1859 in science
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The year 1859 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.
Contents |
[edit] Astronomy
- August 28–September 2 - The solar storm of 1859, the largest geomagnetic solar storm on record, causes the Northern lights aurora to be visible as far south as Cuba and knocks out telegraph communication. This is also called the Carrington event, Richard Carrington being the first known person to observe solar flares, due to this storm. It is also the first major solar radiation storm to be recorded.[1]
- Marian Albertovich Kowalski publishes the first usable method to deduce the rotation of the Milky Way.[2]
- Attempting to explain Mercury's solar orbit, French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier proposes the existence of a hypothetical planet, Vulcan, inside its orbit and amateur astronomer Edmond Modeste Lescarbault claims to have observed it during March.[3]
[edit] Biology
- March 21 - The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania issues the charter establishing the Zoological Society of Philadelphia, the first organization of its kind in the United States and founder of the nation's first zoo.
- November 24 - Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species.
- Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, in the second volume of Histoire naturelle générale des Règnes organiques, introduces the term ethology.[4]
- Rudolf Virchow publishes Vorlesungen über Cellularpathologie in ihrer Begründung auf physiologischer und pathologischer Gewebelehre, a major textbook on cellular pathology.[5]
[edit] Chemistry
- Aleksandr Butlerov discovers hexamine.
- August von Hofmann isolates sorbic acid.
- Gustav Robert Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen invent an improved spectroscope.[6][7]
[edit] Mathematics
- Arthur Cayley produces the first Cayley–Klein metric.[8]
- Bernhard Riemann publishes his paper on number theory, Ueber die Anzahl der Primzahlen unter einer gegebenen Grösse ("On the Number of Primes Less Than a Given Magnitude")[9] including the Riemann zeta function and Riemann hypothesis.
[edit] Medicine
- Florence Nightingale publishes Notes on Nursing: What it is and What it is Not in London.[10]
- District nursing begins in Liverpool, England, when philanthropist William Rathbone employs Mary Robinson to nurse the sick poor in their own homes.
[edit] Technology
- May 2 - Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Royal Albert Bridge for the Cornwall Railway at Saltash in England is officially opened.[11]
- Thomas Aveling of Rochester, Kent, England, produces the first traction engine, by modification of an existing machine.[12]
- Étienne Lenoir, working in Paris, produces the first single-cylinder two-stroke Lenoir cycle gas engine with an electric ignition system.[13]
[edit] Awards
- February 23 - William Armstrong created a Knight Bachelor
- Copley Medal: Wilhelm Weber
- Wollaston Medal for geology: Charles Darwin
[edit] Births
- February 14
- Henry Valentine Knaggs (d. 1954), English practitioner of naturopathic medicine.
- George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr. (d. 1896), American civil engineer.
- February 19 - Svante Arrhenius (d. 1927), Swedish winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
- February 28 - Florian Cajori (d. 1930), Swiss historian of mathematics.
- March 4 - Alexander Stepanovich Popov (d. 1906), Russian physicist.
- April 7 - Jacques Loeb (d. 1924), German physiologist.
- May 15 - Pierre Curie (d. 1906), French winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics.
- May 28 - Edward Hopkinson (d. 1922), English electrical engineer.
- June 25 - Gerhard Heilmann (d. 1946), Danish paleo-ornithologist.
[edit] Deaths
- May 1 - John Walker (b. 1781), English chemist.
- May 5 - Johann Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet (b. 1805), German mathematician.
- May 6 - Alexander von Humboldt (b. 1769), German naturalist and explorer.
- June 8 - Walter Hunt (b. 1796), American inventor.
- September 10 - Thomas Nuttall (b. 1786), English naturalist.
- September 15 - Isambard Kingdom Brunel (b. 1806), British civil engineer.
- October 12 - Robert Stephenson (b. 1803), English railway engineer.
[edit] References
- ^ Plait, Philip C. (2008). Death from the Skies! – these are the ways the world will end. New York: Viking Penguin. ISBN 978-0670019977.
- ^ Recherches astronomiques de l'observatoire de Kasan.
- ^ Baum, Richard; Sheehan, William (1997). In Search of Planet Vulcan, the Ghost in Newton's Clockwork Machine. New York: Plenum Press. ISBN 0306455676.
- ^ Oxford English Dictionary
- ^
"Virchow, Rudolf". Encyclopedia Americana. 1920. - ^ Weeks, Mary Elvira (1932). "The discovery of the elements. XIII. Some spectroscopic discoveries". Journal of Chemical Education 9 (8): 1413–1434. Bibcode 1932JChEd...9.1413W. doi:10.1021/ed009p1413. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ed009p1413. Retrieved 2011-11-21.
- ^ "Robert Bunsen". infoplease. Pearson Education. 2007. http://www.infoplease.com/biography/var/robertbunsen.html. Retrieved 2011-11-21.
- ^ Cayley, Arthur (1859), "A sixth memoir upon quantics", Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 149: 61–90, ISSN 0080-4614, JSTOR 108690, Collected Math. Papers, volume 2
- ^ Monatsberichte der Königlich Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin (November 1859).
- ^ "Florence Nightingale: Notes on Nursing". 300 Women Who Changed the World. Encyclopædia Britannica. http://search.eb.com/women/article-9404148. Retrieved 2011-10-12.
- ^ Binding, John (1997). Brunel's Royal Albert Bridge. Truro: Twelveheads Press. ISBN 0-906294-39-8.
- ^ Bonnett, Harold (1975). Discovering Traction Engines (rev. ed.). Princes Risborough: Shire Publications. p. 5. ISBN 0-85263-318-1.
- ^ Patented 1860. Wise, David Burgess (1974). "Lenoir: The Motoring Pioneer". In Ward, Ian. The World of Automobiles. London: Orbis Publishing.
