There was one sterile period: only one poem is dated between 1872 and 1882 and, except for the poems written on the trip to Italy in 1887, very few from 1882 to 1890.

* 1887 – Mumbai Fire Brigade is established.

* 1887 – A week after being arrested by the Prussian Secret Police, Alsatian police inspector Guillaume Schnaebelé is released on order of German Emperor William I, defusing a possible war.

There is some controversy regarding how the records of 1887 should be interpreted.

In his 1887 work, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, Tönnies argued that Gemeinschaft is perceived to be a tighter and more cohesive social entity, due to the presence of a " unity of will.

* 1887 – The French Riviera is hit by a large earthquake, killing around 2, 000.

* 1887 – In Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania the first Groundhog Day is observed.

A part of this route is the same as where electric trams made their world first run in 1887.

* 1887 – The Reinsurance Treaty between Germany and Russia is signed.

* 1887 – David Kalakaua, monarch of the Kingdom of Hawaii, is forced at gunpoint, at the hands of the Americans, to sign the Bayonet Constitution giving Americans more power in Hawaii while stripping Hawaiian citizens of their rights.

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier (; October 6, 1887 – August 27, 1965 ), was an architect, designer, urbanist, and writer, famous for being one of the pioneers of what is now called modern architecture.

Max and Moritz is the first published original foreign children ’ s book in Japan which was translated into rōmaji by Shinjirō Shibutani and Kaname Oyaizu in 1887 as (" Naughty stories ").

* 1887 – Balochistan is conquered by the British Empire.

Founded in 1887, Occidental College, or " Oxy " as it is called by students and alumni, is one of the oldest liberal arts colleges on the West Coast.

Between 1880 and 1887, Heaviside developed the operational calculus ( involving the D notation for the differential operator, which he is credited with creating ), a method of solving differential equations by transforming them into ordinary algebraic equations which caused a great deal of controversy when first introduced, owing to the lack of rigour in his derivation of it.

First observed by Heinrich Hertz in 1887, the phenomenon is also known as the Hertz effect, although the latter term has fallen out of general use.

Edison for many years used the " hill-and-dale " method with both cylinder and disc records, and Emile Berliner is credited with the invention of the lateral cut Gramophone record in 1887.

The term wireless telegraphy is a historical term used today to apply to early radio telegraph communications techniques and practices, particularly those used during the first three decades of radio ( 1887 to 1920 ) before the term radio came into use.

In Italy, there is Bussana Vecchia, a ghost town in Liguria which was abandoned in 1887 following an earthquake and subsequently squatted in the 1960s.

The land and sea boundary with China, delineated under the France-China treaties of 1887 and 1895, is " the frontier line " accepted by Hanoi that China agreed in 1957-58 to respect.

Wireless telegraphy is a historical term used today to apply to early radio telegraph communications techniques and practices, particularly those used during the first three decades of radio ( 1887 to 1920 ) before the term radio came into use.

* 1887 – 1890: Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti of Liverpool, England is hired by the London Electric Supply Corporation to design the Deptford Power Station.

* February 4 – The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, as passed by the 49th United States Congress, is signed into law by President Grover Cleveland.