Major Anniversaries in 2025

225 years since the invention of the battery by Italian scientist Alessandro Volta

225 years since the death of English instrument maker Jesse Ramsden, who devised the finest scientific instruments in Europe during the latter quarter of the 18th century

200 years since the first scheduled railway service between Stockton and Darlington in northeast England

175 years since the death of William Sturgeon, an English physicist and inventor best known for making the first electromagnets and the first practical English electric motor

175 years since the birth of Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, best known for his novels 'Treasure Island', 'Kidknapped' and the 'Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde'

175 years since the death of William Wordsworth, English poet who founded the Romantic Age of English literature with fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge

150 years since the death of Charles Wheatstone, an English scientist and inventor best known for making improvements to early telegraph machines and the 'Wheatstone bridge', as well as inventing the English concertina, the stereoscope, and the 'Playfair cipher'

150 years since English engineer William Crookes invented the 'Crooks tube', a forerunner of the cathode ray tube

150 years since the birth of John Buchan, Scottish author and diplomat, best known for his Richard Hannay novels, especially 'The Thirty-Nine Steps', which established the 'action hero' fiction genre now popular in TV and movies

150 years since the death of Scottish geologist Charles Lyell, author of the standard reference book 'Principles of Geology', but better known for having presented Wallace and Darwin's theory of Evolution by Natural Selection to the Linnean Society