The Counting Thread

[TheFaQQer]

1729 - Birth of Catherine the Great

[TheFaQQer]

1730 - Birth of Josiah Wedgwood

[TheFaQQer]

1731 - Benjamin Franklin starts the Library Company of Philadelphia

[TheFaQQer]

1732 - The original Covent Garden Theatre Royal (now the Royal Opera House) is opened.

[TheFaQQer]

MDCCXXXIII - First Freemasons lodge opened in what will become the United States of America.

[TheFaQQer]

MDCCXXXIV - Rob Roy MacGregor died

[TheFaQQer]

1735 - New York Weekly Journal writer John Peter Zenger is acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, on the basis that what he published was true, establishing the concept of freedom of the press.

[TheFaQQer]

1736 - Francis I, Holy Roman Emperor weds Maria Theresa of Austria, ruler of the Habsburg Empire.

[TheFaQQer]

1737 - the planet Venus passed in front of Mercury. The event is witnessed during the evening hours by the amateur astronomer John Bevis at the Royal Greenwich Observatory. As of 2006, it is still the only such planet/planet occultation that has been directly observed.

[TheFaQQer]

1738 - Franz Ketterer invents the cuckoo clock.