British engineer Robert Stephenson completes a box-girder railway bridge over the Menai Strait, between Anglesey and mainland Wales

US entrepreneur Cornelius Vanderbilt conveys passengers across the American continent through Nicaragua by steamship and horse and carriage

Ferdinand de Lesseps is granted the concession to construct a canal from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea

The Panama Railroad company completes a line between the Atlantic and the Pacific, providing America's first transcontinental link

Brunel dies just before the maiden voyage of his gigantic final project, the luxury liner The Great Eastern

Joseph Bazalgette is given the task of providing London with a desperately needed new system of sewers

The Metropolitan Railway, the world's first to go underground, opens in London using steam trains between Paddington and Farringdon Street

The Union Pacific and the Central Pacific railroads meet at Promontory Summit in Utah, completing the first transcontinental line

Thousands of distinguished guests assemble at Port Said for the opening of the Suez Canal

An agreement is signed between France and Britain to cooperate in the construction of a tunnel beneath the Channel

A congress in Paris, with Ferdinand de Lesseps as president, decides to construct a canal from coast to coast in Panama

Brooklyn Bridge, the longest suspension bridge in the world, is opened between Brooklyn and lower Manhattan

German engineer Karl Friedrich Benz builds the Tri-Star, a three-wheeled vehicle with an internal combustion that is considered the first commercial automobile

German engineer Gottlied Wilhelm Daimler builds the first successful 4-wheel vehicle with an internal combustion engine

A vast cantilever bridge, spanning a mile of water, carries the railway across the Firth of Forth in Scotland

The world's first electric underground railway passes under the Thames, linking the City of London and Stockwell

Work begins in the Urals and at Vladivostock, laying track which will eventually join up as the Trans-Siberian railway

London's Tower Bridge raises its roadway for the first time to let a ship pass up the Thames

US engineer Henry Ford test-drives his first four-wheel internal-combustion vehicle, the Quadricycle, built in a coal shed behind his home

Turbinia, powered by the newly invented Parsons steam turbine, breaks the speed record when Queen Victoria reviews her fleet

Daimler cars launch a new brand, the Mercedes 35 hp, named after the ten-year-old daughter of the investor and distributor Emil Jellinek

Ransome Eli Olds manufactures the Curved Dash Oldsmobile on assembly line principles in Detroit

French automobile pioneer Leon Serpollet sets a new land speed record, driving a steam car at 75 mph along the Promenade des Anglais in Nice

William K. Vanderbilt drives the first internal-combustion car to win the land speed record, at 76 mph at Ablis in France

The first Aswan dam, at this time the world's largest, is completed on the Nile