The First Opium War begins in China.
September 9 - John Herschel takes the first glass plate photograph.
November 4 - The Newport Rising is the last large-scale armed rebellion against authority in mainland Britain.
November 11 - The Virginia Military Institute is founded in Lexington, Virginia.
November 25 - A cyclone slams India with high winds and a 40 foot storm surge, destroying the port city of Coringa (never to be entirely rebuilt again). The storm wave sweeps inland, taking with it 20,000 ships and thousands of people. An estimated 300,000 deaths result from the disaster.
November 27 - In Boston, Massachusetts, the American Statistical Association is founded.
