1838 was a common year starting on Monday (see link for calendar).

Events

• January 6 - Samuel Morse first publicly demonstrates the telegraph.
• January 8 - Alfred Vail demonstrates a telegraph using dots and dashes (this is the forerunner of Morse code)
• January 12 - Joseph Smith, Jr. and Sidney Rigdon flee Ohio for Missouri
• March 7 – Jenny Lind, the "Swedish Nightingale" debuts at the Stockholm Opera
• April 30 - Nicaragua declares independence from the Central American Federation
• June 12 - Territory of Iowa established
• 1 August - Slavery officially abolished in Trinidad & Tobago
• 7 September - Grace Darling rescues 9 survivors from the wreck of Forfarshire off the Farne Islands
• September 3 - Dressed in a sailor's uniform and carrying identification papers provided by a free Black seaman, future abolitionist Frederick Douglass boards a train in Maryland on his way to freedom from slavery
• October 16 - Date in the Bill Stump's Stone
• October 27 - Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs issues the Extermination Order, ordering the expulsion of all Mormons from the state.
• November 3 The Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce is founded. This paper was later renamed to The Times of India in 1861
• November 5 - Honduras separates from the Central American Federation, weakening the confederation.
• Proteins discovered by Jöns Jakob Berzelius
• the Pastry War
• Start of First British-Afghan War
• Republic of Yucatan declares independence from Mexico
• Start of Central American Civil War
• Friedrich Bessel makes the first accurate measurement of distance to a star.
• Christian Hermann Weisse proposes the two-source hypothesis of gospel origins, which is held by a majority of biblical scholars to this day.
• Regular Atlantic steamship service begins
• Augustus Siebe invents a closed diving suit with a helmet
• Louis Daguerre develops Daguerreotype

Births

• January 4 - Charles Stratton (General Tom Thumb), circus performer and entertainer (d. 1883)
• January 6 - Max Bruch, German composer (d. 1920)
• January 16 - Franz Brentano, German philosopher and psychologist (d. 1917)
• February 6 - Henry Irving, English actor (d. 1905)
• February 16 - Henry Adams, American historian (d. 1918)
• February 18 - Ernst Mach, Austrian physicist and philosopher
• March 3 - George William Hill, astronomer (d. 1914)
• April 8/ July 8 - Ferdinand von Zeppelin, inventor of the zeppelin (d. 1917)
• April 21 - John Muir, American naturalist (d. 1914)
• May 10 - John Wilkes Booth, actor and assassin of Abraham Lincoln
• May 20 - Jules Méline, French statesman (d. 1925)
• September 2 - Liliuokalani of Hawai'i, last monarch of Hawaii, (d. 1917)
• October 25 - Georges Bizet, French composer (d. 1875)
• November 7 - Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, French writer (d. 1889)
• November 13 - Joseph Fielding Smith, president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (d. 1918)
• December 20 - Edwin Abbott Abbott, theologian and author (d. 1926)
• Cleveland Abbe, American meteorologist

Deaths

• May 17 - Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, French diplomat (* 1754)
• July 4 - Colonel José Antonio Vidaurre and his accomplices, authors of The Riot of Quillota, Chile were shot.
• September 1 - William Clark, Co-captain (with Meriwether Lewis) of the U.S. Corps of Discovery's Expedition to the Pacific Northwest (or popularly called the Lewis and Clark Expedition) of 1803-06.