1880
year
1880 (MDCCCLXXX) was a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar and a leap year starting on Tuesday of the Julian calendar, the 1880th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 880th year of the 2nd millennium, the 80th year of the 19th century, and the 1st year of the 1880s decade. As of the start of 1880, the Gregorian calendar was 12 days ahead of the Julian calendar, which remained in localized use until 1923.
Events
January
January 27 – Thomas Edison is granted a patent for the incandescent light bulb. Edison filed for a US patent for an electric lamp using "a carbon filament or strip coiled and connected ... to platina contact wires." Although the patent described several ways of creating the carbon filament, including using "cotton and linen thread, wood splints, papers coiled in various ways," Edison and his team later discovered that a carbonized bamboo filament could last more than 1200 hours.
January
The international White slave trade affair scandal in Brussels is exposed and attracts international infamy.
The Gokstad ship is found in Norway, the first Viking ship burial to be excavated.
February
February 2
The first electric streetlight is installed in Wabash, Indiana.
The first successful shipment of frozen mutton from Australia arrives in London, aboard the SS Strathleven.
February 4 – The Black Donnelly Massacre takes the lives of five members of one family in Biddulph Township, Middlesex County, Ontario, Canada.
“1880” enters the record as year. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what year can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“1880” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, year provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7806. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1880, 1923 and 1200.
A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
- Subject orientation
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Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “1880”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow 1880 primary sources, 1880 archive and year research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “1880” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.