1866 in science

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The year 1866 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy

• May – William Huggins studies the emission spectrum of a nova and discovers that it is surrounded by a cloud of hydrogen.
• June 4 – Pluto (not known at this time) reaches its only aphelion between 1618 and 2113.
• Giovanni Schiaparelli realizes that meteor streams occur when the Earth passes through the orbit of a comet that has left debris along its path.

Biology

• Gregor Mendel publishes his laws of inheritance.
• Ernst Haeckel challenges the plant/animal division of life, observing that single celled organisms, the protists, do not fit into either category.
• Élie Metchnikoff describes the early separation of "polecells" (progenital cells) in parthenogenetic Diptera.
• Robert John Lechmere Guppy discovers the guppy (fish) in Trinidad.
• Frederick Smith first discovers Formica candida in the Bournemouth district of England, describing it as Formica gagates.
• Nikolai Kaufman publishes his Moscow Flora.

Chemistry

• Dynamite invented by Alfred Nobel.
• August von Hofmann proposes the now standard system of hydrocarbon nomenclature and invents the Hofmann voltameter.
• Emil Erlenmeyer proposes that naphthalene has a structure of two fused benzene rings.

Medicine

• Max Schultze discovers two sorts of 'receptors' in the retina.
• Dr John Langdon Down publishes his theory that different types of mental condition can be classified by ethnic characteristics, notably "Mongolism", the genetic developmental disability now known as Down syndrome.
• Invention of a clinical thermometer by Thomas Clifford Allbutt.
• Elizabeth Garrett Anderson opens the St Mary's Dispensary in London where women could seek medical advice from exclusively female practitioners.
• A cholera epidemic in London causes over 5,000 deaths.
• Patrick Manson starts a school of tropical medicine in Hong Kong.

Physics

• James Clerk Maxwell formulates the Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution in the kinetic theory of gases.

Technology

• January 12 – Royal Aeronautical Society is formed in London.
• July 27 – The SS Great Eastern successfully completes laying the transatlantic telegraph cable between Valentia Island, Ireland and Heart's Content, Newfoundland, permanently restoring a communications link.
• August 23 – Ralph H. Twedell patents the hydraulic riveter in the United Kingdom.

Awards

• Copley Medal: Julius Plücker
• Wollaston Medal for Geology: Charles Lyell

Births

• April 17 – Ernest Starling (died 1927), English physiologist
• September 13 – Arthur Pollen (died 1937), English inventor
• September 21 – H. G. Wells (died 1946), English scientific populariser
• September 25 – Thomas Hunt Morgan (died 1945), American biologist, Nobel laureate in Physiology
• October 8 – Reginald Fessenden (died 1932), Canadian pioneer of radio broadcasting
• November 30 – Robert Broom (died 1951), Scottish-born paleontologist
• December 7 – Maude Delap (died 1953), Irish marine biologist

Deaths

• March 6 – William Whewell (born 1794), English scientist, philosopher, and historian of science
• April 5 – Thomas Hodgkin (born 1798), English physician
• July 20 – Bernhard Riemann (born 1826), German-born mathematician.
• December 1 – George Everest (born 1790), British surveyor and geographer.