Naturalist Charles Darwin sends his publishers the first three chapters of On the Origin of Species, which will become one of the most influential books ever published.

On April 9, 1859, a 23-year-old Missouri youth named Samuel Langhorne Clemens receives his steamboat pilot’s license.

At Port Said, Egypt, ground is broken for the Suez Canal, an artificial waterway intended to stretch 101 miles across the isthmus of Suez and connect the Mediterranean and the Red seas. Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French diplomat who organized the colossal undertaking, delivered the pickax blow that inaugurated construction.

On April 30, 1859, the first chapter of Charles Dickens’ serialized novel, A Tale of Two Cities, is published in Dickens’ circular, All the Year Round. It rolls out over 31 weekly installments, with the last one appearing that November.

It’s the birthday of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of master sleuth Sherlock Holmes.

The famous tower clock known as Big Ben, located at the top of the 320-foot-high Elizabeth Tower, begins ticking over the Houses of Parliament in Westminster, London, for the first time on May 31, 1859. The great bell's strikes are first heard a few weeks later, on July 11.

Jean Francois Gravelet, a Frenchman known professionally as Charles Blondin, becomes the first daredevil to walk across Niagara Falls on a tightrope. The feat, which was performed 160 feet above the Niagara gorge just down river from the Falls, was witnessed by some 5,000 spectators. Wearing pink tights and a yellow tunic, Blondin crossed a cable about two inches in diameter and 1,100-feet long with only a balancing pole to protect him from plunging into the dangerous rapids below.

Abolitionist John Brown leads a small group on a raid against a federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), in an attempt to start an armed revolt of enslaved people and destroy the institution of slavery.

The infamous Western outlaw known as “Billy the Kid” is mostly likely born in a poor Irish neighborhood on New York City’s East Side on November 23, 1859. (Much about his early life is unknown or unverified.) Before he was shot dead at age 21, Billy reputedly killed at least nine people in the American West.

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, a groundbreaking scientific work by British naturalist Charles Darwin, is published in England on November 24, 1859. Darwin’s theory argued that organisms gradually evolve through a process he called “natural selection.” In natural selection, organisms with genetic variations that suit their environment tend to propagate more descendants than organisms of the same species that lack the variation, thus influencing the overall genetic makeup of the species.

Militant abolitionist John Brown is executed on charges of treason, murder and insurrection on December 2, 1859.