1785 was a common year starting on Saturday (see link for calendar).

Events

• January 1st The first issue of the Daily Universal Register, later known as The Times, is published in London.
• January 7 - Frenchman Jean-Pierre Blanchard and American John Jeffries travel from Dover, England to Calais, France in a hydrogen gas balloon, becoming the first to cross the English Channel by air.
• January 27 The University of Georgia founded
• July 6 - The dollar is unanimously chosen as the money unit for the United States. This is the first time a nation has adopted a decimal coinage system.
• August 1 - Fleet of French explorer Jean Francois de Galoup, count la Përouse leaves Paris for circumnavigation
• August 15 - Cardinal de Rohan is arrested in Paris - the necklace affair comes into open
• November – Drought in Haiti

• University of New Brunswick founded in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada
• Coal gas first used for illumination
• Louis XVI of France signs to a law that a handkerchief must be square
• British government establishes a permanent land force in the Eastern Caribbean, based in Barbados

Births

• January 4 - Friedrich Wilhelm, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg
• January 4 - Jakob Grimm, German philologist, folklorist, and writer (d. 1863)
• March 27 - Louis XVII of France
• April 4 - Bettina von Arnim, German poet (d. 1859)
• April 26 - John James Audubon, French-American naturalist and illustrator (d. 1851)
• May 18 - John Wilson, Scottish writer (d. 1854)
• August 15 - Thomas de Quincey, English writer (d. 1859)
• August 23 - Oliver Hazard Perry, American naval officer

Deaths

• January 3 - Baldassare Galuppi, composer
• May 8 - Etienne Francois, Duke of Choiseul, French statesman
• December 29 - Johan Herman Wessel, Norwegian author