1872 in science
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The year 1872 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.
Chemistry
- Robert Chesebrough patents Vaseline in the United States[1]
- Eugen Baumann rediscovers polyvinyl chloride
- Charles-Adolphe Wurtz discovers the aldol reaction
Conservation
- March 1 â Yellowstone National Park is established in the United States, the world's first national park[2][3]
Exploration
- May 13âSeptember 26 â Benjamin Leigh Smith's 1872 expedition to Jan Mayen and Svalbard[4]
- December 21 â Challenger expedition: HMS Challenger (1858) sails from Portsmouth in England on the 4-year scientific expedition that lays the foundation for the science of oceanography[5]
Mathematics
- Richard Dedekind publishes Stetigkeit und irrationale Zahlen, a theory of irrational numbers[6]
- Felix Klein produces the Erlangen program on geometries[6]
Medicine
- February 15 â George Huntington makes the first detailed description of Huntington's disease, in Middleport, Ohio[7][8][9]
- Moritz Kaposi describes Kaposi's sarcoma[10][11] and the manifestations of systemic lupus erythematosus
- Ferdinand Monoyer proposes the dioptre as a unit for measuring the optical power of a lens[12]
Physics
- Ludwig Boltzmann states the Boltzmann equation for the temporal development of distribution functions in phase space, and publishes his H-theorem[13]
Technology
- April 1 â English hangman William Marwood first uses his technique of the long drop (on uxoricide William Frederick Horry at Lincoln Castle)[14]
- April 2 â George Brayton obtains a United States patent for a constant pressure internal combustion engine, initially using vaporized gas, and marketed as 'Brayton's Ready Motor'[15][16]
- John Hopkinson proposes the group flash system for distinguishing lighthouses[17]
- Reverend C. M. Ramus of Sussex, England, devises the single-step hydroplane hull[18]
Institutions
- October 1 â the Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College begins its first academic session
- The Polytechnic Museum in Moscow is founded[19]
Publications
- May â the magazine Popular Science is first published in the United States
- Charles Darwin publishes The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
Awards
Births
- April 5 â Samuel Cate Prescott (died 1962), American food scientist and microbiologist
- April 21 - Charles Gandy (died 1943), French physician.
- May 6 â Willem de Sitter (died 1934), Dutch mathematician, physicist and astronomer
- May 21 â Henry E. Warren (died 1957), American inventor
- May 31 â Charles Greeley Abbot (died 1973), American astrophysicist
- August 1 â Solomon Carter Fuller (died 1953), Liberian-born psychiatrist
- September 23 â Marie Depage (died in sinking of the RMS Lusitania 1915), Belgian nurse
- October 4 â Ernest Fourneau (died 1949), French medicinal chemist
Deaths
- March 8 â Priscilla Susan Bury (born 1799), English botanist[21]
- April 2 â Samuel Morse (born 1791), American inventor
- May 6 â George Robert Gray (born 1808), English zoologist
- August 11 â Sir Andrew Smith (born 1797), Scottish-born military surgeon, explorer, ethnologist and zoologist
- August 22 â Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis (born 1787), French physician
- November 7 â Alfred Clebsch (born 1833), German mathematician
- December 6 â Félix Archimède Pouchet (born 1800), French scientist
- December 24 â William John Macquorn Rankine (born 1820), Scottish physicist
- Anne Elizabeth Ball (born 1808), Irish psychologist