1802
1802 was a
common year starting on Friday (see link for calendar).
*
March 16 -
West Point is established.
*
March 25/
27 -
Treaty of Amiens between
France and
United Kingdom ends the
War of the Second Coalition.
*
March 28 -
H. W. Olbers discovers the
asteroid Pallas.
*
April 26 - A general amnesty signed by
Napoleon Bonaparte allowed all but about one thousand of the most notorious
émigrés of the
French Revolution to return to
France, as part of a reconciliary gesture to make peace with the various factions of the
Ancien Regime that would ultimately consolidate his own rule.
*
May 19 -
Napoleon Bonaparte establishes the
French légion d'honneur (
Legion of Honour).
*
May 20 -
Napoleon Bonaparte reinstates slavery in the
French colonies, which had been abolished during the
French Revolution.
*
June 8 -
Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture is seized by
French troops and sent to
Fort de Joux for prison.
*July -
Eleuthère Irénée du Pont founds
E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, the modern
DuPont Company.
*
July 4 - At
West Point,
New York the
United States Military Academy opens.
*
August 2 - In a
plebiscite Napoleon Bonaparte is confirmed as
consul for life.
*
September 11 - The
Italian region of
Piedmont becomes a part of
Napoleonic France.
*
October 2 - War ends between
Sweden and
Tripoli. The
United States also negotiates peace, but war continues over the size of compensation.
*October -
French army enters
Switzerland.
Unknown dates
*
Marie Tussaud opens her famous
wax museum in
London, having been commissioned during the
Reign of Terror to make death masks of the victims.
*
Treviranus uses the term
biology for the first time.
*
Thomas Wedgwood produces the world's first
photograph, but has no means of fixing the image, which quickly fades.
*
William Symington builds the first successful
steamship, the
Charlotte Dundas.
*
Ludwig van Beethoven performs his
Moonlight Sonata for the first time.
*
William Wordsworth publishes the poem "
Westminster Bridge".
*The estimated
world population reaches 1 billion people.
Ongoing events
*
French Revolutionary Wars (
1792-1802).
*
Napoleonic Wars (
1799-
1815).
*
February 11 -
Lydia Child, American abolitionist author (d.
1880)
*
February 19 -
Wilhelm Matthias Naeff, Swiss Federal Councilor (d.
1881)
*
February 26 -
Victor Hugo, French author (d.
1885)
*
March 7 -
Edwin Henry Landseer, British painter (d.
1873)
*
April 4 -
Dorothea Dix, American activist (d.
1887)
*
July 24 -
Alexandre Dumas, père, French author (d.
1870)
*
July 26 -
Mariano Arista,
President of Mexico (d.
1855)
*
August 5 -
Niels Henrik Abel, Norwegian mathematician (d.
1829)
*
August 22 -
Gurdon Saltonstall Hubbard, American land speculator (d.
1886)
*
November 9 -
Elijah P. Lovejoy, American abolitionist (d.
1837)
*
December 15 -
Janos Bolyai, Hungarian mathematician (d.
1860)
*
December 23 -
Sara Coleridge, British scholar (d.
1852)
*
February 2 -
Welbore Ellis, 1st Baron Mendip, British statesman (b.
1713)
*
February 3 -
Pedro Rodríguez, Conde de Campomanes, Spanish statesman and writer (b.
1723)
*
February 26 -
Esek Hopkins, American Revolutionary War admiral (b.
1718)
*
April 18 -
Erasmus Darwin, English physician and botanist (b.
1731)
*
June 4 -
Charles Emmanuel IV of Savoy, King of Sardinia (b.
1751)
*
August 10 -
Franz Aepinus, German philosopher (b.
1724)
*
September 26 -
Jurij Vega, Slovenian mathematician, physicist, and soldier (b.
1754)
*
November 9 -
Thomas Girtin, English artist (b.
1775)
*
November 15 -
George Romney, English artist (b.
1734)
*
November 16 -
André Michaux, French botanist (b.
1746)
*
July 22 -
Marie François Xavier Bichat, French anatomist and physiologist (b.
1771)
