1789 in science
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The year 1789 in science and technology involved some significant events.
Contents |
[edit] Anatomy
- Antonio Scarpa publishes Anatomicæ disquisitiones de auditu et olfactu, a classic treatise on the hearing and olfactory organs.[1]
[edit] Astronomy
- August 28 & September 17 - William Herschel discovers Saturn's moons Enceladus and Mimas, which he describes to the Royal Society of London on November 12.[2]
[edit] Botany
- Erasmus Darwin publishes his poem The Loves of the Plants, a popular rendering of Linnaeus' works.
- Antoine Laurent de Jussieu publishes Genera Plantarum: secundum ordines naturales disposita, juxta methodum in Horto regio parisiensi exaratam, anno M.DCC.LXXIV, providing a basis for the system of natural classification of flowering plants largely still in use.[3]
[edit] Chemistry
- Antoine Lavoisier's Traité élémentaire de chimie presents a unified view of new theories of chemistry, containing a clear statement of the law of conservation of mass, defining the nature of elements and denying the existence of phlogiston.
[edit] Exploration
- July 10 - Alexander Mackenzie reaches the Mackenzie River Delta.
[edit] Mathematics
- The Slovene mathematician Jurij Vega presents his approximation of π to 140 decimal places of which the first 126 are correct,[4] a feat not exceeded for more than half a century.
[edit] Medicine
- February 4 - James Parkinson gives the first description of human injury from lightning strikes, in a paper read to the Medical Society of London.
- Andrew Duncan delivers the first lectures on forensic medicine in Britain, at the University of Edinburgh.[5]
[edit] Awards
[edit] Births
- February 26 - Eaton Hodgkinson, English structural engineer (d. 1861)
- August 21 - Augustin Louis Cauchy, French mathematician (d. 1857)
- September 28 - Richard Bright, English physician (d. 1858)
- October 25 - Heinrich Schwabe, German astronomer (d. 1875)
[edit] Deaths
- April 7 - Petrus Camper, Dutch comparative anatomist (b. 1722)
- May 25 - Anders Dahl, Swedish botanist for whom the dahlia is named (b. 1751)
- undated - Angélique du Coudray, French pioneer of modern midwifery (b. 1712)
[edit] References
- ^ Richardson, Benjamin Ward (1886). "Antonio Scarpa, F.R.S., and Surgical Anatomy". The Asclepiad (London: Longmans, Green and Co.) 4 (16): 128–157. http://books.google.com/?id=-xVCQGjm3ZEC. Retrieved 2008-06-10.
- ^ Herschel, William (1 January 1790). "Account of the Discovery of a Sixth and Seventh Satellite of the Planet Saturn; with Remarks on the Construction of its Ring, its Atmosphere, its Rotation on an Axis, and its spheroidical Figure". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (London) 80: 1–20. doi:10.1098/rstl.1790.0001. http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/80/1.1.full.pdf+html. Retrieved 2011-11-23.
- ^
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "De Jussieu". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/De_Jussieu. - ^ Vega, Géorge (1789-08-20). "Détermination de la Demi-Circonférence d'un Cercle". Nova Acta Academiae Scientiarum Imperialis Petropolitanae (Saint Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Arts and Sciences) 9. http://www.southernct.edu/~sandifer/Ed/History/Preprints/Talks/Jurij%20Vega/Vega%20math%20script.pdf. Retrieved 2012-01-06.
- ^ Forbes, Thomas Rogers (1985). Surgeons at the Bailey: English Forensic Medicine to 1878. New Haven: Yale University Press. p. 7. ISBN 0300033389.
