1862 in science

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The year 1862 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy

• January 31 - Alvan Graham Clark makes the first observation of Sirius B, a white dwarf star, through an eighteen inch telescope at Northwestern University.

Biology

• Henry Walter Bates publishes "Contributions to an insect fauna of the Amazon valley. Lepidoptera: Heliconidae". Transactions of the Linnean Society (London) 23 pp. 495-566, describing Batesian mimicry.
• May 15 - Charles Darwin publishes On the various contrivances by which British and foreign Orchids are fertilised by insects, and on the good effects of intercrossing.
• John Gwyn Jeffreys begins publication of British Conchology, or an account of the Mollusca which now inhabit the British Isles and the surrounding seas.

Chemistry

• Alexander Borodin describes the first nucleophilic displacement of chlorine by fluorine in benzoyl chloride.
• Mineralogist Alexandre-Emile Béguyer de Chancourtois makes the first proposal to arrange the chemical elements in order of atomic weights, although this is largely ignored by chemists.

Medicine

• Hermann Snellen publishes the Snellen chart for testing visual acuity.

Technology

• Brown & Sharpe produce the first Universal Milling machine.

Awards

• Copley Medal: Thomas Graham
• Wollaston Medal for geology: Robert Godwin-Austen

Births

• January 23 - David Hilbert (d. 1943), German mathematician.
• February 14 - Agnes Pockels (d. 1935), German chemist (in Venice).
• July 2 - William Henry Bragg (d. 1942), English winner of the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics.
• October 12 - Theodor Boveri (d. 1915), German geneticist.
• October 19 - Auguste Lumière (d. 1954), French inventor, film pioneer.

Deaths

• January 10 - Samuel Colt (b. 1814), American inventor.
• February 3 - Jean-Baptiste Biot (b. 1774), French physicist.
• February 7 - Prosper Ménière (b. 1799), French physician who first described the symptoms of Ménière's disease.
• March 1 - Peter Barlow (b. 1776), English mathematician.
• April 3 - Sir James Clark Ross (b. 1800), English explorer of the Polar regions.
• October 8 - James Walker (b. 1781), Scottish-born civil engineer.
• October 21 - Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, 1st Baronet (b. 1783), English physiologist.
• December 18 - Lucas Barrett (b. 1837), English naturalist (drowned).
• December 20 - Robert Knox (b. 1791), Scottish anatomist
• December 21 - Karl Kreil (b. 1798), Austrian astronomer.