1855

1855 was a common year starting on Monday (see link for calendar).

Events

• January 23 - The first bridge over the Mississippi River opens in what is now Minneapolis, Minnesota, a crossing made today by the Father Louis Hennepin Bridge.
• January 23 - The region of Wairarapa, New Zealand was hit by the strongest earthquake ever recorded in New Zealand, which reached Magnitude 8.1 on the Richter Scale. There were five deaths.
• February 11 - Kassa Hailu is crowned Tewodros II, Emperor of Ethiopia, by Abuna Salama III in a ceremony at the church of Derasge Maryam.
• George Hamilton-Gordon is forced to resign as Prime Minister of Britain because of bad management of the campaigns in the Crimean War and the general unpopularity of that war.
• Stamp duty was removed from newspapers in Britain creating mass market media in the UK.
• The Panama Railway becomes the first railroad to connect the Atlantic Ocean and Pacific Ocean by rail as the railroad's route across Panama is completed.

Births

• January 5 - King Camp Gillette, American inventor (d. 1932)
• January 20 - Ernest Chausson, French composer (d. 1899)
• January 21 - John Moses Browning, American firearms inventor (d. 1926)
• January 28 - William Seward Burroughs, American bank clerk and inventor (d. 1898)
• March 13 - Percival Lowell, American astronomer (d. 1916)
• March 24 - Andrew Mellon, American banker and philanthropist (d. 1937)
• April 21 - Hardy Richardson, 19th century baseball player (d. 1931)
• April 27 - Caroline Rémy, French feminist (d. 1929)
• May 1 - Marie Corelli, English novelist (d. 1924)
• July 26 - Ferdinand Tönnies, German sociologist (d. 1936)
• November 5 - Léon Teisserenc de Bort, French meteorologist (d. 1913)
• November 6 - Ezra Seymour Gosney, American philanthropist and eugenicist (d. 1942)

Deaths

• January 6 - Giacomo Beltrami, Italian explorer (b. 1779)
• January 26 - Gérard de Nerval, French writer (b. 1808)
• February 6 - Josef Munzinger, member of the Swiss Federal Council (b. 1791)
• February 23 - Carl Friedrich Gauss, German mathematician, astronomer, and physicist (b. 1777)
• March 29 - Henri Druey, member of the Swiss Federal Council (b. 1799)
• March 31 - Charlotte Brontë, English author (b. 1816)
• May 5 - Robert Inglis, English politician (b. 1786)
• May 23 - Charles Robert Malden English explorer (b. 1797)
• June 28 - Fitzroy Somerset, 1st Lord Raglan, commander of British forces in the Crimean War (b. 1788)
• August 7 - Mariano Arista, President of Mexico (b. 1802)
• November 11 - Søren Kierkegaard, Danish philosopher (b. 1813)
• November 26 - Adam Mickiewicz, Polish writer (b. 1798)