1865 in science
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The year 1865 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.
Archaeology
- John Lubbock publishes Pre-historic Times, as Illustrated by Ancient Remains, and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages, including his coinage of the term Palæolithic.[1]
Astronomy
- Vassar College Observatory opens at Poughkeepsie, New York, with Maria Mitchell as its first director.
Chemistry
- Friedrich Kekulé proposes a ring structure for benzene.[2]
- Adolf von Baeyer begins work on indigo dye, a milestone in modern industrial organic chemistry which revolutionizes the dye industry.[3]
- Johann Josef Loschmidt indirectly determines the number of molecules in a mole, later named the Avogadro constant.[4]
Economics
- William Stanley Jevons publishes his book The Coal Question, which will form the scientific basis for the Jevons paradox.
Life sciences
- Louis Pasteur shows that the air is full of bacteria.
- Joseph Lister begins to experiment with antiseptic surgery in Glasgow using carbolic acid.[5]
- Max Schultze gives the first known description of the platelet.[6]
- Claude Bernard publishes Principes de Médecine experimentale.
- February 8 & March 8 â Gregor Mendel reads his paper, Versuche über Pflanzenhybriden (Experiments on Plant Hybridization), at two meetings of the Natural History Society of Brünn in Moravia.[7]
- May 17 â Father Armand David first observes Père David's Deer in China.[8]
- JuneâAugust â Francis Galton formulates eugenics.[9]
- September â John Henry Walsh (writing as 'Stonehenge' in the magazine The Field) gives the first definition of a dog breed standard (for the pointer) based on physical form.[10]
- September 28 â Elizabeth Garrett Anderson obtains a licence from the Society of Apothecaries in London to practice medicine, the first woman to qualify as a doctor in the United Kingdom,[11] and sets up in her own practice.
Physics
- Rudolf Clausius gives the first mathematical version of the concept of entropy, and also names it.[12][13]
- James Clerk Maxwell publishes A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field.[5]
Technology
- Aveling and Porter produce the world's first steam roller at Rochester in England.[14]
- Hermann Sprengel produces the Sprengel pump which is capable of creating a significant vacuum.[15]
Awards
- Copley Medal: Michel Chasles[16]
- Wollaston Medal in Geology: Thomas Davidson
Births
- January 22 â Friedrich Paschen (died 1947), German physicist.
- February 1 â Henry Luke Bolley (died 1956), American plant pathologist.
- March 19 â William Morton Wheeler (died 1937), American entomologist.
- March 31 â Anandi Gopal Joshi (died 1887), Indian physician.
- April 28 â Charles W. Woodworth (died 1940), American entomologist.
- June 27 â John Monash (died 1931), Australian civil engineer and General.
- August 10 â Charles Close (died 1952), Jersey-born cartographer.
- October 12 â Arthur Harden (died 1940), English biochemist, Nobel Prize in Chemistry recipient.
- November 4 â Chevalier Jackson (died 1958), American laryngologist and pioneer of endoscopy.
Deaths
- January 14 â Marie-Anne Libert (born 1782), Belgian botanist.
- January 31 â Hugh Falconer (born 1808), British geologist, botanist, paleontologist and paleoanthropologist.
- April 23 â Diego de Argumosa (born 1792), Spanish surgeon.
- April 30 â Robert FitzRoy (born 1805), English admiral and meteorologist, suicide.
- May 27 â Charles Waterton (born 1782), English naturalist and explorer.
- June 5 â Sir John Richardson (born 1787), Scottish-born naturalist, explorer and naval surgeon.
- July 25 â Dr. James Barry (born 1789-1799), Irish-born military surgeon.
- August 12 â Sir William Jackson Hooker (born 1785), English botanist.
- August 13 â Ignaz Semmelweis (born 1818), Hungarian physician, following restraint in insane asylum.
- August 26 â Johann Franz Encke (born 1791), German astronomer.
- August 29 â Robert Remak (born 1815), Polish/Prussian Jewish embryologist.
- September 2 â Sir William Rowan Hamilton (born 1805), Irish mathematician, physicist and astronomer.
- October 17 â Joseph-François Malgaigne (born 1806), French surgeon.