1855 in science
From Infogalactic: the planetary knowledge core
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The year 1855 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.
Contents
Biology
- Robert Remak publishes Untersuchungen über die Entwickelung der Wirbelthiere in Berlin, providing evidence for cell division, which is supported (but not acknowledged) by Rudolf Virchow.[1][2]
Cartography
- September – Rev. James Patterson presents the Gall orthographic projection for celestial and terrestrial equal-area cartography.[3]
Chemistry
- May 10 – The Bunsen burner is invented by Robert Wilhelm Bunsen.
- Friedrich Gaedcke first isolates the cocaine alkaloid, which he names "erythroxyline".[4]
- William Odling proposes that carbon is tetravalent.
- Charles-Adolphe Wurtz publishes the Wurtz reaction.[5]
- Benjamin Silliman, Jr. pioneers methods of petroleum cracking, which makes the entire modern petrochemical industry possible.[6]
Exploration
- November 17 – Dr David Livingstone becomes the first European to see the Victoria Falls.
Medicine
- March – Mary Seacole opens the British Hotel at Balaklava, a nursing and convalescent establishment for Crimean War officers.[7]
- October – The Renkioi temporary hospital, prefabricated in wood to a design by I. K. Brunel, is erected in Turkey to serve Crimean War invalids.[8]
- Thomas Addison describes Addison's disease in On the Constitutional and Local Effects of Disease of the Suprarenal Capsules.
Paleontology
- The first archaeopteryx fossil is found in Bavaria, but will not be identified until 1970.[9]
Physics
- James Clerk Maxwell unifies electricity and magnetism into a single theory, classical electromagnetism, thereby showing that light is an electromagnetic wave.
- Heinrich Geißler designs a mercury pump capable of producing a significant vacuum.
Technology
- October 17 – Henry Bessemer files his patent for the Bessemer process of steelmaking.[10]
- William Armstrong produces the rifled breech-loading Armstrong Gun.
Institutions
- Opening of Eidgenössische Polytechnische Schule in Zurich, Switzerland.
Publications
- Matthew Fontaine Maury publishes The Physical Geography of the Sea.
Awards
- Copley Medal: Léon Foucault
- Wollaston Medal for Geology: Henry De la Beche
Births
- January 5 – King Camp Gillette (died 1932), inventor.
- January 21 – John Moses Browning (died 1926), inventor.
- January 28 – William Seward Burroughs (died 1898), inventor of the adding machine.
- March 13 – Percival Lowell (died 1916), astronomer.
- May 29 – David Bruce (died 1931), microbiologist.
- November 5 – Léon Teisserenc de Bort (died 1913), meteorologist.
- November 7 – Edwin Hall (died 1938), American physicist who discovered the "Hall effect".
Deaths
- February 23 – Carl Friedrich Gauss (born 1777), mathematician.
- March 20 – Joseph Aspdin (born 1778), inventor.
- April 13 – Henry De la Beche (born 1796), geologist.
- June 29 – John Gorrie (born 1803), physician and inventor.
- July 6 – Andrew Crosse (born 1784), 'gentleman scientist', pioneer experimenter in electricity.
- July 8 – William Edward Parry (born 1790), Arctic explorer.
- October 7 – François Magendie (born 1783), physiologist.
- December 6 – William John Swainson (born 1789), naturalist.
References
- ↑ Virchow, R. Archiv für pathologische Anatomie und Physiologie und für klinische Medicin 8 (1855).
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- ↑ At Glasgow meeting of British Association for the Advancement of Science.
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