1750 in science
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The year 1750 in science and technology involved some significant events.
Astronomy
- Thomas Wright suggests that the Milky Way Galaxy is a disk-shaped system of stars with the Solar System near the centre.
Exploration
- April 1 – Pehr Osbeck sets out on a primarily botanical expedition to China.
Mathematics
- English mathematician Thomas Simpson formulates the Weber problem, and solves it geometrically in the triangle case.[1]
Physics
- January 17 – John Canton reads a paper before the Royal Society on a method of making artificial magnets.[2]
- Approx. date – Leonhard Euler and Daniel Bernoulli develop the Euler–Bernoulli beam equation.
Technology
- November 18 – Westminster Bridge across the River Thames in London, designed by the Swiss-born engineer Charles Labelye, is officially opened.[3]
Publications
- Historia Plantarum, originally written by Conrad Gessner between 1555 and 1565.
Awards
Births
- March 16 – Caroline Herschel, German-born English astronomer (died 1848)
- July 2 – François Huber, Swiss naturalist (died 1831)
- July 5 – Ami Argand, Genevan physicist and chemist (died 1803)
- September 22 – Christian Konrad Sprengel, German botanist (died 1816)
- October 25 – Marie Le Masson Le Golft, French naturalist (died 1826)
- Aaron Arrowsmith, English cartographer (died 1823)
- Jean Nicolas Fortin, French physicist and instrument maker who invented a portable mercury barometer in 1800 (died 1831)
Deaths
- December 1 – Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr, German mathematician, astronomer, and cartographer (born 1677)