General
Population: 1.41 Billion*
- Entertainment: Writers include RL Stevenson (Treasure Island), Becque, Ibsen, F Anstey, George Bernard Shaw, Sardou, Bakunin (posthumous),
Besant, Nietzsche, Leslie Stephen,
Art includes Cezanne, Manet
Music includes Millocker, Tchaikovsky (1812 Overture), Gounod, Rimsky-Korsakov, Gilbert and Sullivan ("Iolanthe"), Wagner, Debussy
- Mecidine: Viennese physician Joseph Breuer uses hypnosis to treat hysteria – start of modern psychoanalysis
Koch discovers tuberculosis germs
- Science: Flemming publishes stages of mitosis
Darwin publishes final letter to Nature and dies
- Sports: Sullivan beats Paddy Ryan to win heavyweight boxing championship
- Technology: Electric iron patented by Seely
Maxim patents recoil-operated (automatic) machine gun
- Deaths: Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Italian statesman Giuseppe Garibaldi, Novelist Anthony Trollope,
Author Count Gobineau, Writer and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Naturalist Sir Charles W Thomson, Economist W.S. Jevons, Statesman Leon Gambetta
Africa
- Egypt: British bombard Alexandria to occupy Cairo and suppress nationalists – French withdraw from Egypt and British occupy
- Sudan: King Mohammed Ahmed of Dongola Sudan declares self the Mahdi and rebels against Britain and Egypt to 1885
Americas
Asia
- India: Cyclone hits Bombay (Mumbai) and storm surge kills 100,000
- Indochina: (Vietnam) French take Hanoi
- Japan: Bank of Japan founded
Europe
- General: Triple Alliance is formed between Germany, Austria and Italy
- Czechoslovakia: Charles U in Prague divided into German and Czech institutions
- Germany: Berlin Philharmonic founded
First issue of Berliner Tageblatt
- Great Britain: Kilmainham agreement between Parnel and British government – Feinans murder Lord Frederick Cavendish and TH Burke in Phoenix Park Dublin (Phoenix Park murders) – terrorist massacres in Maamtrasne
Queen Victoria gives Epping Forest to the nation
London Chamber of Congress established
First electric train service in Britain
- Netherlands: Three-mile limit for territorial waters agreed upon at Hague Convention
- Russia: World Expo in Moscow
- Serbia: (Austria-Hungary) Prince Milan Obrenovich of Serbia proclaims self king
Middle East
Pacific