1849 Archives | HISTORY

At a graduation ceremony at a church in Geneva, New York on January 23, 1849, Geneva Medical College bestows a medical degree upon Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman in the United States to receive one. Despite the near-uniform opposition of her fellow students and medical professionals, Blackwell pursued her calling with an iron will and dedicated her life to treating the sick and furthering the cause of women in medicine.

On April 10, 1849, Walter Hunt—a mechanic and independent inventor from New York—patents his metal invention with a spring called the safety pin. Although later businessmen would make a fortune selling the ubiquitous devices, Hunt sells rights to it for just $400 and never earns anything else.

Using a fleet of some 200 pilotless balloons, Austria launches what is considered history’s first remote aerial attack on August 22, 1849. The blitz over Venice is part of a counteroffensive against the city, which had overthrown Austrian rule a year before and briefly gained independence as the Republic of San Marco. 

On October 3, 1849, writer Edgar Allan Poe is found delirious and wearing another man’s clothes outside of a Baltimore tavern being used as a polling place. Poe died in a Baltimore hospital four days later, yet the exact cause of his death and the sequence of events that led to it remain a mystery.  

On November 16, 1849, a Russian court sentences Fyodor Dostoevsky to death for his allegedly anti-government activities linked to a radical intellectual group. His execution is stayed at the last minute.

John Froelich, the inventor of the first internal-combustion traction motor, or tractor, is born on November 24, 1849, in Iowa.

On December 22, 1849 writer Fyodor Dostoevsky is led before a firing squad and prepared for execution. He had been convicted and sentenced to death on November 16 for allegedly taking part in antigovernment activities. However, at the last moment he was reprieved and sent into exile.