Bernard Kavanagh (1816 - 1896)

Refresh this page to see various historical events that occurred during Bernard's lifetime.

In 1816, in the year that Bernard Kavanagh was born, in July, Lord Byron, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Polidori were vacationing in Switzerland, talking about the occult. They challenged each other to write the best horror story they could. Mary (Godwin) Shelley wrote "Frankenstein" - which came to her in a dream. Polidori wrote the short story The Vampyre.

In 1827, by the time he was merely 11 years old, on February 28th, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad - the B&O - was incorporated. The B&O became the first railroad to carry both people and freight and was Maryland's answer to the Erie Canal. Construction began on July 4th, 1828.

In 1833, at the age of 17 years old, Bernard was alive when on April 18th, over 300 delegates from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland called on the office of the Prime Minister of Great Britain to demand the immediate abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire. Following this, slavery was abolished by the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 - with exceptions provided for the East India Company, Ceylon, and Saint Helena.

In 1843, at the age of 27 years old, Bernard was alive when on May 22nd, an estimated 700 to 1,000 pioneers set out from Missouri on the Oregon Trail. Called "The Great Migration of 1843", the wagon train often had to build roads or float down rivers.

In 1896, in the year of Bernard Kavanagh's passing, in April, the first study on global warming due to CO2 - carbon dioxide - in the atmosphere was published by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius. Arrhenius concluded that human activity due to the Industrial Revolution would amplify CO2 in the atmosphere, causing a greenhouse effect. His conclusions have been extensively tested in the ensuing 100+ years and are still seen to hold true.