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1843 in science

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1843 in science

The year 1843 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Contents

Astronomy

  • March 11–14 – Eta Carinae flares to become the second brightest star.
  • February 5–April 19 – "Great March Comet" observed.
  • Heinrich Schwabe reports a periodic change in the number of sunspots: they wax and wane in number according to a ten-year cycle.

    • Chemistry

  • Jean-Baptiste Dumas names lactose.
  • Carl Mosander discovers Terbium and Erbium.
  • John J. Waterston produces an account of the kinetic theory of gases.

    • Mathematics

  • September – Ada Lovelace translates and expands Menabrea’s notes on Charles Babbage's analytical engine, including an algorithm for calculating a sequence of Bernoulli numbers, regarded as the world's first computer program.
  • October 16 – William Rowan Hamilton discovers the calculus of quaternions and deduces that they are non-commutative.
  • Arthur Cayley and James Joseph Sylvester found the algebraic invariant theory.
  • John T. Graves discovers the octonions.
  • Pierre-Alphonse Laurent discovers and presents the Laurent expansion theorem.

    • Physics

  • James Prescott Joule experimentally finds the mechanical equivalent of heat.

    • Physiology and medicine

  • British surgeon James Braid publishes Neurypnology: or the Rationale of Nervous Sleep, a key text in the history of hypnotism.
  • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., argues that puerperal fever is spread by lack of hygiene in physicians.

    • Technology

  • March 25 – Completion of the Thames Tunnel, the first bored underwater tunnel in the world (engineer: Marc Isambard Brunel).
  • July 19 – Launch of SS Great Britain, the first iron-hulled, propeller-driven ship to cross the Atlantic Ocean (designer: Isambard Kingdom Brunel).
  • November 21 – Thomas Hancock patents the vulcanisation of rubber using sulphur in the United Kingdom
  • The steam powered rotary printing press is invented by Richard March Hoe in the United States.
  • Robert Stirling and his brother James convert a steam engine at a Dundee factory to operate as a Stirling engine.
  • The first public telegraph line in the United Kingdom is laid between Paddington and Slough.

    • Publications

  • October – Anna Atkins begins publication of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, a collection of contact printed cyanotype photograms of algae which forms the first book illustrated with photographic images.

    • Awards

  • Copley Medal: Jean-Baptiste Dumas
  • Wollaston Medal for Geology: Jean-Baptiste Elie de Beaumont; Pierre Armand Dufrenoy

    • Births

  • January 13 – David Ferrier (died 1928), Scottish neurologist.
  • May 6 – G. K. Gilbert (died 1918), American geologist.
  • June 12 – David Gill (died 1914), Scottish astronomer.
  • June 23 – Paul Heinrich von Groth (died 1927), German mineralogist.
  • July 24 – William de Wiveleslie Abney (died 1920), English astronomer.
  • August 17 – Alexandre Lacassagne (died 1924), French forensic scientist.
  • November 30 – Martha Ripley (died 1912), American physician.
  • December 11 – Robert Koch (died 1910), German physician, famous for the discovery of the tubercle bacillus (1882) and the cholera bacillus (1883) and for his development of Koch's postulates; awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1905
  • Adelaida Lukanina (died 1908), Russian chemist.

    • Deaths

  • July 25 – Charles Macintosh (born 1766), Scottish inventor of a waterproof fabric.
  • August 10 – Robert Adrain (born 1775), Irish American mathematician.
  • September 11 – Joseph Nicollet (born 1786), French geographer, explorer, mathematician and astronomer.
  • September 19 – Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis (born 1792), French mathematician and discoverer of the Coriolis effect.
  • September 30 – Richard Harlan (born 1796), American zoologist.
  • November 16 – Abraham Colles (born 1773), Anglo-Irish surgeon.

    • References

    1843 in science Wikipedia
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