1738

• The future King George III of Great Britain.
• Hanoverian (later British) astronomer William Herschel.
• Irish architect John Beresford.
• Irish folk musician Turlough O'Carolan.
• Austrian composer Leopold Hofmann.
• British aristocrat and general Lord Charles Cornwallis.
• Italian composer Giovanni Battista Borghi.
• American painter John Singleton Copley.
• American-born painter Benjamin West.
• Czech composer Jan Evangelista Antonin Kozeluh.
• Italian jurist Cesare Beccaria.
• german painter Anton Raphael Mengs.
• British Revolutionary War general Henry Clinton.

• Dutch physician Hermann Boerhaave.
• French composer Jean-Joseph Mouret.
• French diplomat and geographer Benoit Maillet.

• Anglican priests John Wesley, Charles Wesley, and George Whitefield claim to have religious visions that lead them to found Methodism.
• The Spanish colonial government in Florida establishes a refuge for escaped slaves from Carolina at Fort Mose.
• The Treaty of Vienna ending the War of the Polish Succession is finally ratified (it was agreed to in 1735). the terms are mostly salami slicing:
• Augustus, the Elector of Saxony, gets the throne of Poland.
• France agrees the Pragmatic Sanction allowing Maria Theresa to inherit the Hapsburg dominions.
• French King Louis XV consoles his father-in-law Stanislaus Leszczynski, who had been the canididate preferred by Polish nobility, with the Duchy of Lorraine.
• Francis Stephen, duke of Lorraine, is parked in Tuscany.
• Spain gets Naples and Sicily, Austria gets Parma and Piacenza.
• The government of Naples undertakes excavations at Herculaneum.
• J F Brondel invents the flush toilet.
• William Champion patents a process for distilling zinc.

1737 - 1738 - 1739

How They Were Made - 18th Century