1733

• English chemist Joseph Priestley.
• German biologist Joseph Kölreuter.
• German author Christoph Friedrich Nicolai.
• German author Christoph Martin Wieland.
• Finnish historian Henrik Forsius.

• French composer François Couperin.
• German composer Georg Böhm.
• French sculptor Pierre Etienne Monnot.
• Frederick Augustus II, elector of Saxony and king of Poland.
• English actor Barton Booth.
• Dutch-born English physician, poet, and political commentator Bernard de Mandeville.

• English prison reformer James Oglethorpe founds the colony of Georgia with its initial settlement of Savannah as a place where debtors can go to work their debts off instead of debtors prison.
• The Spanish treasure fleet sinks off the Florida Keys.
• The Polish king is supposed to be elected by the nobility. There are two candidates to succeed Frederick Augustus as king of Poland:
• Stanislaus Leszczynski, father-in-law of king Louis XV of France, and whom king Charles XII of Sweden had put on the Polish throne as a puppet in 1705.
• Frederick Augustus, elector of Saxony, son of the previous king.
Stanislaus is favored by the French (of course) and most of the Polish nobility.  Frederick Augustus, however, is favored by Saxony (of course), Austria and Russia. The latter countries manage to get some of the dissenting nobles to "ask" them for help.   Louis needs to protect his father-in-law, and thus is born the War of the Polish Succession (fought mostly in Italy and Lorraine).
• Parilament passes the Molasses Act, imposing a duty on molasses imported from anywhere other than the British West Indies.
• James Kay invents the flying shuttle, a step towards the automation of weaving.
• Benjamin Franklin publishes the first Poor Richard's Almanack.

1732 - 1733 - 1734

How They Were Made - 18th Century