| 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. |
| 1881–1890 | USA, UK [statistics and demography] | Emigration to the USA is 807,357 from Britain and 655,482 from Ireland. |
| June 1883 - December 1885 | Madagascar, France [wars] | The French wage a war with Madagascar when the Hova government rejects the island's status as a French protectorate, created in 1882. |
| 1884 | Germany [technology] | German inventor Paul Gottlieb Nipkow patents a mechanical scanning device consisting of a rotating disc with a spiral of holes. All television systems later use the disc, or a modified version of it, to scan images, until electronic scanning is invented. |
| 1884 | USA [baseball] | Moses Fleetwood Walker becomes the first black American major league baseball player when he makes his American Association league debut for the Toledo Blue Stockings. |
| 1884 | UK [charities] | The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children is formed in Britain. |
| 1884 | Spain [churches and temples] | The Spanish architect Antonio Gaudí begins work on the Sagrada Familia Church in Barcelona, Spain, an extravagant and idiosyncratic building that is still unfinished at his death in 1926. |
| 1884 | UK [clubs and societies] | The Fabian Society, an association of intellectual British socialists, is founded. |
| 1884 | UK [football] | Scotland wins the first football British International Championship, the world's oldest international football championship. |
| 1884 | USA [fiction] | The US writer Mark Twain publishes his novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. |
| 1884 | USA [information technology] | German-born US inventor Ottmar Mergenthaler patents the first Linotype typesetting machine. Characters are cast as metal type in complete lines rather than as individual letters as in a monotype machine. |
| 1884 | France [painting] | The French artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir paints Umbrellas. |
| 1884 | USA [painting] | The US artist John Singer Sargent paints Madame X (Madame Gautreau). |
| 1884 | UK [telephone services] | The General Post Office in Britain introduces public telephone boxes. |
| 1884 | UK [sports] | The Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), the governing body for the native Irish sports of hurling, Gaelic football, handball, and rounders, is formed, in Dublin, Ireland. |
| April - August 1884 | German South West Africa, Togoland, Cameroon, Germany [colonization] | Germany occupies South West Africa, Togoland, and Cameroon. |
| 8 May 1884 | USA [births and deaths] | Harry S Truman, thirty-third president of the USA 1945–53, a Democrat, born in Lamar, Missouri (–1972). |
| 6 July 1884 | Austria-Hungary [births and deaths] | Gregor Mendel, Austrian monk and botanist who laid the mathematical foundations of genetics, dies in Brünn, Austro-Hungarian Empire (61). |
| 11 November 1884 | USA [elections] | Grover Cleveland, Democrat, wins 219 electoral votes in the US presidential election while James G Blaine, Republican, wins only 182 after being deserted by the Mugwumps, the reformist Republicans. In the Congressional elections, the Republicans attain a majority in the Senate (43–34), while the Democrats retain control of the House (183–140). |
