| 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. |
| 1880 | UK, USA [clothing and fashion] | Soft canvas shoes, known in Britain as ‘plimsolls’, catch on with the increasing popularity of lawn tennis as a sport. |
| 1880 | USA [fiction] | The US writer Lewis Wallace publishes his historical novel Ben-Hur. |
| 1880 | France [fiction] | The French writer Emile Zola publishes his novel Nana, one of the Les Rougon-Macquart series and Le Roman expérimental/The Experimental Novel, setting out his theories on the novel. |
| 1880 | world [food and drink] | Salmon, meat, and fruit are all available in tins. |
| 1880 | Canada [ice-hockey] | The world's first ice hockey club is formed at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. |
| 1880 | UK [everyday life] | Greenwich Mean Time is established as the legal time in the British Isles. |
| 1880 | USA [telephone services] | Fifty thousand private telephones are in use in the USA. |
| 1880 | UK [telephone services] | The first telephone directory in Britain is published by the London Telephone Company in England: it contains just 255 listings. |
| 1880 | USA, UK, France, Russian Empire [railways] | Railway mileage in operation stands at 140,481 km/87,801 mi in the USA, 28,696 km/17,935 mi in Britain, 26,288 km/16,430 mi in France, and 19,520 km/12,200 mi in Russia. |
| 1880 | USA [railways] | There are 149,874 km/93,671 mi of railroad track in the USA. |
| 1880 | France [sculpture] | The French artist Auguste Rodin begins work on his monumental Gates of Hell, meant to be a doorway to the Museum of Decorative Art in Paris, France. Still unfinished at his death in 1917, the motifs for the project turned into some of his best-known works, such as The Thinker. |
| 1880 | France [sculpture] | The French artist Edgar Degas sculpts The Little 14-year-old Dancer. |
| 1880 | Egypt, UK [ships and shipping] | The Suez Canal linking the Mediterranean and the Red Sea is used by 4,344,000 tons of shipping, 70 % of which is British. |
| 1880 | UK [technology] | British geologist John Milne invents the modern seismograph for measuring the strength of earthquakes. |
| c. 1880 | Arabia [births and deaths] | Ibn Saud, Arabian tribal and Muslim leader who founds the modern state of Saudi Arabia in 1932 and begins to exploit its oil resources, born in Riyadh, Arabia (–1953). |
| 28 April 1880 | UK [administration] | William Ewart Gladstone forms a Liberal ministry in which he is also chancellor of the Exchequer, with Lord Granville foreign secretary, William Harcourt home secretary, and Joseph Chamberlain president of the Board of Trade. |
| 8 May 1880 | France [births and deaths] | Gustave Flaubert, French realist novelist best known for Madame Bovary (1857), dies in Croisset, France (58). |
| 6 June 1880 | Belgium [elections] | The Clericals defeat their ideological rivals, the Liberals, in the Belgian elections and begin a long era of power which extends until 1914. |
| 13 October 1880 | Transvaal, UK [diplomacy] | The Transvaal declares itself independent from Britain in opposition to Britain's annexation of the Boer Transvaal Republic in 1877. |
| 2 November 1880 | USA [elections] | The Republican candidate James A Garfield is elected as president of the USA. In the Congressional elections, Republicans and Democrats share the seats in the Senate (37–37), but the Republicans regain control of the House (147–135). |
| 2 December 1880 | England [births and deaths] | George Eliot (pseudonym of Mary Anne Evans), English novelist, dies in London, England (61). |
