(STILL IN PREPARATION - Suggestions welcome)
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1800: William Nicholson and Johann Ritter decompose water into hydrogen and oxygen 1800: Alessandro Volta invents the voltaic pile, the electrical battery Aug 1801: Robert Fulton builds the "Nautilus" submarine and invents the torpedo 1802: Humphry Davy invents the incandescent light 1803: Thomas Young determines that light is made of waves 1806: Humphry Davy invents the carbon arc light 1806: Louis-Nicolas Vauquelin and Pierre Jean Robiquet discover the first aminoacid, asparagine 1807: Humphry Davy discovers potassium, sodium, barium, calcium and magnesium 1808: John Dalton's atomic theory 1809: Lamarck's theory of evolution 1811: Amedeo Avogadro's law 1813: Carl-Friedrich Gauss develops non-Euclidean geometry 1816: Francis Ronalds invents the telegraph 1820: Hans Oersted discovers that an electrical charge in motion (an electric current) generates a magnetic field 1820: Johann Schweigger invents the galvanometer 1821: Michael Faraday publishes his theory on electromagnetic rotation, the principle behind the electric motor 1824: Sadi Carnot discovers the second law of Thermodynamics 1824: William Buckland provides the first description of a dinosaur, the Megalosaurus 1825: Pierre-Simon Laplace speculates that the future is fully determined 1827: Joseph Fourier proves that any periodic function can be represented as the sum of a series of sinusoidal and cosinusoidal waves 1827: Andre-Marie Ampere founds Electrodynamics 1827: Robert Brown discovers "Brownian motion" 1829: William Austin Burt invents the typewriter 1830: Nikolai Lobachevsky writes "The Foundations of Geometry" 1831: Cyrus McCormick invents the mechanical harvesting machine 1831: Michael Faraday's electromagnetic experiments prove the identity of electricity and magnetism and he invents the transformer 1831: Patrick Matthew's "On Naval Timber and Arboriculture" explains the evolution of species by variation and selection more than a decade before Darwin 1833: Carl Gauss and Wilhelm Weber build the first electromagnetic telegraph 1835: Edward Davy invents the electrical relay 1836: Marc Dax speculates that language is localized in the left hemisphere of the brain 1837: Samuel Morse invents a code for the telegraph 1837: John Deere invents the steel plow 1837: Karl Schimper coins the term "ice age" for an age when most of Europe, Asia and North America was covered with ice 1838: Charles Wheatstone invents the stereoscope to view three-dimensional images 1838: The Great Western Railway in Britain installs the first commercial telegraph in the world, built by Charles Wheatstone 1839: Scottish blacksmith Kirkpatrick Macmillan invents the bicycle 1839: Alexandre Becquerel discovers the photovoltaic effect 1839: Charles Goodyear develops a process to vulcanize rubber (to make it elastic) 1840: Justus von Liebig invents fertilizers and promotes Peruvian guano 1842: Julius Mayer discovers that heat can be converted into work (before Joule) 1843: James Joule establishes the equivalence of work and heat (energy can be transformed) 1844: The first telegraph line in the USA, stretching from Washington to nearby Baltimore, opens (Morse's "What hath God wrought") 1844: Darwin develops a theory of evolution by variation and selection but is afraid to publish it 1846: Abraham Gesner invents kerosene, based on coal 1847: Hermann Helmholtz popularizes Mayer's and Joule's proofs of the conservation of energy: electric, magnetic, heat and light energy are equivalent to mechanical work 1848: Louis Pasteur discovers that the molecules of living organisms are asymmetric 1848: William Thompson "Kelvin" introduces a scale of absolute temperature 1849: James Francis' water turbine 1850: Rudolf Clausius discovers entropy 1850: Casimir Davaine identifies the bacterium that causes anthrax, the first association of a microorganism with a disease 1851: Armand Fizeau measures the speed of light 1852: Leon Foucault invents the gyroscope 1852: William Thompson "Kelvin" discovers the second law of Thermodynamics ("On a Universal Tendency in Nature to the Dissipation of Mechanical Energy") 1854: Bernhard Riemann's "Habilition Dissertation" introduces manyfolds in a non-Euclidean geometry 1854: John Snow proves that cholera is a waterborne disease 1854: Filippo Pacini isolates the cholera bacterium Vibrio Cholerae 1855: Henry Bessemer invents the Bessemer converter for mass-producing steel 1856: Bessemer converter for mass-producing steel 1856: William Perkin, still a teenager, invents the first synthetic dye, mauve 1857: George Pullman invents the bus 1858: August Moebius discovers the "Mobius Strip" 1858: The first transatlantic cable between the USA and Britain 1858: Alfred Wallace discovers the same theory of evolution as Darwin's and both are publicly announced at the Linnaean Society 1859: Charles Darwin publishes "The Origin of Species" 1859: Le Verrier discovers that the perihelion of the planet Mercury advances by 38" per century more than Newton's equations predict 1859: Gaston Plante invents the lead-acid cell, the first rechargeable battery 1863: There are 56 known elements 1863: Paul Broca proves that language is localized in the left hemisphere of the brain 1864: James Maxwell discovers the laws of electromagnetism 1864: James Croll explains that ice ages are due to variations in the Earth's orbit 1865: Louis Pasteur discovers that diseases are caused by germs (birth of modern medicine) 1865: Giovanni Caselli launches the first commercial telefax service (between Paris and Lyon) 1865: Gregor Mendel presents his theory about the unit of transmission of traits in living beings (the gene) 1866: The first practical dynamo is developed by Siemens 1866: Ernst Haeckel argues that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" 1867: Georges Leclanche' invents the zinc-manganese battery (forerunner of the alkaline battery) 1867: Alfred Nobel invents dynamite 1868: Christopher Latham Sholes invents the first practical typewriter 1868: William Huggins discovers that galaxies are receding 1869: John Hyatt's celluloid, the first industrial plastic 1869: Dmitri Mendeleev publishes his periodic table of elements (56 known elements and a law for discovering the next ones) 1869: Johann Miescher discovers DNA in cells, but it seems useless 1872: Eugen Baumann produces a new kind of vinyl, polyvinyl chloride (PVC) 1873: Camillo Golgi's "On the Structure of the Brain Grey Matter" describes the body of the nerve cell with a single axon and several dendrites 1873: Christopher Latham Sholes invents the QWERTY keyboard (1873), which Remington begins to mass produce 1874: Wilhelm-Max Wundt founds experimental Psychology 1874: Karl Wernicke discovers that aphasia is caused by damage in the left temporal lobe 1875: The first typewritten book (on a Remington typewriter) is published, "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" 1876: Alexander Bell demonstrates the telephone (for the first time humans in distant places can talk to each other) 1876: Pavel Yablochkov (Paul Jablochkoff) invents an electric arc lamp 1876: Ferdinand Braun discovers semiconductors 1876: John Hughlings Jackson discovers that loss of spatial skills is related to damage to the right hemisphere 1876: Ferdinand Braun discovers semiconductors 1877: Thomas Edison invents the phonograph that records sound on a cylinder (for the first time humans can store and play sounds) 1877: Ludwig Boltzmann founds Thermodynamics and explains entropy 1878: Willard Gibbs' "On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances" on statistical mechanics and thermodynamics 1879: James Ritty invents the cash register 1879: Robert Koch identifies the bacillus that causes anthrax 1879: Georg Cantor invents Set Theory 1879: Siemens demonstrates the first electric railway 1879: Thomas Edison invents an incandescent light bulb 1879: Walther Flemming discovers mitosis, the process by which living cells divide 1881: David Gestetner invents the stencil duplicator, the first office machine to make duplicates of documents 1881: Pasteur develops a vaccine for anthrax 1881: Carlos Finlay proposes that yellow fever is spread by mosquitoes 1882: Robert Koch discovers the bacterium of tuberculosis 1882: Etienne-Jules Marey's chronophotography 1883: Koch rediscovers Vibrio Cholerae 1884: Charles Parsons' steam turbine (that will open the age of cheap electricity and fast sea travel) 1885: Daimler and Maybach invent the motorcycle 1885: Joseph Swan uses synthetic fiber to make fabrics 1885: Louis Pasteur administers a vaccine against rabies 1885: John Kemp Starley invents the "safety" bicycle (with gearing, chain drive and low wheels) 1886: Karl Benz builds a gasoline-powered car 1886: Josephine Cochrane invents the dishwasher 1886: Ernst Mach formulates the principle that the inertia of an object is due to the interaction of that object with all the rest of the world's matter 1886: Heinrich Hertz discovers that electromagnetic waves can be generated by an electric circuit and detected by another circuit (in particular, waves at frequencies from 300 GHz down to 3 kHz, or "radio" waves) 1887: Heinrich Hertz discovers the photoelectric effect 1887: Emile Berliner invents the gramophone that records sound on a disc 1887: The first book is printed using Ottmar Mergenthaler's linotype (by the New York Tribune) 1887: Albert Michelson and Edward Morley discover that the speed of light in a vacuum is always 299,792,458 meters per second 1888: Kodak introduces the first consumer camera (for the first time humans can reproduce an image without a painter) 1888: John Dunlop invents the pneumatic tire 1888: Nikola Tesla invents the alternating-current motor 1888: Heinrich Waldeyer discovers the chromosome 1889: Jonas Wenstrom invents the three phase system for generators, transformers and motors 1890: Herman Hollerith builds an electrical tabulating device (the first electrical calculator) 1890: Emil von Behring and Shibasaburo Kitasato discover the existence of antibodies 1890: London inaugurates the world's first electrical subway system 1890: William James's "Principles of Psychology" 1890: Henri Poincare proves the recurrence theorem 1891: Santiago Ramon y Cajal proves that the nerve cell (the neuron) is the elementary unit of processing in the brain 1891: Eugene Dubois discovers Pithecanthropus Erectus in Indonesia 1892: Hendrik Lorentz discovers that the atom is not elementary but is made of smaller units that are electrical in nature 1892: Dmitri Ivanovsky discovers the first virus, a non-bacterial pathogen 1892: August Weismann's "germ plasma" theory of genetic heredity 1892: Henri Poincare` founds Chaos Theory 1893: Almirian Decker's alternate-current power plant (alternating current makes it easy to transmit electricity over long distances) 1893: Nikola Tesla holds the first public demonstration of radio communication 1895: The Lumiere brothers invent cinema (for the first time humans can replay what has happened in the past) 1895: Wilhelm Roentgen discovers X-rays, light rays that are invisible to the human eye 1896: Antoine Becquerel observes the radioactive decay of atomic nuclei (birth of nuclear science) 1896: Svante Arrhenius shows that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide cause global warming through a greenhouse effect 1896: Almroth Edward Wright, Richard Pfeiffer and Wilhelm Kolle develop the typhoid vaccine 1897: British physician Ronald Ross proves that malaria is spread by mosquitoes 1897: Karl Ferdinand Braun builds the first oscilloscope and invents the cathode ray tube 1897: Joseph-John Thompson discovers that electricity is due to the flow of tiny negatively charged particles (discovers the electron) 1897: Bayer's aspirin 1898: Valdemar Poulsen invents the telegraphone, the first magnetic recording device for voice 1898: Martinus Beijerinck is the first scientist to discover a virus and call it "virus" (the tobacco mosaic virus) 1898: Pierre Curie and Marie Curie isolate the radioactive elements polonium and radium (and coin the word "radioactivity") 1899: Valdemar Poulsen invents the magnetic recorder 1899: Guglielmo Marconi sends radio messages across the Channel Continues to Science of the 20th Century |