1786 in science

The year 1786 in science and technology involved some significant events.

Astronomy

January 17 – Pierre Méchain first observes Comet Encke, from Paris.
August 1 – Caroline Herschel becomes the first woman to discover a comet, observing from England.

Summer – English captain George Dixon begins a year-long exploration of the shores of modern-day British Columbia and southeastern Alaska. He spends the intervening winter in the Hawaiian Islands, where he becomes the first European to visit the island of Molokaʻi.^[1]

February 2 – In a speech before The Asiatic Society in Calcutta, Sir William Jones notes the formal resemblances between Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, laying the foundation for comparative linguistics and Indo-European studies.

Erland Samuel Bring publishes Meletemata quaedam mathematica circa transformationem aequationum algebraicarum, proposing algebraic solutions to quintic functions.
Joseph Louis Lagrange moves from Prussia to Paris under the patronage of King Louis XVI.
William Playfair produces the first line and bar charts.

August – James Rumsey tests his first steamboat in the Potomac River at Shepherdstown, Virginia.
Ignaz von Born introduces a method of extracting metals using the patio process in his Ueber des Anquicken der gold- und silberhältigen Erze, published in Vienna.
Scottish millwright Andrew Meikle invents a practical threshing machine.

January 5 – Thomas Nuttall, English naturalist (died 1859)
February 26 – François Arago, French mathematician, physicist and astronomer (died 1853)
February 28 – Christian Ramsay, Scottish botanist (died 1839)
April 16 – Thomas Sewall, American anatomist (died 1845)
April 28 – Elizabeth Andrew Warren, Cornish botanist and marine algolologist (died 1864)
July 24 – Joseph Nicollet, French geographer, explorer, mathematician and astronomer (died 1843)
November 3 – Ernst Friedrich Germar, German entomologist (died 1853)
December 6 – Johann Georg Bodmer, Swiss mechanical engineer and inventor (died 1864)

February 25 – Thomas Wright, English astronomer, mathematician, instrument maker, architect, garden designer, antiquary and genealogist (born 1711)
May 2 – Petronella Johanna de Timmerman, Dutch scientist (born 1723)
May 4 – Leonardo Ximenes, Tuscan polymath (born 1716)
May 15 – Eva Ekeblad, agronomist, first woman in the Swedish Royal Academy of Science (born 1724)
May 21 – Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Swedish chemist (born 1742)
October 16 – Alexander Wilson, Scottish polymath (born 1714)
November 10 – John Hope, Scottish physician and botanist (born 1725)