1784 in Great Britain

Events from the year 1784 in the Kingdom of Great Britain.

Incumbents

15 January - Henry Cavendish's paper Experiments on Air reveals the composition of water.^[1]
28 February - John Wesley charters the Methodist Church.^[2]
8 March - Mary Bailey, a mariticide, becomes the last person in Britain to suffer a sentence for murder of death by burning, at Winchester.^[3]
15 April - General election won by William Pitt the Younger's Tory Party.^[4]
20 May - A treaty is signed in Paris with the Dutch Republic formally ending the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War.
21 June - Commutation Act reduces duties on spirits and tea, and implements window tax.^[4]
2 August - The first mail coach runs between Bristol and London.^[2]
13 August - Parliament passes the India Act to regulate the East India Company.^[5]
16 August - Britain creates the colony of New Brunswick in Canada.
21 August - Joseph Bramah receives his first lock patent.
25 & 27 August - Scottish apothecary James Tytler makes the first balloon ascents in Britain, in a hot air balloon from Edinburgh.
15 September - The Italian Vincenzo Lunardi makes the first hydrogen balloon flight in Britain, from Moorfields in London to South Mimms.^[2]
4 October - The Englishman James Sadler makes the first hot air balloon flight in England, from Oxford to Woodeaton.^[6]

Britain receives its first bales of cotton imported from the United States.
Industrial Revolution: Henry Cort of Funtley, Hampshire, applies the coal-fired reverbatory furnace to the puddling process for conversion of cast to wrought iron.^[7]
Publication of the Annals of Agriculture edited by Arthur Young begins.

28 January - George Hamilton Gordon, 4th Earl of Aberdeen, Prime Minister (died 1860)
31 January - Bernard Barton, poet (died 1849)
20 October - Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, Prime Minister (died 1865)
October - Sarah Biffen, painter (died 1850)

↑ Cavendish, Henry (1784). "Experiments on Air". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 75: 372–384. doi:10.1098/rstl.1785.0023. JSTOR 106582.
↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Penguin Pocket On This Day. Penguin Reference Library. 2006. ISBN 0-14-102715-0.
↑ "Timeline of capital punishment in Britain". Retrieved 2011-02-02.
↑ 4.0 4.1 Palmer, Alan; Palmer, Veronica (1992). The Chronology of British History. London: Century Ltd. pp. 228–230. ISBN 0-7126-5616-2.
↑ Williams, Hywel (2005). Cassell's Chronology of World History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. pp. 336–337. ISBN 0-304-35730-8.
↑ Hibbert, Christopher (1988). "Sadler's Balloon Ascents". The Encyclopædia of Oxford. London: Macmillan. pp. 370–1. ISBN 0-333-39917-X.
↑ Gales, W.K.V. (1981). Ironworking. Princes Risborough. p. 8. ISBN 0-85263-546-X.