Science & Discovery in the 19th century

270 sourced entries, 1800 CE to 1899 CE, oldest first. Also see Science & Discovery across every century or everything else in the 19th century.

• 1800February 11 – Infrared radiation is discovered by astronomer Sir William Herschel.source
• 1800February 22 – The Baker rifle, designed by Ezekiel Baker, is selected by the British Board of Ordnance as a new standard.source
• 1800March 20 – Alessandro Volta describes his new invention, the voltaic pile, the first chemical battery, in a letter to the Royal Society of London.source
• 1801January 1 – Giuseppe Piazzi discovers the asteroid and dwarf planet Ceres.source
• 1801The first of a continuous series of censuses is held in France.source
• 1801Ultraviolet radiation is discovered by Johann Wilhelm Ritter.source
• 1802February – The Rosetta Stone is brought to England by Colonel Tomkyns Hilgrove Turner, who arrives at Portsmouth on the captured French frigate L'Egyptiane.source
• 1802March 28 – H. W. Olbers discovers the asteroid Pallas.source
• 1802April 10 – The Great Trigonometrical Survey of India begins with the measurement of a baseline near Madras.source
• 1803April 26 – The L'Aigle meteorite falls in Normandy, causing a shift in scientific opinion on the origin of meteorites.source
• 1803September 6 – John Dalton, British scientist, begins using symbols to represent the atoms of different elements.source
• 1803Major breakthroughs in chemistry occur, with the identification of the elements rhodium and palladium (by William Hyde Wollaston); osmium and iridium (by Smithson Tennant); and cerium (by Wilhelm Hisinger, Jons Jakob Berzelius and Martin Heinrich Klaproth)source
• 1804April 5 – The High Possil meteorite, the first recorded meteorite to fall in Scotland in modern times, falls at High Possil.source
• 1804June 21 – Smithson Tennant announces the discovery of the elements iridium and osmium; three days later, William Hyde Wollaston reveals to the Royal Society that he is the formerly anonymous discoverer of palladium.source
• 1804September 1 – German astronomer K. L. Harding discovers the asteroid Juno.source
• 1807March 29 – H. W. Olbers discovers the asteroid Vesta.source
• 1807October 6 – English chemist Humphry Davy electrochemically isolates potassium from potash.source
• 1808June 30 – English chemist Humphry Davy informs the Royal Society of London of his isolation and discovery of two elements by electrolysis. From lime, he has produced calcium and established that lime is calcium oxide; by heating boric acid and potassium in a copper tube, he creates a substance he calls boracium, which is eventually called boron. This year he also isolates magnesium and strontium.source
• 1808December 9 – At 20:34 UTC, Mercury occults Saturn (there are no observation records).source
• 1809Louis Poinsot describes the two remaining Kepler–Poinsot polyhedra.source
• 1809Jean-Baptiste Lamarck publishes Philosophie Zoologique, outlining a (wrong) concept of evolution, by acquisition or loss of inherited characteristics, through use or disuse.source
• 1810June – Nicolas Appert publishes L'art de conserver pendant plusieurs années toutes les substances animales ou végétales, the first description of modern food preservation using airtight containers.source
• 1811March 25 – The Great Comet of 1811 is discovered by Honoré Flaugergues.source
• 1811Iodine was discovered by French chemist Bernard Courtois.source
• 1812February 12 – Napoleon I authorizes the usage of Mesures usuelles, the basis of the metric system.source
• 1813Probable date – George E. Clymer invents the Columbian press, used to print newspapers worldwide.source
• 1815October 3 – The Chassigny Martian meteorite falls in Chassigny, Haute-Marne, France.source
• 1815November 3 – Sir Humphry Davy announces his invention, the Davy lamp (a coal mining safety lamp),source
• 1815Wisden Cricketers' Almanack retrospectively recognises statistics for first-class cricket in England from this year.source
• 1817October 17 – The frigate is launched in Bombay for the British Royal Navy. She will still be afloat two centuries later.source
• 1818January 3 (21:52 UTC) – Venus occults Jupiter. It is the last occultation of one planet by another before November 22, 2065.source
• 1818July 29 – French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel submits his prizewinning "Memoir on the Diffraction of Light" to the French Academy of Sciences, precisely accounting for the limited extent to which light spreads into shadows, and thereby demolishing the oldest objection to the wave theory of light.source
• 1819January 29 – Sir Stamford Raffles lands on the island of Singapore.source
• 1819July 1 – German astronomer Johann Georg Tralles discovers what will be called the Great Comet of 1819.source
• 1819December 17 – The new astronomical observatory of Capodimonte in Naples starts operating. The astronomer Carlo Brioschi made the first observation by measuring the position of ⍺ Cassiopeiae.source
• 1820March 10 – The Astronomical Society of London is founded.source
• 1820April 8 – The statue of the Venus de Milo (Aphrodite of Milos, c. 150 BC-125 BC) is discovered on the Greek island of Milos, by a peasant named Yorgos Kentrotas.source
• 1820April 21 – Hans Christian Ørsted discovers the relationship between electricity and magnetism.source
• 1821January 21 – Peter I Island in the Antarctic is first sighted, by Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen.source
• 1822September 27 – Jean-François Champollion announces his success in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs, using the Rosetta Stone, in a letter to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris (based on the work of Thomas Young).source
• 1823February 15 (approx.) – The first officially recognised gold is found in Australia, by surveyor James McBrien at Fish River, near Bathurst, New South Wales, predating the Australian gold rushes.source
• 1823Olbers' paradox is described by the German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers.source
• 1824February 20 — William Buckland formally announces the name Megalosaurus, the first scientifically validly named non-avian dinosaur species.source
• 1824The Colorado potato beetle is first described, by Thomas Say.source
• 1824The Panoramagram is invented as the first stereoscopic viewer.source
• 1825February 10 – Gideon Mantell names and describes the second known dinosaur Iguanodon.source
• 1826February 23 – Russian mathematician Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky develops non-Euclidean geometry (independently of János Bolyai).source
• 1826Aniline is first isolated, from the destructive distillation of indigo, by Otto Unverdorben.source
• 1827January 27 – Author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe first elaborates on his vision of Weltliteratur (world literature), in a letter to Johann Peter Eckermann, declaring his belief that "poetry is the universal possession of mankind", and that "the epoch of world literature is at hand, and each must work to hasten its coming."source
• 1827April 7 – John Walker begins selling his invention, the "Lucifer" friction match, in England.source
• 1827May 1 – Georg Ohm publishes Die galvanische Kette, mathematisch bearbeitet (tr., The Galvanic Circuit Investigated Mathematically) in which Ohm's law appears for the first time.source
• 1827June 4 – French inventor Joseph Niépce sends a package to Louis Daguerre revealing the existence of his invention, "heliography", where an image can be reproduced onto a pewter plate and then reprinted. In 1829, the two will begin a partnership, and Daguerre will perfect Niépce's photographic process to reproduce images more quickly.source
• 1827Between June 4–July 18 – In Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France, Nicéphore Niépce makes the first photograph, View from the Window at Le Gras.source
• 1827John James Audubon begins publication of the 10-volume The Birds of America, in the United Kingdom.source
• 1828Friedrich Wöhler synthesizes urea, possibly discrediting a cornerstone of vitalism.source
• 1831August 29 - Michael Faraday demonstrates electromagnetic induction at the Royal Society of London. Joseph Henry recognises it at about the same time.source
• 1832July 2 – André-Michel Guerry presents his Essay on moral statistics of France to the French Academy of Sciences, a significant step in the founding of empirical social science.source
• 1833The dawn of biochemistry: The first enzyme, diastase, is discovered by Anselme Payen.source
• 1834March 14 – John Herschel discovers the open cluster of stars now known as NGC 3603, observing from the Cape of Good Hope.source
• 1835August 25 – In the U.S., The New York Sun prints the first of six installments of the Great Moon Hoax.source
• 1835November 16 – Halley's Comet reaches perihelion, its closest approach to the Sun.source
• 1836May 15 – During an eclipse of the Sun, English astronomer Francis Baily observes the phenomenon named after him as Baily's beads.source
• 1836October 2 – Charles Darwin returns to England aboard , with biological data he will later use to develop his theory of evolution, having left South America on August 17.source
• 1837Louis Daguerre develops the daguerreotype.source
• 1838Proteins are discovered by Gerardus Johannes Mulder. and named by Jöns Jacob Berzelius.source
• 1838Friedrich Bessel makes the first accurate measurement of distance to a star.source
• 1839January 2 – The first photograph of the Moon is taken, by French photographer Louis Daguerre.source
• 1839January 9 – The French Academy of Sciences announces the daguerreotype photography process.source
• 1839August 19 – The French government gives the daguerreotype "for the whole world".source
• 1839Michael Faraday publishes Experimental Researches in Electricity, clarifying the true nature of electricity.source
• 1840March 12 – Paweł Strzelecki reaches Australia's highest summit, Mount Kosciuszko.source
• 1840December 7 – David Livingstone leaves Britain for Africa.source
• 1840The first known photograph of Niagara Falls, a daguerreotype, is taken by English chemist Hugh Lee Pattinson.source
• 1842July 8 – The total solar eclipse of July 8, 1842 is visible from Asia.source
• 1842Julius von Mayer proposes that work and heat are equivalent.source
• 1842English palaeontologist Richard Owen coins the name Dinosauria, hence the Anglicized dinosaur.source
• 1843March 11–14 – Eta Carinae flares, to become the second-brightest star.source
• 1843August 1 – Brazil becomes the second country, after Great Britain, to issue nationally valid postage stamps, with the release of its Bull's Eye series.source
• 1843August 19 – Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Black Cat" is first published in The Saturday Evening Post.source
• 1843October 16 – Søren Kierkegaard's philosophical book Fear and Trembling is first published, in Denmark.source
• 1843October 16 – Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton discovers the calculus of quaternions and deduces that they are non-commutative.source
• 1843December 19 – Charles Dickens's novella A Christmas Carol is first published in London, England. Released on December 19, it sells out by Christmas Eve.source
• 1843December 21 – The first total solar eclipse of Saros 139 occurs over southern Asia.source
• 1843The Quaker magazine The Friend is first published in London.source
• 1843James Joule experimentally finds the mechanical equivalent of heat.source
• 1844August 10 – German astronomer Friedrich Bessel deduces from the motion of the bright stars Sirius and Procyon that they have dark companions.source
• 1844Swedish chemistry professor Gustaf Erik Pasch is granted a privilege for his invention of a safety match.source
• 1845August 28 – The journal Scientific American begins publication.source
• 1845Ephraim Bee reveals that the Emperor of China has given him a special dispensation: that he has entrusted him with certain sacred and mysterious rituals through Caleb Cushing, the U.S. Commissioner to China, to "extend the work and influence of the Ancient and Honorable Order of E Clampus Vitus" in the New World.source
• 1845Heinrich Hoffmann publishes a book (Lustige Geschichten und drollige Bilder), introducing his character, Struwwelpeter, in Germany.source
• 1846September 23 – Discovery of Neptune: The planet is observed for the first time by German astronomers Johann Gottfried Galle and Heinrich Louis d'Arrest, as predicted by British astronomer John Couch Adams and French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier.source
• 1846October 1 – Triton, Neptune's largest moon, is discovered by William Lassell 17 days after the discovery of Neptune.source
• 1847March – The first known publication of the classic joke "Why did the chicken cross the road?" occurs in The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine.source
• 1847October 19 – Charlotte Brontë publishes Jane Eyre under the pen name of Currer Bell in England.source
• 1848May 3 – The boar-crested Anglo-Saxon Benty Grange helmet is discovered in a barrow on the Benty Grange farm in Derbyshire.source
• 1848September 16 – William Cranch Bond and William Lassell discover Hyperion, Saturn's moon.source
• 1849April 12 – Astronomer Annibale de Gasparis discovers the asteroid 10 Hygiea.source
• 1849April 22 – The first Kennedy arrives in America.source
• 1849July 23 – French scientist Hippolyte Fizeau makes a measurement of the speed of light in air using a specially devised apparatus.source
• 1850May 25 – The hippopotamus Obaysch arrives at London Zoo from Egypt, the first seen in Europe since Roman times.source
• 1850July 17 – Vega becomes the first star (other than the Sun) to be photographed.source
• 1851February 12 – Edward Hargraves claims to have found gold in Australia.source
• 1851July 28 – Total solar eclipse visible in Canada, Greenland, Iceland and Northern Europe, the first solar eclipse to be photographed.source
• 1851July 29 – Annibale de Gasparis, in Naples, Italy discovers asteroid 15 Eunomia.source
• 1851October 24 – Ariel and Umbriel, moons of Uranus, are discovered by William Lassell.source
• 1852March 17 – Annibale de Gasparis discovers the asteroid Psyche from the north dome of the Astronomical Observatory of Capodimonte in Naples.source
• 1852September 19 – Annibale de Gasparis discovers the asteroid Massalia from the north dome of the Astronomical Observatory of Capodimonte in Naples.source
• 1852October 23 – The conjecture of the four color theorem is first proposed, as student Francis Guthrie of University College London presents the question of proving, mathematically, that no more than four colors are needed to give separate colors to bordering shapes on a map (the theorem is not proven for almost 123 years, until 1976).source
• 1853September 19 – English missionary Hudson Taylor first leaves for China.source
• 1853October 4 – On the east coast of the United States, Donald McKay launches the Great Republic, the world's biggest sailing ship, which at 4,500 tons is too large to be successful.source
• 1853French diplomat Arthur de Gobineau begins publication of his An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines), an early example of scientific racism.source
• 1854Professor Benjamin Silliman of Yale University is the first person to fractionate petroleum into its individual components, by distillation.source
• 1855April 18 – The Bordeaux Wine Official Classification of 1855, requested by Napoleon III for the Exposition Universelle (opening May 15), first appears.source
• 1855August 1 – Monte Rosa, the second-highest summit in the Alps, is first ascended.source
• 1855The cocaine alkaloid is first isolated by German chemist Friedrich Gaedcke.source
• 1856January 8 – Borax deposits are discovered in large quantities by John Veatch in California.source
• 1856The Great Trigonometrical Survey of India officially gives 'Peak XV' (later to be named Mount Everest) the height of 29002 ft m. 'Peak IX' (Kangchenjunga), previously thought to be the world's highest, is confirmed as 28156 ft m.source
• 1856Gregor Mendel starts his research on genetics.source
• 1857March 23 – Elisha Otis' first elevator is installed (at 488 Broadway, New York City).source
• 1857March 25 – The phonautograph is patented by French typesetter Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. It is the earliest known device for recording sound.source
• 1858February 11 – Lourdes apparitions: Pauper girl Bernadette Soubirous of Lourdes, fourteen, has a vision at the grotto of Massabielle, the first in a series of eighteen events which will come to be regarded as Marian apparitions.source
• 1858June 2 – Comet Donati, the first comet to be photographed, is discovered by Giovanni Battista Donati, and remains visible for several months afterwards.source
• 1858July 1 – A joint presentation of papers by Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, announcing a theory of evolution by natural selection, are read at London's Linnean Society.source
• 1858August – The first aerial photography is carried out by Nadar, from a moored balloon in France.source
• 1858November 16 – The 2,400,000th day of the Epoch of the Julian day is reached.source
• 1859March 26 – French amateur astronomer Edmond Modeste Lescarbault claims to have noticed a planet closer to the Sun than Mercury (later named Vulcan).source
• 1859June 18 – Aletschhorn, the second summit of the Bernese Alps, is first ascended.source
• 1859November 24 – The French Navy's La Gloire, the first ocean-going ironclad warship in history, is launched.source
• 1859November 24 – English naturalist Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species, a book which argues for the gradual evolution of species through natural selection (it immediately sells out its initial print run).source
• 1859November – Bernhard Riemann publishes On the Number of Primes Less Than a Given Magnitude. In his paper there is an incidental comment that later becomes the Riemann Hypothesis, one of the most important unsolved problems in Mathematics.source
• 1859Karl Marx publishes A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.source
• 1859John Stuart Mill publishes On Liberty.source
• 1859George Eliot publishes Adam Bede.source
• 1860January 2 – The astronomer Urbain Le Verrier announces the discovery of a hypothetical planet Vulcan at a meeting of the French Academy of Sciences in Paris, France.source
• 1860April 9 – French typesetter Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville creates a recording of the French folk song Au clair de la lune with his phonautograph, producing the world's earliest known intelligible sound recording of the human voice (however, it was not rediscovered until 2008).source
• 1860December 1 – Charles Dickens publishes the first installment of Great Expectations in his magazine All the Year Round.source
• 1860Discovery of the chemical elements: Robert Bunsen discovers caesium and rubidium.source
• 1860German chemist Albert Niemann makes a detailed analysis of the coca leaf, isolating and purifying the alkaloid, which he calls cocaine.source
• 1861March 30 – Discovery of the chemical elements: British chemist William Crookes announces his discovery of thallium.source
• 1861April 26 – Giovanni Schiaparelli discovers the asteroid 69 Hesperia.source
• 1861May 13 – Comet C/1861 J1 (the "Great Comet of 1861") is discovered from Australia.source
• 1861May 17 – Scottish-born physicist James Clerk Maxwell demonstrates the principle of permanent three-colour photography in a lecture at the Royal Institution in London using a photograph captured by Thomas Sutton.source
• 1861June 9 – Règlement Organique: With the approval of European powers, the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate is established as a semi-autonomous sub-division separate from the Sidon Eyalet. An Ottoman Armenian, Davud Pasha, is appointed Mutasarrıf by the Ottoman Sultan.source
• 1861August 1 – The first public weather forecast: measured and predicted correctly by Admiral Robert FitzRoy in Britain.source
• 1861August 15 – First description of Archaeopteryx, based on a feather found in Bavaria; in September the first complete identified skeleton is found near Langenaltheim in Germany.source
• 1861August 19 – Weisshorn, the fifth highest summit in the Alps, is first ascended.source
• 1862January 31 – Alvan Graham Clark makes the first observation of Sirius B, a white dwarf star, through an eighteen-inch telescope at Northwestern University in Illinois.source
• 1863June 27 – The Chōshū Five leave Japan secretly to study at University College London, which is part of the ending of sakoku.source
• 1863December 19 – Linoleum is patented in the United Kingdom.source
• 1863Richard Owen publishes the first description of a fossilised bird, Archaeopteryx.source
• 1864February – John Wisden publishes The Cricketer's Almanack for the year 1864 in England; it will go on to become the major annual cricket reference publication.source
• 1864May 7 – The clipper ship City of Adelaide is launched in Sunderland, England. By the 21st century, she will be the world's oldest surviving clipper of only two (Cutty Sark being the other).source
• 1864October 30 – An annular solar eclipse occurs, the 42nd solar eclipse of Solar Saros 131.source
• 1864December 8 – James Clerk Maxwell presents his paper, A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field, to the Royal Society in London, treating light as an electromagnetic wave.source
• 1865February 8 & March 8 – Gregor Mendel reads his paper on Experiments on Plant Hybridization at two meetings of the Natural History Society of Brünn in Moravia, subsequently taken to be the origin of the theory of Mendelian inheritance.source
• 1865June 26 – Jumbo, a young male African elephant, arrives at London Zoo and becomes a popular attraction.source
• 1865June–August – English polymath Francis Galton first describes eugenics.source
• 1866March 31 – A total lunar eclipse occurs.source
• 1866June 5 – Calculations indicate Pluto (not known at this time) reaches its only aphelion (furthest point from the Sun) between 1618 and August 2113.source
• 1866Marcus Jastrow arrives in the United States to become rabbi of Congregation Rodeph Shalom in Philadelphia.source
• 1866Alfred Nobel invents dynamite in Germany.source
• 1867June 20 – The first recorded association football match in Argentina takes place in Buenos Aires.source
• 1867South African diamond fields are discovered.source
• 1868August 18 – The element later named as helium is first detected in the spectrum of the Sun's chromosphere, by French astronomer Jules Janssen, during a total eclipse in Guntur, British India, but is assumed to be sodium.source
• 1868October 20 – English astronomer Norman Lockyer observes and names the D 3 Fraunhofer line in the solar spectrum, and concludes that it is caused by a hitherto unidentified element, which he later names helium.source
• 1868November 2 – Time zone: New Zealand officially adopts a standard time, to be observed nationally.source
• 1868Thomas Henry Huxley discovers what he thinks is primordial matter and names it bathybius haeckelii (he admits his mistake in 1871).source
• 1869March 1 – (O. S. February 17) – Dmitri Mendeleev finishes his design of the first periodic table and sends it for publishing.source
• 1869March 18 (O. S. March 6) – Dmitri Mendeleev makes a formal presentation of his periodic table to the Russian Chemical Society.source
• 1869November 23 – In Dumbarton, Scotland, the clipper ship Cutty Sark is launched (it is one of the last clippers built, and the only one to survive in the United Kingdom).source
• 1869Friedrich Miescher purifies nuclein, which was then identified as deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).source
• 1870March 18 – Female Infanticide Prevention Act, 1870, passed in British India by Natalia Fish.source
• 1870July 28 – Start of Solar Saros 153. The final eclipse in this series will be in 3114.source
• 1871February 21 – The District of Columbia Organic Act of 1871 is signed into law by U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant.source
• 1871September 2 – Whaling disaster of 1871: The Comet, a brig used by whalers, becomes the first of 33 ships to be crushed in the Arctic ice by an early freeze. Remarkably, all 1,219 people on the abandoned ships are rescued without a single loss of life.source
• 1871October 5 – The Società degli Spettroscopisti Italiani (laterSocietà Astronomica Italiana) is established in Rome, the first scientific organisation in the world dedicated to astrophysics.source
• 1871November 17 – George Biddell Airy presents his discovery that astronomical aberration is independent of the local medium.source
• 1871Modern "neoclassical economics" is initiated by publication of William Stanley Jevons's Theory of Political Economy and Carl Menger's Principles of Economics (Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre).source
• 1872February 4 – A great solar flare, and associated geomagnetic storm, makes northern lights visible as far south as Cuba.source
• 1872May 4 – The magazine Popular Science is first published in the United States.source
• 1872November 27 – A meteor shower display of Andromedids is seen over France.source
• 1873January 1 – Japan adopts the Gregorian calendar.source
• 1873July 5 – New Rush in Griqualand West, South Africa, is renamed Kimberley.source
• 1873Nine Pekin ducks are imported to Long Island (the first in the United States).source
• 1874Charles Taze Russell and the Bible Student movement claim this year marks the invisible return of Jesus Christ to earth.source
• 1875September 11 – Egypt adopts the Gregorian calendar; replacing the Coptic/Alexandrian calendar (based on the ancient Egyptian calendar) which had been the official calendar since the Roman period.source
• 1876January 1 – The Bass Brewery Red Triangle becomes the world's first registered trademark symbol, in the United Kingdom.source
• 1876American librarian Melvil Dewey first publishes the Dewey Decimal Classification system.source
• 1877August 12 – American astronomer Asaph Hall discovers Deimos, the outer moon of Mars.source
• 1877August 18 – Asaph Hall discovers Phobos, the inner moon of Mars.source
• 1877November 21 – Thomas Edison announces his invention of the phonograph, a machine that can record sound, considered his first great invention. Edison demonstrates the device for the first time on November 29.source
• 1878October 14 – The world's first recorded floodlit football fixture is played at Bramall Lane, in Sheffield, England.source
• 1879January 1 – The Specie Resumption Act takes effect. The United States Note is valued the same as gold, for the first time since the American Civil War.source
• 1879February 8 – At a meeting of the Royal Canadian Institute, engineer and inventor Sandford Fleming first proposes the global adoption of standard time.source
• 1879July 1 – American Restorationist Charles Taze Russell publishes the first issue of the monthly Zion's Watch Tower and Herald of Christ's Presence which, as The Watchtower, will become the most widely circulated magazine in the world.source
• 1879October 28 – The Hall effect is discovered by Edwin Hall at Johns Hopkins University in the United States.source
• 1879December 31 – Thomas Edison demonstrates incandescent lighting to the public for the first time, in Menlo Park, New Jersey.source
• 1879Gottlob Frege publishes Begriffsschrift, eine der arithmetischen nachgebildete Formelsprache des reinen Denkens in Halle, a significant text in the development of mathematical logic.source
• 1879Wilhelm Wundt establishes the first psychological research laboratory, at the University of Leipzig.source
• 1879The Stefan–Boltzmann law is discovered by Jozef Stefan.source
• 1880February 24 – The SS Columbia, which will be the first outside usage of Thomas Edison's incandescent light bulb, is launched at the Delaware River Iron Ship Building and Engine Works of John Roach & Sons in Chester, Pennsylvania.source
• 1880July – John Venn popularises Venn diagrams.source
• 1880Piezoelectricity is discovered by Pierre Curie and Jacques Curie.source
• 1881Some Vatican archives are opened to scholars for the first time.source
• 1881The Pali Text Society is founded by British scholar Thomas William Rhys Davids, for the study of Pali (Ceylonese) texts.source
• 1882September 18 – Great Comet of 1882: Her Majesty's Astronomer at the Cape, David Gill, reports watching the comet rise a few minutes before the Sun, describing it as "The nucleus was then undoubtedly single, and certainly rather under than over 4″ in diameter; in fact, as I have described it, it resembled very much a star of the 1st magnitude seen by daylight."source
• 1882December 6 – A transit of Venus, the last until 2004, occurs.source
• 1882The first International Polar Year, an international scientific program, begins.source
• 1883March 2 – The Hong Kong Observatory is established.source
• 1884January – Arthur Conan Doyle's anonymous story "J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement" appears in the Cornhill Magazine (London). Based on the disappearance of the crew of the Mary Celeste in 1872, many of the fictional elements introduced by Doyle come to replace the real events in the popular imagination.source
• 1884October 22 – The International Meridian Conference meeting in Washington, D.C., fixes the Greenwich meridian as the world's prime meridian (voted on October 13).source
• 1884The Stefan–Boltzmann law is reformulated by Ludwig Boltzmann.source
• 1885August 19 – S Andromedae, the only supernova seen in the Andromeda Galaxy so far by astronomers, and the first ever noted outside the Milky Way, is discovered.source
• 1885Martha, the last Passenger pigeon was bornsource
• 1886May 8 – American pharmacist Dr. John Pemberton invents a carbonated beverage that will be named 'Coca-Cola'.source
• 1886November 11 – Heinrich Hertz verifies the existence of electromagnetic waves, at the University of Karlsruhe.source
• 1887February 26 – At the Sydney Cricket Ground, George Lohmann becomes the first bowler to take eight wickets, in a Test innings.source
• 1887Results of the Michelson–Morley experiment are published, indicating that the speed of light is independent of motion.source
• 1887Heinrich Hertz discovers the photoelectric effect on the production and reception of electromagnetic (EM) waves (radio); this is an important step towards the understanding of the quantum nature of light.source
• 1887Franz König publishes "Über freie Körper in den Gelenken" in the medical journal Deutsche Zeitschrift für Chirurgie, describing (and naming) the disease Osteochondritis dissecans for the first time.source
• 1888January 3 – The great telescope (with an objective lens of 91 cm diameter) at Lick Observatory in California is first used.source
• 1888August 28 – The longest date in roman numerals is achieved, as "VIII-XXVIII-MDCCCLXXXVIII". In contrast, the shortest date (I-I-MM) will be achieved 111 years later on January 1, 2000.source
• 1888September 4 – Mohandas Gandhi embarks on the SS Clyde from Bombay for London.source
• 1888John Robert Gregg first publishes Gregg shorthand in the United States.source
• 1889January 1 – The total solar eclipse of January 1, 1889 is seen over parts of California and Nevada.source
• 1889June 28 – The annular solar eclipse of June 28, 1889 is visible across the Atlantic Ocean, Africa and Indian Ocean, and is the 47th solar eclipse of Solar Saros 125.source
• 1889October 21 – Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder is recorded by Adelbert Theodor Wangemann, a German associate of Thomas Edison, on wax cylinders via phonograph. The two surviving wax cylinders that are produced make von Moltke, who was born in 1800, the earliest-living human whose voice has been recorded, and the only person born in the 18th century whose voice will be heard into the 21st.source
• 1889November 14 – Pioneer American woman journalist Nellie Bly (Elizabeth Cochrane) begins an attempt to travel around the world in less than 80 days, inspired by Jules Verne; she finishes the journey in 72 days, 6 hours and 11 minutes.source
• 1890January 25 – American journalist Nellie Bly completes her round-the-world journey in 72 days.source
• 1890May 30 – The five-story skylight Arcade opens in Cleveland, Ohio.source
• 1890The folding carton box is invented by Robert Gair, a Brooklyn printer who developed production of paper-board boxes in 1879.source
• 1890Francis Galton announces a statistical demonstration of the uniqueness and classifiability of individual human fingerprints.source
• 1891March 3 – The International Copyright Act of 1891 is passed, by the 51st United States Congress.source
• 1891May 20 – Thomas Edison's prototype kinetoscope is first displayed at Edison's Laboratory, for a convention of the National Federation of Women's Clubs.source
• 1891June 1 – The Johnstown Inclined Plane opens in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.source
• 1891December 22 – Asteroid 323 Brucia becomes the first asteroid discovered using photography.source
• 1891Nikola Tesla invents the Tesla coil.source
• 1892September 9 – Amalthea, the fifth moon of Jupiter, is discovered by Edward Emerson Barnard.source
• 1892Viruses are first described by Russian biologist Dmitri Ivanovsky.source
• 1893February 28 – USS Indiana, the first battleship in the United States Navy comparable to other nation's battleships of the time, is launched.source
• 1893May 9 – Edison's 1½ inch system of Kinetoscope is first demonstrated in public, at the Brooklyn Institute.source
• 1893July 1 – U.S. President Grover Cleveland is operated on in secret.source
• 1893July 11 – Kōkichi Mikimoto, in Japan, develops the method to seed and grow cultured pearls.source
• 1893Carl Anton Larsen becomes the first man to ski in Antarctica.source
• 1893German physicist Wilhelm Wien formulates Wien's displacement law.source
• 1894March 21 – A syzygy of planets occurs, as Mercury transits the Sun as seen from Venus, and Mercury and Venus both transit the Sun as seen from Saturn, but no two of the transits are simultaneous.source
• 1894Oil is discovered on the Osage Indian reservation, making the Osage the "richest group of people in the world".source
• 1895October – Rudyard Kipling publishes the story "Mowgli Leaves the Jungle Forever" in The Cosmopolitan illustrated magazine in the United States, collected in The Second Jungle Book, published in England in November.source
• 1895November 1 – Max Skladanowsky and his brother Emil present a short film at the Berlin Wintergarten theatre in Germany using the movie projector they have developed.source
• 1895November 8 – Wilhelm Röntgen discovers the type of electromagnetic radiation later known as X-rays.source
• 1895December 11 – Svante Arrhenius becomes the first scientist to deliver quantified data about the sensitivity of global climate to atmospheric carbon dioxide (the "Greenhouse effect"), as he presents his paper "On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air Upon The Temperature of the Ground" to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.source
• 1895Konstantin Tsiolkovsky proposes a space elevator.source
• 1896January 5 – An Austrian newspaper reports Wilhelm Röntgen's discovery, last November, of a type of electromagnetic radiation, later known as X-rays.source
• 1896January 12 – H. L. Smith takes the first X-ray photograph.source
• 1896April – Svante Arrhenius first publishes the "greenhouse law", becoming the first person to predict that emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels and other combustion processes are large enough to cause global warming through the greenhouse effect.source
• 1897April 30 – J. J. Thomson of the Cavendish Laboratory announces his discovery of the electron as a subatomic particle, over 1,800 times smaller than a proton (in the atomic nucleus), at a lecture at the Royal Institution in London.source
• 1897May 6 – John Jacob Abel announces the successful isolation of epinephrine (adrenaline), in a paper read before the Association of American Physicians.source
• 1897July 25 – Writer Jack London sails to join the Klondike Gold Rush, where he will write his first successful stories.source
• 1897October 13 – , a pre-dreadnought battleship of the Royal Navy, is launched at Portsmouth, England; she will be deployed widely in World War I.source
• 1898May 28 – Secondo Pia takes the first photographs of the Shroud of Turin and discovers that the image on the Shroud itself appears to be a photographic negative.source
• 1898June 7 – William Ramsay and Morris Travers discover neon at their laboratory at University College London, after extracting it from liquid nitrogen.source
• 1898July 18 – "The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont" first appear in The Wide World Magazine, as its August 1898 issue goes on sale.source
• 1898December 26 – Marie and Pierre Curie announce the discovery of an element that they name radium.source
• 1899January 14 – The White Star Line's transatlantic ocean liner is launched from the Belfast shipyards in Ireland. At 17,272 gross register tons and 704 ft m, she is the largest ship afloat at this time.source
• 1899March 18 – Phoebe, the ninth-known moon of the planet Saturn is discovered by U.S. astronomer William Pickering from analysis of photographic plates made by a Peruvian observatory, the first discovery of a satellite photographically.source
• 1899April 21 – The nova V606 Aquilae is first observed from Earth as seen within the constellation Aquila.source
• 1899June 17 – David Hilbert creates the modern concept of geometry, with the publication of his book Grundlagen der Geometrie, released at Göttingen.source
• 1899June 27 – A. E. J. Collins, a 13-year-old schoolboy, makes the highest-ever recorded individual score in cricket, 628 not out. His record will stand for 117 years.source
• 1899October 19 – Robert H. Goddard receives his inspiration to develop the first rocket capable of reaching outer space, after viewing his yard from high in a tree and imagining "how wonderful it would be to make some device which had even the possibility of ascending to Mars, and how it would look on a small scale, if sent up from the meadow at my feet."source
• 1899December 2 – During the new moon, a near-grand conjunction of the classical planets and several binocular Solar System bodies occur. The Sun, Moon, Mercury, Mars and Saturn are all within 15° of each other, with Venus 5° ahead of this conjunction and Jupiter 15° behind.source