1855 was a common year starting on Monday (see link for calendar).

Events

• January 23 - The first bridge over the Mississippi River opens in what is now Minneapolis, Minnesota, a crossing made today by the Father Louis Hennepin Bridge.
• George Hamilton-Gordon is forced to resign as Prime Minister of Britain because of bad management of the campaigns in the Crimean War and the general unpopularity of that war.
• The Panama Railway becomes the first railroad to connect the Atlantic Ocean and Pacific Ocean by rail as the railroad's route across Panama is completed.
• The region of Wairarapa, New Zealand was hit by the strongest earthquake ever recorded in New Zealand, which reached Magnitude 8.1 on the Richter Scale. There were five deaths.

Births

• January 5 - King Camp Gillette, inventor († 1932)
• January 21 - John Moses Browning, inventor († 1926)
• January 28 - William Seward Burroughs, inventor of the calculator († 1898)
• March 13 - Percival Lowell, astronomer († 1916)
• March 24 - Andrew Mellon, financier († 1937)
• April 27 - Caroline Rémy, French feminist (d. 1929)
• May 1 - Marie Corelli, novelist
• July 30 - Wilhelm von Siemens, German industrialist
• November 5 - Léon Teisserenc de Bort, French meteorologist († 1913)

Deaths

• January 26 - Gérard de Nerval, French writer (b. 1808)
• February 6 - Josef Munzinger, member of the Swiss Federal Council (b. 1791)
• February 23 - Carl Friedrich Gauss, mathematician, astronomer and physicist
• March 29 - Henri Druey, member of the Swiss Federal Council (b. 1799)
• March 31 - Charlotte Brontë, English author
• May 5 - Sir Robert Inglis, Bt, English politician (b. 1786)
• May 23 - Charles Robert Malden explorer
• June 28 - Fitzroy Somerset, 1st Lord Raglan, commander of British forces in the Crimean War
• August 7 - Mariano Arista, President of Mexico
• November 11 - Søren Kierkegaard, philosopher
• November 26 - Adam Mickiewicz, Polish poet and author