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