| 1800–1850 | USA [consumer products] | A revolution in retail and wholesale trade occurs: specialization transforms the urban retail market, replacing the general store with individual stores for hardware, groceries, dry goods, furnishing, books, tobacco, and so on. Cash-only sales policies are instituted around 1806. |
| 1810–1859 | USA [agriculture] | US cotton production, the vast majority of which is grown in the southern states, rises from 171,000 bales in 1810 to just under 5.4 million in 1859. |
| 1840–1850 | USA [farming] | Wheat becomes an increasingly important cash crop in the USA; production in 1839 is nearly 85 million bushels and climbs to over 100 million bushels in 10 years. |
| 1840–1860 | world [plagues and epidemics] | A cholera pandemic kills millions of people worldwide. |
| 1841–1850 | USA, UK [statistics and demography] | Emigration to the USA is 267,044 from Britain and 780,719 from Ireland. |
| 1845–1958 | Germany [earth sciences] | German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt lays the basis of modern geography with the publication of Kosmos/Cosmos, in which he arranges geographic knowledge in a systematic fashion. |
| 1850 | UK [communications] | British inventor Francis Bakewell invents a ‘copying telegraph’ that can transmit images or print painted with varnish on one conducting roller to another. It is an early version of the facsimile machine and a forerunner of television. |
| 1850 | Bavaria, USA [clothing and fashion] | The Bavarian immigrant Levi Strauss makes the first jeans out of canvas in San Francisco, California. They are originally designed for Californian gold miners. |
| 1850 | Germany, USA, UK [opera] | The opera Lohengrin by the German composer Richard Wagner is first performed, in Weimar, Germany. The wedding march becomes widely used at marriage services. |
| 1850 | Germany [orchestral music] | The German composer Robert Schumann completes his Symphony No. 3 (Opus 97), the Rhenish. |
| 1850 | England [painting] | The English artist John Everett Millais paints Christ in the House of his Parents. |
| c. 1850 | Wales [physics] | The Welsh physicist William Grove demonstrates that steam in contact with a hot platinum wire decomposes into hydrogen and oxygen, thus proving the thermal dissociation of atoms within a molecule. |
| 1850 | UK [other structures] | English engineer Robert Stephenson's high-level bridge at Newcastle upon Tyne, England, opens. It is a two deck structure with railways on the upper level and a roadway underneath, with the iron decks carried on five stone pillars. |
| 1850 | Germany [scientific publications] | German mathematical physicist Rudolf Clausius formulates the second law of thermodynamics in Über die Bewegende Kraft der Wärme/On the Driving Power of Heat. |
| 1850 | England [poetry] | The English writer Elizabeth Barrett Browning publishes her poetry collection Poems, which contains the sonnet sequence Sonnets from the Portuguese. |
| 1850 | England [poetry] | The English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, publishes In Memoriam, a long elegy on the death of his friend Arthur Hallam, anonymously. |
| 23 April 1850 | England [births and deaths] | William Wordsworth, English Romantic poet, and poet laureate 1843–50, dies in Grasmere, Westmorland, England (80). |
| 2 July 1850 | England [births and deaths] | Robert Peel, British prime minister 1834–35 and 1841–46, founder of the Conservative Party, dies in London, England (62). |
| 10 July 1850 | USA [elections] | Following the death of US president Zachary Taylor of cholera the previous day, he is succeeded by Vice-President Millard Fillmore, who is sworn as 13th president of the USA. |
| 5 August 1850 | France [births and deaths] | Guy de Maupassant, French short-story writer in the Naturalist school, born near Dieppe, France (–1893). |
| 5 August 1850 | UK, Australia [law and government] | The British Parliament passes the Australia Government Act, granting representative government to South Australia, Tasmania, and Victoria (which is separated from New South Wales). |
| 18 August 1850 | France [births and deaths] | Honoré de Balzac, French novelist whose writings helped establish the modern form of the novel, dies in Paris, France (51). |
| 9 September 1850 | USA [legislation] | The US Congress passes the Texas and New Mexico Act, establishing the boundaries of Texas and New Mexico, and the Utah Act, establishing the boundary of Utah. As part of the so-called Compromise of 1850, the fate of slavery in the prospective states of New Mexico and Utah would be decided by the principal of popular sovereignty. |
| 10 October 1850 | China [political events] | The Taiping Rebellion breaks out in China under Hong Xiuquan, who takes the cities of Nanjing and Shanghai, proclaims himself emperor, and attacks Beijing. |
| 13 November 1850 | Scotland [births and deaths] | Robert Louis Stevenson, Scottish novelist who writes Kidnapped, Treasure Island, and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, born in Edinburgh, Scotland (–1894). |
| 28 November 1850 | Austrian Empire, Prussia, Germany [diplomacy] | As a result of Russian mediation, Felix, Prince zu Schwarzenberg, of Austria and Otto von Manteuffel of Prussia sign the Punctation of Olmütz, by which Prussia subordinates itself to Austria and recognizes the Frankfurt diet (assembly) of the German Confederation. |
