Science & Discovery

2,148 sourced entries filed under science & discovery, split by century. Each century below opens the full list for that stretch of time.

By century

A line from each of the last few centuries

  • 1544January 24 – During a solar eclipse visible over the Netherlands, Dutch mathematician and designer Gemma Frisius makes the first recorded use of a camera obscura and uses it to observe the event without directly looking at the Sun. Frisius writes about the event the next year and illustrates it in his book De Radio Astronomica et Geometrica (Regarding rays of light in astronomy and geometry).source
  • 1664March 19 – Polish astronomer Jan Heweliusz becomes the first native of Poland to be inducted into England's Royal Society.source
  • 1753November 25 – The Russian Academy of Sciences announces a competition among chemists and physicists to provide "the best explanation of the true causes of electricity including their theory", with a deadline of June 1, 1755 (on the Julian calendar used in Russia, June 12 on the Gregorian calendar used in Western Europe and the New World).source
  • 1860December 1 – Charles Dickens publishes the first installment of Great Expectations in his magazine All the Year Round.source
  • 1965October 21 – Comet Ikeya–Seki approaches perihelion, passing 450,000 km mi from the sun.source
  • 2012July 4 – CERN announces the discovery of a new particle with properties consistent with the Higgs boson after experiments at the Large Hadron Collider.source