Chronopin: upcoming release dates, events and other important dates

On 25 April 1859 the Suez Canal Company broke ground at what is now Port Said, starting a ten-year dig across the Isthmus of Suez. The Suez Canal Authority says about 20,000 Egyptians took part in the groundbreaking despite objections from Britain and the Ottoman Empire.

John Murray issues the first edition of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection from 50 Albemarle Street in London. The print run of 1,250 copies is taken up by the trade on the day of publication.

Tai Ping Koon was established in 1860 serving Western food to Chinese diners, and in doing so more or less invented the genre Hong Kong calls soy-sauce Western - Swiss chicken wings in a sweet soy braise, baked pork chop rice, souffle to finish. It began in Canton and became a Hong Kong business alone when the Canton branch was confiscated and closed in 1956.

The Metropolitan Railway opened between Paddington and Farringdon on January 10, 1863, the world's first underground railway and the ancestor of every metro system shown in Moving Millions Every Day.

Quanjude opened in 1864 and made its name on a method: hanging the ducks in an open oven over fruitwood rather than closing them in, which crisps the skin differently. The dish it standardised is the one the world now calls Peking duck, and the carving at the table is part of it.

During the 1867 Exposition Universelle, Paris opened Baron Haussmann's newly rebuilt sewer network to public tours for the first time, turning Eugène Belgrand's engineering into a civic showcase.

Dmitri Mendeleev's paper The Dependence between the Properties of the Atomic Weights of the Elements is read to the Russian Chemical Society in St Petersburg, arranging the known elements by atomic weight and valence and leaving gaps for elements not yet found.

The Suez Canal was inaugurated on 17 November 1869, linking the Mediterranean and the Red Sea after ten years of digging. A procession of ships headed by the French imperial yacht L'Aigle, carrying Empress Eugenie, entered the canal at Port Said.

Leopold Cafe was founded in Colaba in 1871 by Irani immigrants, part of the wave of Zoroastrian cafes that shaped how Bombay eats out, and has outlasted almost all of them. It became a fixture for travellers along the Causeway, and was one of the sites attacked in November 2008 - it reopened days afterwards and kept the bullet marks in its walls.

New York's Brooklyn Bridge opened to the public, completing a 13-year construction effort that Emily Warren Roebling steered to completion after her husband was incapacitated by decompression sickness.

The third explosion of 27 August 1883 destroyed over 70% of the island and remains the loudest sound in recorded history, audible in Perth and near Mauritius. The eruption and its tsunamis killed at least 36,417 people.

On 4 October 1883 the Express d'Orient, run by Wagons-Lits, began its through service from Paris to Constantinople, the start of the legendary Orient Express.

The Doyle family began selling fish on the sand at Watsons Bay in 1885, looking back across the harbour at the city, and the business has stayed in the family for five generations - one of the oldest restaurants in Australia still run by the people whose name is on it.

Bavaria's unfinished fairy-tale castle, built for King Ludwig II and left incomplete at his sudden death, opened to paying visitors for the first time.

President Grover Cleveland dedicates Frédéric Bartholdi's monumental copper figure on Bedloe's Island, capping a decade of Franco-American fundraising and engineering.

After decades of stalled funding and a visible change in stone partway up its shaft, the Washington Monument finally opened its doors to visitors in 1888.

Gustave Eiffel’s engineering firm finished the Eiffel Tower in Paris after just over two years of construction, built as the entrance arch for the 1889 Exposition Universelle. The 300-metre iron lattice tower was the tallest man-made structure in the world at the time.

The Forth Bridge, a railway cantilever spanning the Firth of Forth in Scotland, was formally opened by the Prince of Wales on 4 March 1890, some months after the structure itself was finished in November 1889. Designed by John Fowler and Benjamin Baker and built by Sir William Arrol & Co., it was Britain's first major all-steel structure and the world's longest cantilever bridge span.

Henry Zietz opened the Buckhorn Exchange on 17 November 1893 across from the rail yards, and it holds Colorado liquor licence number one. The walls carry several hundred mounted animals and the menu still runs to elk, buffalo and rattlesnake.

Confeitaria Colombo opened in 1894 and fitted itself out like a Parisian tea room transplanted to the tropics - Belgian mirrors, Italian marble, a jacaranda counter and a stained-glass skylight over the hall. It became the meeting room of Rio's belle epoque and is now listed as heritage.

The café that became the meeting room of Catalan modernisme opened on 12 June 1897 in the Casa Martí, a Puig i Cadafalch building in the Gothic Quarter. It lasted only six years in its first run, but in them it hosted Picasso's first solo exhibition and the circle around Rusiñol and Casas - and he drew its menu card.

On 28 August 1898 New Bern, North Carolina, pharmacist Caleb Bradham renamed his carbonated "Brad's Drink" as Pepsi-Cola, the name from which PepsiCo takes its own.

Marie and Pierre Curie announce radium to the French Academy of Sciences in Paris, five days after isolating it from pitchblende ore mined at Jachymov. It is the second element they identify that year, after polonium.

The Paris Métro's first line opened to the public on 19 July 1900, running between Porte Maillot and Porte de Vincennes.

A Category 4 hurricane drove a storm surge of over 15 ft across Galveston Island, killing between 6,000 and 12,000 people. It remains the deadliest natural disaster in United States history.

The US Navy commissioned USS Holland (SS-1), designed by Irish-American engineer John Philip Holland, becoming the first submarine in an unbroken line of US Navy submarines.

The house that made xiaolongbao a Shanghai export was established in 1900, selling the thin-skinned soup dumplings that had been developed in Nanxiang town on the city's edge a couple of decades earlier. Queues for them became a fixture of the old city, and the name is now on branches across Shanghai and abroad.

Theatercaféen opened in 1900 across the street from Oslo's National Theatre and became the room where Norwegian actors, writers and politicians ate after curtain - a Viennese-style café with a gallery, caricatures of its regulars on the walls and live music from a balcony.

On 16 June 1903 in Detroit Henry Ford and a group of investors signed the incorporation papers for Ford Motor Company; the filing reached the Michigan Secretary of State the next day and the first Model A order followed within a month.

Orville Wright flew 120 feet in 12 seconds over the sand at Kill Devil Hills, the first sustained flight by a manned, powered, controlled heavier-than-air aircraft. The brothers flew four times that day; Wilbur’s fourth and last covered 852 feet in 59 seconds.