How old is a bottle of 1869 beer? Victoria is Queen of England & Ulysses S. Grant is president. 1869 Gladstone was Prime Minister The Irish Church is disestablished. The Suez Canal is opened. Mendeleyev devises a periodic table of elements. Jules Verne '20,000 leagues under the sea' Friederich Nietzsche accepted the chair of classical philology at Basel. 1871 Charles Darwin worked on a series of supplemental treatises, including 'The Descent of Man' Names of the time: Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostojevski, Wagner, Marx (Karl, not Groucho).