The Great Fire of Turku destroys three…
September 1827 CE
The Great Fire of Turku destroys three quarters of the city—the largest city in Finland—with many human casualties on September 4, 1827.
It remains the largest urban fire in the history of Finland and the Nordic countries.
The fire destroys the downtown area of Turku, including Turku Cathedral and the main building of the Imperial Academy of Turku, Akatemiatalo.
The disaster had been made possible by a dry summer preceding the event, a fire-spreading storm rising on the night of the fire, and a lack of extinguishers because a large number of the city's people happen to be visiting a market in Tampere that day.
The damage is considerable and will be felt for a long period of time in the aftermath of the event.
Eleven thousand people are left homeless, and twenty-seven deaths and hundreds of wounded are recorded.
Most Finnish archives, including practically all material from the Middle ages, is destroyed in the fire.
The Imperial Academy of Turku will be transferred to Helsinki, the new capital of the Grand Duchy of Finland, thus contributing to the city losing its significance as Helsinki grows.
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The Okhotsk saltworks, ninety years old in 1827, is worked by one hundred and fifty exiles and about a hundred guards and overseers.
These largely originated in part from correspondence with the North West Compnany and later Hudson's Bay Company.
The border will continue to extend west on the 49th parallel to the Rocky Mountains, where the Columbia (and some times the Snake River) will be used as the border until it reaches the Pacific Ocean.
Later historians will appraise Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs George Canning as the most supportive British Foreign minister in securing a border along the Columbia.
United States Secretary of State Henry Clay had given instructions to the American plenipotentiaries to offer a partition of the Pacific Northwest along the 49th parallel to the Pacific Ocean.
The difference in the two considered plans are too much to solve, making the diplomats put off a formal colonial division once more.
The explorer John Franklin, after returning to England, had married the poet Eleanor Anne Porden in 1823.
Their daughter, Eleanor Isabella, was born the following year.
His wife dies of tuberculosis in 1825, shortly after persuading her husband not to let her ill-health prevent him from setting off on another expedition to the Arctic.
This expedition, a two-year trip round trip down the Mackenzie River to explore the shores of the Beaufort Sea west of the river's mouth, is better supplied and more successful than his last.
The first Picpus Fathers had departed from Bordeaux aboard the La Comète on November 21, 1826 and stopped in Valparaíso in Chile on February 8, 1827.
Resuming their trip on February 25, the Picpus Fathers enter port at Honolulu Harbor on July 7.
Having originally been refused entry by Protestant advisors to the king, the Picpus Fathers do not disembark from their ship until July 9, the Feast of Our Lady of Peace.
Among the first Picpus Fathers are Abraham Armand and Alexis Bachelot of France, as well as Patrick Short of the United Kingdom.
They are joined by six lay brothers.
It has been claimed that Fathers Armand, Bachelot and Short concelebrated the first Mass in the Hawaiian Islands on Bastille Day, July 14, 1827, in honor of their religious institute's French heritage, but this is untrue, and an anachronism: concelebration of masses is not practiced at thia time, and since France is being ruled by the restored Bourbon monarchy, "Bastille Day" would certainly not be marked as a national holiday.
They perform the first baptism on November 30.
The Picpus Fathers are quick to plunge into the Hawaiian society.
They learn the local language, go into the Native Hawaiian community and begin preaching to them.
They distribute Hawaiian language Bibles and teach the lessons of Jesus from the gospels.
Hundreds of Native Hawaiians choose to receive the sacraments of baptism, confirmation and Eucharist.
Among the first converts are William Pitt Kalanimoku who had been baptized by Abbe de Quelen aboard the French vessel L'Uranie, which had arrived in 1819, four months after the death of Kamehameha the Great; also the royal governors of Oʻahu, Boki and Liliha.
They will become pivotal members of the Catholic underground.
Johan Ludvig Heiberg pens another popular vaudeville play, Da Uadskillelige, in 1827.
Steen Steensen Blicher publishes another novella, “The Robber’s Den,” in 1827.
William Parry had set sail in May 1821 with the HMS Fury and HMS Hecla on a second expedition to discover a Northwest Passage, but had had to return to England in October 1823 without achieving his purpose.
During his absence he had in November 1821 been promoted to post rank, and shortly after his return he was appointed acting Hydrographer of the Navy.
His Journal of a Second Voyage, &c., had appeared in 1824.
With the same ships, Parry had undertaken a third expedition on the same quest in 1824, but again unsuccessfully, and following the wreck of the Fury, had returned home in October 1825 with a double ship's company.
He published an account of this voyage in 1826.
Parry has also pioneered the use of canning techniques for food preservation on his Arctic voyages.
However, his techniques were not infallible: in 1939 viable spores of certain heat-resistant bacteria were found in canned roast veal that had traveled with Parry to the Arctic Circle in 1824.
Parry weds Isabella Louisa Stanley, daughter of John Stanley, 1st Baron Stanley of Alderley and Lady Maria Josepha Holroyde, on October 23, 1826.
In the following year Parry obtains the sanction of the Admiralty for an attempt on the North Pole from the northern shores of Spitzbergen at Seven Islands.
In 1827, he reaches 82°45’N, which will remain for forty-nine years the highest latitude attained.
He publishes an account of this journey under the title of Narrative of the Attempt to reach the North Pole, &c. (1827).
Parry travels across the ice from Spitsbergen to latitude 82° 45' north in attempt to reach the North Pole in 1827.
Georg Ohm gives his complete theory of electricity in a pamphlet published in Berlin in 1827, with the title Die galvanische Kette mathematisch bearbeitet, the most important of his works.
In this work, he states his law for electromotive force acting between the extremities of any part of a circuit is the product of the strength of the current, and the resistance of that part of the circuit .
This work, the germ of which had appeared during the two preceding years in the journals of Schweigger and Poggendorff, will exert an important influence on the development of the theory and applications of electric current.
Ohm's name has been incorporated in the terminology of electrical science in Ohm's Law, the proportionality of current and voltage in a resistor, and adopted as the SI unit of resistance, the ohm (symbol Ω).
Georg Simon Ohm was born into a Protestant family in Erlangen, Bavaria, (at that time a part of the Holy Roman Empire) son to Johann Wolfgang Ohm, a locksmith and Maria Elizabeth Beck, the daughter of a tailor in Erlangen.
Although his parents had not been formally educated, Ohm's father is a respected man who had educated himself to a high level and is able to give his sons an excellent education through his own teachings.
Of the seven children of the family only three survive to adulthood: Georg Simon, his younger brother Martin, who later becomes a well-known mathematician, and his sister Elizabeth Barbara.
His mother had died when he was ten.
From early childhood, Georg and Martin had been taught by their father, who had brought them to a high standard in mathematics, physics, chemistry and philosophy.
Georg Simon attended Erlangen Gymnasium from age eleven to fifteen where he had received little in the area of scientific training, which sharply contrasted with the inspired instruction that both Georg and Martin received from their father.
This characteristic made the Ohms bear a resemblance to the Bernoulli family, as noted by Karl Christian von Langsdorf, a professor at the University of Erlangen.
Georg Ohm's father, concerned that his son was wasting his educational opportunity, had sent Ohm to Switzerland, where, in September 1806, Ohm accepted a position as a mathematics teacher in a school in Gottstadt bei Nydau.
Professor Langsdorf had left the University of Erlangen in early 1809 to take up a post in the University of Heidelberg and Ohm would have liked to have gone with him to Heidelberg to restart his mathematical studies.
Langsdorf, however, had advised Ohm to continue with his studies of mathematics on his own, advising Ohm to read the works of Euler, Laplace and Lacroix.
Reluctantly, Ohm had taken his advice but left his teaching post in Gottstadt bei Nydau in March 1809 to become a private tutor in Neuchâtel.
For two years, he had carried out his duties as a tutor while he followed Langsdorf's advice and continued his private study of mathematics; in April 1811, he returned to the University of Erlangen.
Ohm's own studies had prepared him for his doctorate, which he received from the University of Erlangen on October 25, 1811.
Immediately joining the faculty there as a lecturer in mathematics, he left after three semesters because of unpromising prospects.
He could not survive on his salary as a lecturer.
The Bavarian government offered him a post as a teacher of mathematics and physics at a poor quality school in Bamberg, which Ohm accepted in January 1813.
Unhappy with his job, Georg began writing an elementary textbook on geometry as a way to prove his abilities.
When Ohm's high school was closed down in February 1816, the Bavarian government had sent him to an overcrowded school in Bamberg to help out with the teaching of mathematics.
After his assignment in Bamberg, Ohm had sent his completed manuscript to King Frederick William III of Prussia.
Satisfied with Ohm's book, the King had on September 11, 1817 offered Ohm a position at the Jesuit Gymnasium of Cologne, which has a reputation for good science education; Ohm had been required to teach physics in addition to mathematics.
The physics laboratory was well-equipped, allowing Ohm to begin experiments in physics.
As the son of a locksmith, Ohm has some practical experience with mechanical devices.
His writings are numerous.
Alexander von Humboldt has spent the past twenty-three years in Paris and published a twenty-three-volume work describing the results of his explorations.
He leaves in 1827 for Berlin, where he is appointed chamberlain to the king of Prussia.