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
- 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.
- Henry Walter Bates publishes "Contributions to an insect fauna of the Amazon valley. Lepidoptera: Heliconidae"[1] describing Batesian mimicry.
- George Bentham and Joseph Dalton Hooker begin publication of Genera plantarum based on the collections of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, England.[2]
- 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
- Chemist and composer Alexander Borodin describes the first nucleophilic displacement of chlorine by fluorine in benzoyl chloride.[3]
- 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.[4]
- Alexander Parkes exhibits Parkesine, one of the earliest synthetic polymers, at the International Exhibition in London. This discovery forms the foundation of the modern plastics industry.[5]
Medicine
- Hermann Snellen publishes the Snellen chart for testing visual acuity.
Technology
- Brown & Sharpe produce the first Universal Milling machine.[6]
- David Kirkaldy publishes Results of an Experimental Inquiry into the Comparative Tensile Strength and other properties of various kinds of Wrought-Iron and Steel in Glasgow describing his pioneering work in tensile testing.
Awards
Births
- January 23 – David Hilbert (died 1943), German mathematician
- February 14 – Agnes Pockels (died 1935), German chemist (in Venice)
- June 7 – Philipp Lenard (died 1947), German physicist
- July 2 – William Henry Bragg (died 1942), English winner of the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics
- July 20 – Paul Bujor (died 1952), Romanian animal morphologist, politician and short story writer
- October 12 – Theodor Boveri (died 1915), German geneticist
- October 19 – Auguste Lumière (died 1954), French inventor, film pioneer
Deaths
- January 10 – Samuel Colt (born 1814), American inventor
- February 3 – Jean-Baptiste Biot (born 1774), French physicist
- February 7 – Prosper Ménière (born 1799), French physician who first described the symptoms of Ménière's disease
- February 11 – Luther V. Bell (born 1806), American psychiatric physician
- March 1 – Peter Barlow (born 1776), English mathematician
- April 3 – Sir James Clark Ross (born 1800), English explorer of the Polar regions
- May 6 – Olry Terquem (born 1782), French Jewish geometer
- October 8 – James Walker (born 1781), Scottish-born civil engineer
- October 21 – Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, 1st Baronet (born 1783), English physiologist
- December 18 – Lucas Barrett (born 1837), English naturalist (drowned)
- December 20 – Robert Knox (born 1791), Scottish anatomist
- December 21 – Karl Kreil (born 1798), Austrian astronomer
References
- ^ Transactions of the Linnean Society (London) 23 pp. 495–566.
- ^ Isely, Duane (1994). One hundred and one botanists. Ames: Iowa State University Press.
- ^ Behrman, E. J. (2006). "Borodin" (PDF). Journal of Chemical Education. 83: 1138. doi:10.1021/ed083p1138.1.
- ^ "The Periodic Table". Retrieved 2011-10-07.
- ^ "Alexander Parkes (1813–1890)". People & Polymers. Plastics Historical Society. Archived from the original on 2007-03-15. Retrieved 2007-03-24.
- ^ Roe, Joseph Wickham (1916). English and American Tool Builders. New Haven: Yale University Press.