1882 in science

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The year 1882 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy

• September – Great Comet of 1882 sighted.

Great Comet as seen from Cape Town by David Gill

• December 6 – Transit of Venus, 1882.

Biology

• March 24 – Robert Koch announces his discovery of the bacterium responsible for tuberculosis, Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
• Élie Metchnikoff discovers phagocytosis.

Chemistry

• Italian physicist Luigi Palmieri detects helium on Earth for the first time through its D₃ spectral line when he analyzes the lava of Mount Vesuvius.

Earth sciences

• Clarence Dutton's Tertiary History of the Grand Cañon District is published by the United States Geological Survey.

Mathematics

• German mathematician Ferdinand von Lindemann publishes proof that π is a transcendental number and that squaring the circle is consequently impossible.
• December – Swedish mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler establishes the journal Acta Mathematica.

Medicine

• March 28 – Paul Carl Beiersdorf patents an adhesive bandage in Germany, the foundation of the Beiersdorf company.
• Vladimir Bekhterev publishes Provodiashchie puti mozga ("The Conduction Paths in the Brain and Spinal Cord"), beginning to note the role of the hippocampus in memory.

Technology

• By March – Étienne-Jules Marey invents a chronophotographic gun capable of photographing 12 consecutive frames per second on the same plate.
• April 29 – Werner von Siemens demonstrates his Electromote, the first form of trolleybus, in Berlin.
• June 6 – Henry W. Seeley patents the electric clothes iron in the United States.
• September 4 – Thomas Edison starts the world's first commercial electrical power plant, lighting one square mile of lower Manhattan.

Events

• First International Polar Year, an international scientific program, begins.
• The Chartered Institute of Patent Agents, the modern-day Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys, is founded in the United Kingdom.

Awards

• Copley Medal: Arthur Cayley
• Wollaston Medal for Geology: Franz Ritter von Hauer

Births

• March 14 – Wacław Sierpiński (died 1969), Polish mathematician.
• March 23 – Emmy Noether (died 1969), German mathematician.
• June 17 – Harold Gillies (died 1960), New Zealand-born plastic surgeon.
• July 21 – Herbert E. Ives (died 1953), American optical engineer.
• September 30 – Johannes Hans Geiger (died 1945), inventor of the Geiger counter.
• October 5 – Robert Goddard (died 1945), American rocket scientist.
• October 26 – Marietta Pallis (died 1963), Indian-born Graeco-British ecologist.
• December 11 – Max Born (died 1970), physicist and recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1954.
• December 28 – Arthur Eddington (died 1944), astrophysicist.
• Israel Aharoni (died 1946), zoologist.

Deaths

• January 11 – Theodor Schwann (born 1810), physiologist.
• April 19 – Charles Darwin (born 1809), geologist and naturalist.
• September 23 – Friedrich Woehler (born 1800), chemist.
• October 27 – Christian Heinrich von Nagel (born 1803), geometer.
• November 20 – Henry Draper (born 1837), doctor, astronomer.
• December 24
  • Johann Benedict Listing (born 1808), mathematician.
  • Charles Vincent Walker (born 1812), telegraph engineer.