1869

## Events

- The Periodic table was developed.

## Births

- January 1 – Sigma Nu, First Anti-Hazing Honor/Social Fraternity
- January 4 – Tommy Corcoran, baseball player
- January 10 – Grigori Rasputin, Russian mystic
- January 15 – Stanisław Wyspiański, Polish dramatist, poet, painter, and architect
- February 11 – Helene Kroller-Muller, Dutch museum founder and patron of the arts
- February 14 – Charles Wilson, Scottish physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
- March 3 – Michael von Faulhaber, German cardinal and archbishop
- March 12 – George William Forbes, New Zealand Prime Minister and first leader of the New Zealand National Party
- March 14 – Algernon Blackwood, English writer
- March 18 – Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
- April 2 – Hughie Jennings, baseball player
- April 5,6 – Tom Adam, Named number one in the world
- April 11 – Gustav Vigeland, Norwegian sculptor
- April 27 – May Moss, Activist
- May 5 – Hans Pfitzner, German composer
- May 20 – John Stone Stone, American physicist and inventor
- June 27 – Hans Spemann, German embryologist, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
- August 10 – Lawrence Binyon, English poet and scholar
- September 3 – Fritz Pregl, Austrian chemist, Nobel Prize laureate
- September 17 – Christian Lous Lange, Norwegian pacifist, won the Nobel Peace Prize
- September 21 - Carlo Airoldi, Italian marathon runner
- September 23 – Mary Mallon, "Typhoid Mary"
- October 2 – Mahatma Gandhi, Indian political leader, Father of the Nation
- October 25 – John Heisman, American football coach
- November 11 – Victor Emmanuel III of Italy, King)
- November 25 – Herbert Greenfield, Premier of Alberta, Canada
- December 16 – Hristo Tatarchev, Bulgarian revolutionary, leader of the revolutionary movement in Macedonia and Eastern Thrace
- December 22 – Edwin Arlington Robinson, American poet
- December 30 – Stephen Leacock, British-Canadian writer and economist
- December 31 – Henri Matisse, French painter

## Deaths

- July 18 – Laurent Clerc, co-founder of the first American school for the deaf.
- January 1 – Martin W. Bates, U.S. Senator from Delaware (b. 1786)
- January 30 – William Carleton, Irish novelist (b. 1794)
- February 15 – Mirza Ghalib, poet of Urdu (b. 1796).
- March 8 – Hector Berlioz, French composer (b. 1803)
- March 24 – Antoine-Henri Jomini, French general (b. 1779)
- April 20 – Carl Loewe, German composer (b. 1796)
- June 16 – Charles Sturt, Australian explorer (b. 1795)
- June 20 – Hijikata Toshizou, Japanese military commander (b. 1835)
- August 31 – Mary Ward (scientist), first car accident victim
- September 12 – Peter Roget, British lexicographer (b. 1779)
- October 8 - Franklin Pierce, 64, fourteenth President of the United States, liver cirrhosis (b. 1804)
- October 13 – Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, French literary critic (b. 1804)
- October 23 – Edward Smith-Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (b. 1799)
- December 18 – Louis Moreau Gottschalk, American composer and pianist (b. 1829)

## Hit songs

- "Little Brown Jug" by R.E. Eastburn
- "Now the Day is Over" by Joseph Barnby
- "Shoo, Fly! Don't Bother Me!" by T. Bringham Bishop
- "Sweet Genevieve" by Henry Tucker