1816 in science
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The year 1816 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.
Botany
- Botanic Gardens, Sydney, established in Australia.
Chemistry
- Veuve Clicquot invents the riddling table process to clarify champagne.
Mathematics
- John Farey notes the Farey sequence.[1]
Medicine
- René Laennec invents the stethoscope.[2]
- Caleb Parry publishes An Experimental Inquiry into the Nature, Cause and Varieties of the Arterial Pulse, describing the mechanisms for the pulse.[3]
Mineralogy
- Johann Fischer von Waldheim publishes Essai sur la Turquoise et sur la Calaite in Moscow, the first scientific treatise on the mineral turquoise.
Physics
- Sir David Brewster (1781â1868) discovers stress birefringence.
Technology
- January 9 â Sir Humphry Davy's Davy lamp is first tested underground as a coal mining safety lamp at Hebburn Colliery in north east England.[4]
- The Spider Bridge at Falls of Schuylkill, a temporary iron-wire footbridge erected across the Schuylkill River, north of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is the first wire-cable suspension bridge in history.[5]
- Johann Nepomuk Maelzel begins production of the metronome with a scale.[6]
- Rev. Robert Stirling obtains a patent in the United Kingdom for the Stirling hot air engine.
- English inventor Francis Ronalds demonstrates the practicability of the electric telegraph but it is rejected as "wholly unnecessary" at this time.[7][8][9]
- approx. date â Simeon North in New England produces a practicable milling machine for working metal.[10]
Awards
- Copley Medal: Not awarded[11]
Births
- January 2 â Anastasie FÄtu, Moldavian and Romanian physician and naturalist (died 1886)
- July 7 â Rudolf Wolf, Swiss astronomer (died 1893)
- July 20 â Sir William Bowman, 1st Baronet, English ophthalmologist, histologist and anatomist (died 1892)
- December 13 â Werner Siemens, German electrical engineer (died 1892)
Deaths
- January 2 â Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau, French chemist (born 1737)
- April 7 â Christian Konrad Sprengel, German botanist (born 1750)
- September 18 â Bernard McMahon, Irish American horticulturalist (born c. 1775)
- September 28 â Edward Howard, English chemist (born 1774)
- December 15 â Charles Stanhope, 3rd Earl Stanhope, English engineer (born 1753)