1785

• American bird illustrator John James Audubon.
• English geologist Adam Sedgwick.
• Chinese official Lin Tse-Hsü (pinyin Lin Zixu) whose actions precipitated the 1839-1842 Opium War.
• English poet and author Thomas Love Peacock.
• German folklorist Jacob Ludwig Karl Grimm.
• French physicist Claude Navier.
• French mathematician Charles Brianchon.
• French sailor and explorer Comte Jean-François Galaup de Lapérouse
• French physicist Jean Charles Athanase Peltier.
• Baltimoresocialite Elisabeth "Betsy" Patterson, who married Napoleon Bonaparte's brother Jerome; her brother's widow married the Duke of Wellington.
• French composer Alexandre-Pierre-François Boëly.
• American poet and Unitarian minister John Pierpont (also the maternal grandfather of John Pierpont Morgan).

• Italian composer Baldassare Galuppi.
• James Edward Oglethorpe, founder of Georgia.

Events of 1785:

• The United States declares the dollar its unit of currency.
• The United States concludes a treaty with the Cherokee Indians, and a separate treaty with the Wyandot and Lenni-Lenape (Delaware) Indians.
• The US Goverment starts selling the lands it has purchased from the Indians a $1 an acre.
• The Cherokee's lands were whittled away bit by bit by 11 more treaties, until 1838 when gold was allegedly discovered on the small bit of territory left, and President Andrew Jackson ordered them removed west to Oklahoma. The Wyandot were pushed out of Ohio with all the other tribes by William Henry Harrison during the War of 1812.
• Landowners in the Scottish Highlands begin evicting the clans who live there from the land to make way for sheep, which are more profitable.  The "Highland Clearances" force tens of thousands of people to move to the coast to a miserable existence of fishing and kelp collecting.  The only avenue of existence left to most young men was to enlist in a "Highland Regiment" of the British Army.
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart begins working on his opera of the popular Beaumarchais play The Marriage of Figaro.
• Spain pays to transport seven shiploads of Acadians from Nova Scotia to Louisiana.
• Frenchman Jean-Pierre Blanchard and American John Jeffries are the first to fly a balloon across the English Channel.
• In France, The Cardinal de Rohan presents what he thinks is a gift to Queen Marie Antoinette, a ridiculously expensive Diamond Necklace. Alas, the money to pay for the necklace is embezzled, and the French Treasury eventually has to foot the bill. As France's finances are slightly this side of bankruptcy, a public scandal ensues from this affair and does little to endear the Queen to France's starving peasantry.
• Shah Agha Mohammad Khan moves the capital of Persia to Teheran.

1784 - 1785 - 1786