Science & Discovery in the 18th century

164 sourced entries, 1700 CE to 1799 CE, oldest first. Also see Science & Discovery across every century or everything else in the 18th century.

• 1700March 1 (Gregorian) – Protestant Germany and Denmark–Norway adopt the Gregorian calendar.source
• 1700An inventory made for the House of Medici of Florence is the first documentary evidence for a piano, invented by their instrument keeper Bartolomeo Cristofori.source
• 1701English agriculturalist Jethro Tull invents a drill for planting seeds in rows.source
• 1702January 2 – A total solar eclipse is visible from the southern Pacific Ocean.source
• 1702April 20 – Comet C/1702 H1 is discovered and passes within 0.0435 AU (a little more than four million miles or 6.5 million km) of the Earth.source
• 1702May 5 – Globular cluster Messier 5 (M5, NGC 5904) is discovered by Gottfried Kirch and his wife Maria Margarethe.source
• 1702September 19 – Jupiter occults Neptune.source
• 1704January 7 – A partial solar eclipse, Solar Saros 146, is visible in Antarctica.source
• 1704May 19–23 – Vigorous Strombolian activity from Mount Vesuvius, Italy is recorded.source
• 1704June 2 – Annular solar eclipse is visible from a region of the Southern Ocean between South Africa and Antarctica.source
• 1704June 17 – Total lunar eclipse takes place, Saros series 125.source
• 1704November 27 – Annular solar eclipse is visible through Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, eastern China, Myanmar and northern Philippines.source
• 1704December 25 – The fall of the meteorite of Barcelona is seen and heard over distances up to hundreds of kilometres and is interpreted as a divine sign.source
• 1704Giancomo Miraldi observes Martian polar ice caps as "white spots" at the Martian poles.source
• 1705July 20 – The planet Mercury transits Jupiter, as seen by astronomers from Earth. The event happens again on October 4, 1708, but will not be seen again from Earth until October 27, 2088source
• 1705November 16 – An annular solar eclipse is visible in the southern Atlantic Ocean.source
• 1705Edmond Halley publicly predicts the periodicity of Halley's Comet and computes its expected path of return in 1758.source
• 1708Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico delivers his inaugural lecture to the University of Naples, which will be published in 1709 as his first book, De Nostri Temporis Studiorum Ratione (On the Order of the Scholarly Disciplines of Our Times).source
• 1709August 8 – The hot air balloon of Bartolomeu de Gusmão flies in Portugal.source
• 1709A collapsible umbrella is introduced in Paris.source
• 1710August 24 – Total eclipse of the sun is visible at .source
• 1711February 3 – A total lunar eclipse occurs, at 12:31 UT.source
• 1711July 29 – Total lunar eclipse at 17:50 UT.source
• 1711Luigi Ferdinando Marsili shows that coral is an animal rather than a plant as previously thought.source
• 1711John Shore invents the tuning fork.source
• 1712January 8 – Total eclipse of the sun visible fromsource
• 1712August 23 – The British Royal Navy 60-gun ship HMS Rippon is launched at Deptford Dockyard.source
• 1712December 28 – Total eclipse of the sun visible fromsource
• 1715May 3 – A total solar eclipse is seen across southern England, Sweden and Finland (the last total eclipse visible in London for almost 900 years). English astronomer Edmond Halley (who is using the old style Julian calendar date of April 22) records the first observation noted of the phenomenon of "Baily's beads", in which higher elevations on the moon can be observed obscuring portions of the light moments before and after totality.source
• 1716March 6 – At night, an aurora borealis is seen throughout Europe, from Ireland to Italy.source
• 1717Thomas Fairchild, a nurseryman at Hoxton in the East End of London, becomes the first person to produce a successful scientific plant hybrid, Dianthus Caryophyllus barbatus, known as Fairchild's Mule.source
• 1718The white potato reaches New England from England.source
• 1720February 10 – Edmond Halley is appointed as Astronomer Royal for England.source
• 1722Modern music theory finds definition in Jean-Philippe Rameau's Traité de l'harmonie réduite à ses principes naturels (Treatise on Harmony), published in Paris.source
• 1724December 24 – Francesco Valesio resumes writing his Diario di Roma, 13 years after he ceased his recording of daily life in Rome.source
• 1724China expels foreign missionaries.source
• 1725November 26 – British astronomers James Bradley and Samuel Molyneux set up a telescope in Molyneux's private observatory to begin their observations of stellar parallax of the star Gamma Draconis. The observations, which start on December 3, lead to Bradley's pioneering discovery of the aberration of light.source
• 1726The Complete Classics Collection of Ancient China, an immense Chinese encyclopedia, is printed using copper-based movable type printing.source
• 1728March 14 – Jean-Jacques Rousseau leaves Geneva for the first time.source
• 1728English astronomer James Bradley uses stellar aberration (first observed in 1725) to calculate the speed of light, and observes nutation of the Earth's axis.source
• 1729August 1 – The Comet of 1729, possibly the largest comet based on the absolute magnitude, on record, is discovered by Fr. Nicolas Sarrabat, a professor of mathematics at Marseille.source
• 1731November 25 – Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler announces his use of the irrational number e (approximately 2.71828) as the base for the concept of the natural logarithm, describing it in a letter to German mathematician Christian Goldbach.source
• 1732December 19 – Benjamin Franklin, in the Pennsylvania Gazette, first advertises the publication of Poor Richard's Almanack, purportedly written by "Richard Saunders", a pen name used by Franklin. The book goes on sale on December 28. The annual publication will continue until 1758.source
• 1732Herman Boerhaave publishes the authorized edition of his Elementa chemiae, recognised as the first text on chemistry.source
• 1732The world's first lightship is moored at the Nore, in the Thames Estuary of England.source
• 1734Anton Wilhelm Amo becomes the first African to receive a doctorate in Europe and begins teaching at the University of Halle.source
• 1735May 22 – George Hadley publishes the first explanation of the trade winds.source
• 1735Cobalt is discovered and isolated by Georg Brandt, the first metal element found since ancient times.source
• 1736June 8 – Leonhard Euler writes to James Stirling describing the Euler–Maclaurin formula, providing a disconnection between integrals and sums.source
• 1736October 3 – French scientist Charles Marie de La Condamine and a team of surveyors begin the first measurements at the Equator to determine the exact meridian arc measurement of distance between points separated by one degree of longitude in order to make a precise calculation of the Earth's circumference. The initial measurements of this French Geodesic Mission to the Equator, made in what is now Ecuador, last until November 3. The same year the French Geodesic Mission to Lapland took place. Both confirm Isaac Newton's prediction that the Figure of the Earth is flattened at the poles.source
• 1736Charles Marie de La Condamine, with François Fresneau Gataudière, makes the first scientific observations of rubber, in Ecuador.source
• 1736Leonhard Euler produces the first published proof of Fermat's "little theorem".source
• 1736Sir Isaac Newton's Method of Fluxions (1671), describing his method of differential calculus, is first published (posthumously) and Thomas Bayes publishes a defense of its logical foundations (anonymously).source
• 1737February 27 – French scientists Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau and Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon publish the first study correlating past weather conditions with an examination of tree rings.source
• 1737May 28 – The planet Venus passes in front of Mercury. The event is witnessed during the evening hours, by the amateur astronomer John Bevis, at the Royal Greenwich Observatory. As of 2006, it is still the only such planet/planet occultation that has been directly observed.source
• 1738Pierre Louis Maupertuis publishes Sur la figure de la terre, which confirms Newton's view that the earth is an oblate spheroid, slightly flattened at the poles.source
• 1741December 25 – Anders Celsius develops his own thermometer scale, Centigrade, the predecessor of the Celsius scale.source
• 1742June 7 – Christian Goldbach first describes Goldbach's conjecture ("Every even number is the sum of two primes") in a letter to fellow mathematician Leonhard Euler.source
• 1743July 23 – James Oglethorpe departs from Georgia to England and returns there in September.source
• 1743October 21 – Benjamin Franklin's view of a lunar eclipse from Philadelphia is spoiled by a rainstorm; several days later, he learns that residents of Boston received the same storm hours after the eclipse, demonstrating that weather moves from west to east.source
• 1743November 5 – Coordinated scientific observations of the transit of Mercury are organized by Joseph-Nicolas Delisle.source
• 1743December 9 – At Haarlem, Dutch astronomer Dirk Klinkenberg becomes the first to observe the Great Comet of 1744. Swiss astronomer Jean-Philippe de Cheseaux discovers it independently on December 13. Both scientists are given credit for its discoverysource
• 1744March 1 (approximately) – The Great Comet of 1744, one of the brightest ever seen, reaches perihelion.source
• 1744April – The Female Spectator (a monthly) is founded by Eliza Haywood in England, the first periodical written for women by a woman.source
• 1744June 15 – Commodore George Anson's voyage around the world concludes after four years as HMS Centurion returns to England at Spithead and Anson is greeted as a hero.source
• 1744October 12 – The creator of binomial nomenclature for the identification of plant and animal species, Carl Linnaeus, is selected as president of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, succeeding the late Anders Celsius, who had devised the centigrade measurement of temperature.source
• 1745February 27 – Pierre Bouguer appears before the French Academy of Sciences to deliver his report of the data gathered in the French Geodesic Mission, including the first precise measurement of the Earth's circumference. His determination that the circumference is 24854.85 mi and that the distance from the pole to equator is roughly 6214 mi eventually leads to the Academy's calculation of the metre and the metric system.source
• 1745August 6 (July 26 Old Style) – The first recorded women's cricket match takes place in Surrey, England.source
• 1746Eva Ekeblad reports her discovery, of how to make flour and alcohol from potatoes, to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.source
• 1747Samuel Johnson begins work on A Dictionary of the English Language in London.source
• 1748August – The Camberwell beauty butterfly is named after specimens found at Camberwell in London.source
• 1748Montesquieu publishes De l'esprit des lois.source
• 1748Leonhard Euler publishes Introductio in analysin infinitorum, an introduction to pure analytical mathematics, in Berlin.source
• 1748The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences makes Eva Ekeblad its first female member.source
• 1750March 20 – The first number of Samuel Johnson's The Rambler appears.source
• 1750August 20 – French astronomer Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille, by way of the Foreign Minister, the Marquis de Puisieulx and Netherlands ambassador to Paris Mattheus Lestevenon, sends a letter that ultimately persuades the States-General of the Dutch Republic to allow and partially finance Lacaille's stellar trigonometry mission to the Cape of Good Hope. The expedition departs Lorient on October 21.source
• 1751Adam Smith is appointed professor of logic.source
• 1751Ferdinando Galiani publishes the first modern economic analysis, Della Moneta.source
• 1751In the University of Glasgow (Scotland):source
• 1752February 23 – Messier 83 (M83), the "Southern Pinwheel Galaxy" and the first to be cataloged outside the "Local Group" of galaxies nearest to Earth's galaxy, the Milky Way, is discovered by French astronomer Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille. Lacaille, who observes M83 during a research voyage in the Southern Hemisphere, is the first to identify the body as a nebulous object rather than a star. M83, 15 million light-years away, is the most distant object to be identified up to that time.source
• 1752May 10 – At Marly-la-Ville in France, physicist Thomas-François Dalibard successfully conducts the kite experiment proposed by Benjamin Franklin in the 1750 book Franklin's Experiments and Observations on Electricity.source
• 1753March 1 – Sweden adopts the Gregorian calendar, by skipping the 11 days difference between it and the Julian calendar, and letting February 17 be followed directly by March 1.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
• 1754January 28 – Horace Walpole, in a letter to Horace Mann, coins the word serendipity.source
• 1754Marian apparition at Las Lajas in Colombia.source
• 1755September 6 – The Russian Academy of Sciences awards its prize for "the best explanation of the true causes of electricity including their theory" to Switzerland's Johann Euler for his paper Disquisitio de causa physica electricitatis.source
• 1755The brine shrimp Artemia salina is first described, in Linnaeus' Systema Naturæ.source
• 1756January 27 – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is born in Salzburg, Austria, to Anna Maria and Leopold Mozart.source
• 1757April 16 – The works of astronomer Galileo Galilei espousing heliocentrism are removed (with the approval of Pope Benedict XIV) from the Index Librorum Prohibitorum list of books banned by Roman Catholic Church, along with "all books teaching the earth's motion and the sun's immobility". Other works of heliocentrists Galileo, Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Diego de Zúñiga and Paolo Foscarini remain on the list.source
• 1757December 6 – In Buddhist tradition, Jigme Lingpa discovers the Longchen Nyingthig terma through a meditative vision, which brings him to Boudhanath. The Longchen Nyingtig is a popular cycle of teachings in the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism.source
• 1758January 1 – Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus (Carl von Linné) publishes in Stockholm the first volume (Animalia) of the 10th edition of Systema Naturae, the starting point of modern zoological nomenclature, introducing binomial nomenclature for animals to his established system of Linnaean taxonomy. Among the first examples of his system of identifying an organism by genus and then species, Linnaeus identifies the lamprey with the name Petromyzon marinus. He introduces the term Homo sapiens. (Date of January 1 assigned retrospectively.)source
• 1758December 25 – Halley's Comet is sighted by Johann Georg Palitzsch, confirming Edmund Halley's 1705 prediction of its periodicity.source
• 1759English clockmaker John Harrison produces his "No. 1 sea watch" (H4), the first successful marine chronometer.source
• 1759Madame du Coudray publishes Abrégé de l'art des accouchements (The Art of Obstetrics), and the French government authorizes her to carry her instruction "throughout the realm" and promises financial support.source
• 1761June 6 – (May 26 old style); A transit of Venus occurs, and is observed from 120 locations around the Earth. In his observations by telescope at St. Petersburg, Mikhail Lomonosov notes a ring of light around the planet's silhouette as it begins the transit, and becomes the first astronomer to discover that the planet Venus has an atmosphere.source
• 1761Marine chronometer invented as a means to accurately determine longitude.source
• 1761Johann Heinrich Lambert finds a proof that π is irrational.source
• 1763November 24 – Bayes' theorem is first announced.source
• 1764April 1 – A solar eclipse occurs. On the same day, the undefeated Thoroughbred racehorse Eclipse, named after the event, is foaled at Keats Gore, near East Ilsley in Berkshire.source
• 1764Cesare Beccaria - On Crimes and Punishments (Dei delitti e delle pene), a founding work of penologysource
• 1764Immanuel Kant - Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen)source
• 1766April 9 – American botanist John Bartram completes his first exploration and cataloging of North American plants after more than nine months.source
• 1767January 1 – The first annual volume of The Nautical Almanac and Astronomical Ephemeris, produced by British Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, gives navigators the means to find longitude at sea, using tables of lunar distance.source
• 1768December 10 – The first of the weekly numbers of the Encyclopædia Britannica, edited by William Smellie, are published in Edinburgh; one hundred are planned.source
• 1769June 3 – A transit of Venus is followed five hours later by a total solar eclipse, the shortest such interval in historical times. The transit is viewed by King George III of Great Britain, at the Kew Observatory.source
• 1769First recorded use of 'literally' as a metaphorical intensifier.source
• 1770July 1 – Lexell's Comet (D/1770 L1) passes the Earth at a distance of 2184129 km, the closest approach by a comet in recorded history.source
• 1770Joseph-Louis Lagrange proves Bachet's conjecture.source
• 1772March 8 – Biela's Comet is first discovered by French astronomer Jacques Leibax Montaigne, but not proven to be a periodic comet until 1826, when Wilhelm von Biela correctly identifies its return.source
• 1772Scottish scientist Daniel Rutherford discovers nitrogen gas, isolating it from air.source
• 1773October 13 – French astronomer Charles Messier discovers the Whirlpool Galaxy, an interacting, grand design spiral galaxy located at a distance of approximately 31 million light-years, in the constellation Canes Venatici.source
• 1773Hilaire Rouelle discovers urea.source
• 1773Scottish judge James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, begins publication of Of the Origin and Progress of Language, a contribution to evolutionary ideas of the Enlightenment.source
• 1773John Harrison wins the Longitude prize, for his invention of the marine chronometer.source
• 1774August 1 – The element oxygen is discovered for the third time (the second quantitatively, following the somewhat earlier work of Carl Wilhelm Scheele (1771–72) by Joseph Priestley, who publishes the fact in 1775, and so names the element (and usually gets all the credit, because his work was published first).source
• 1774November 26 – English chemist Joseph Priestley becomes the first person to discover and identify sulfur dioxide.source
• 1774A revision of the laws of cricket introduces a leg before wicket rule.source
• 1775Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart writes his five violin concertos in Salzburg at about this date.source
• 1776February 17 – Edward Gibbon publishes the first volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.source
• 1776March 9 – Scottish economist Adam Smith publishes The Wealth of Nations in London.source
• 1778June 24 – A total solar eclipse takes place across parts of North America, from Texas to Virginia.source
• 1780Jeremy Bentham's Introduction to Principles of Morals and Legislation, presenting his formulation of utilitarian ethics, is printed (but not published) in London.source
• 1781March 13 – Sir William Herschel discovers the planet Uranus. Originally he calls it Georgium Sidus (George's Star), in honour of King George III.source
• 1781Charles Messier publishes the final catalog of Messier objects.source
• 1781Carl Wilhelm Scheele discovers tungsten.source
• 1782December 14 – The Montgolfier brothers first test fly a hot air balloon in France; it floats nearly 2 km mi.source
• 1782Princess Yekaterina Vorontsova-Dashkova is the first woman in the world to direct a scientific academy, the Imperial Academy of Arts and Sciences.source
• 1783August 18 – The 1783 Great Meteor passes on a 1,000-mile track across the North Sea, Great Britain and France, prompting scientific discussion.source
• 1783August 27 – Jacques Charles and Les Frères Robert launch the world's first hydrogen-filled balloon, Le Globe, in Paris.source
• 1783November 21 – In Paris, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent, marquis d'Arlandes, make the first untethered hot air balloon flight (flight time: 25 minutes, Maximum height: 900 m).source
• 1783November 27 – English rector John Michell concludes that some stars might have enough gravity force to prevent light escaping from them, so he calls them "dark stars".source
• 1783December 1 – Jacques Charles and Nicolas-Louis Robert make the first manned flight in a hydrogen-filled gas balloon in Paris.source
• 1783December 31 – Louis-Sébastien Lenormand makes the first ever recorded public demonstration of a parachute descent, by jumping from the tower of the Montpellier Observatory in France, using his rigid-framed model, which he intends as a form of fire escape.source
• 1783Princess Yekaterina Vorontsova-Dashkova is elected an honorary member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the first female foreign member and its second female member, after Eva Ekeblad.source
• 1784January 15 – Henry Cavendish's paper to the Royal Society of London, Experiments on Air, reveals the molecular composition of water.source
• 1784September 19 – In France, the Robert brothers (Anne-Jean Robert and Nicolas-Louis Robert) and a Mr. Collin-Hullin (whose first name is lost to history) become the first people to fly more than 100 km or 100 miles in the air, lifting off from Paris and landing 6 hours and 40 minutes later near Bethune after a journey of 186 km.source
• 1784November 27 – The phenomenon of black holes is first posited in a paper by John Michell, in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.source
• 1784Antoine Lavoisier pioneers quantitative chemistry.source
• 1784Carl Friedrich Gauss pioneers the field of summation with the formula summing at the age of 7.source
• 1784Benjamin Franklin invents bifocal spectacles.source
• 1785March 7 – Scottish geologist James Hutton first presents his landmark work, Theory of the Earth; or an Investigation of the Laws observable in the Composition, Dissolution, and Restoration of Land upon the Globe to the Royal Society of Edinburgh.source
• 1785April 28 – Astronomer William Herschel begins his second series of surveys of the stars, published in 1789.source
• 1785October 5 – Vincenzo Lunardi of Italy becomes the first person to pilot a balloon over Scotland.source
• 1785Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi publishes Letters on the Teachings of Spinoza, and starts the Pantheism controversy of the 1780s.source
• 1786April 27 – British astronomer William Herschel publishes his first list of his discoveries, Catalogue of One Thousand New Nebulae and Clusters of Stars; two additional books are published in 1789 and 1802.source
• 1786August 1 – Caroline Herschel discovers a comet (the first discovered by a woman) from England.source
• 1787January 11 – William Herschel discovers Titania and Oberon, two moons of Uranus.source
• 1787April 19 – British astronomer Sir William Herschel notices three red glowing spots on the dark part of the Moon.source
• 1787August 10 – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composes his famous Eine kleine Nachtmusik.source
• 1787Antoine Lavoisier is the first to suggest that silica is an oxide of a hitherto unknown metallic chemical element, later isolated and named silicon.source
• 1787Caroline Herschel is granted an annual salary of £50, by King George III of Great Britain, for acting as assistant to her brother William in astronomy.source
• 1787A fossil bone recovered from Cretaceous strata at Woodbury, New Jersey is discussed by the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.source
• 1789August 28 – William Herschel discovers Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons.source
• 1789German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth discovers the element uranium, while studying the mineral pitchblende.source
• 1790December 17 – The Aztec calendar stone is discovered at El Zócalo, Mexico City.source
• 1792Hungarian astronomer Franz Xaver von Zach publishes The Tables of the Sun, an essential early work for navigation.source
• 1793January 9 – Jean-Pierre Blanchard becomes the first to fly in a gas balloon in the United States.source
• 1795April 7 – The metric system is adopted in France.source
• 1796July 10 – Carl Friedrich Gauss discovers that every positive integer is representable as a sum of at most 3 triangular numbers.source
• 1797October 22 – André-Jacques Garnerin makes the first parachute descent, at Parc Monceau, Paris; he uses a silk parachute to descend approximately 3,000 ft m from a hot air balloon.source
• 1798Alois Senefelder invents lithography.source
• 1798Thomas Malthus publishes An Essay on the Principle of Population (anonymously) in London.source
• 1798The platypus is first discovered by Europeans.source
• 1799October 12 – Jeanne Geneviève Labrosse becomes the first woman to jump from a balloon with a parachute, from an altitude of 900 m ft over France.source