Calcutta was the capital of British India from 1772. It became the Royal capital of India on 1st November 1858. Calcutta then became the Imperial capital of India on 1st January 1877 and remained so till 1911 when the capital was moved to Delhi.
Kolkata based physician Subhash Mukhopadhyay was the second doctor to perform a successful in-vitro fertilization in the world leading th the birth of Kanupriya Agarwal, alias Durga.
The University of Calcutta, India’s second oldest modern university was established in 1857.
Born into brothels, a documentary about the children of prostitutes in Sonagachi (Kolkata's red light district) won the Oscar award for the best documentary feature in 2005.
The Calcutta Medical College which was founded in 1835, is Asia’s oldest medical school.
India’s first cellular telephone service was started in Kolkata in July 31, 1995.
The British built the first theatre hall in 1745 and called it the “Play House”. But it was the Russian theatre lover Horasim Lebedev who floated the first Bangla theatre production in 1795 based on an adaptation of “The Disguise”. Lebedev is also credited with building the first auditorium for Bangla play, the “Bengalee Theatre”.
The world’s second oldest Geological Survey came into existence in Calcutta in the year 1851.
Asia’s first modern University in Serampore (a Danish settlement) was built in 1827.
The Indian Botanical Gardens at Shibpur, near the Bengal Engineering College, is home of the largest banyan tree in the world (the banyan tree with the biggest girth), according to the Guinness Book of Records.
