1868 in science

Overview of the events of 1868 in science

List of years in science

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1868 in science

1867

1869

Fields

* Archaeology

Technology

* Sustainable energy research
* Transportation technology

Social sciences

* Psychology
* Governance and policy studies

Paleontology

* Dinosaurs' extinction

Extraterrestrial environment
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The year 1868 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

## Biology

[edit]

* January 30 – Publication of Charles Darwin's The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (by John Murray in London), including his theory of heredity, which he calls pangenesis.
* Jules-Emile Planchon and colleagues propose Phylloxera as the cause of the Great French Wine Blight.[1]
* Roland Trimen reads a paper to the Linnaean Society explaining Batesian mimicry in African butterflies.[2][3]
* T. H. Huxley discovers what he thinks is primordial matter and names it Bathybius haeckelii. He admits his mistake in 1871.[4]
* The Granny Smith apple cultivar originates in Eastwood, New South Wales, Australia, from a chance seedling propagated by Maria Ann Smith (née Sherwood, 1799–1870).[5]

## Chemistry

[edit]

* August 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, India, but assumed to be sodium.[6]
* October 20 – English astronomer Norman Lockyer observes and names the D3 Fraunhofer line in the solar spectrum and concludes that it is caused by a hitherto unidentified element which he later names helium.[7]
* Louis Arthur Ducos du Hauron patents methods of color photography.[8]

## Medicine

[edit]

* Jean-Martin Charcot describes and names multiple sclerosis.[9][10]
* Adolph Kussmaul performs the first esophagogastroduodenoscopy on a living human.[11][12][13][14]

## Paleontology

[edit]

* March – French geologist Louis Lartet discovers the first identified skeletons of Cro-Magnon, the first anatomically modern humans (early Homo sapiens sapiens), at Abri de Crô-Magnon, a rock shelter at Les Eyzies, Dordogne, France.

## Technology

[edit]

* June 23 – The Sholes and Glidden typewriter is patented in the United States.[15]
* October 28 – American inventor Thomas Edison applies for his first patent, for a form of electronic voting machine.
* Ernest and Auguste Bollée first patent the Éolienne Bollée wind turbine in France.[16]
* Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell's paper on governors[17] is a landmark in the mathematics of feedback and in control theory.
* Pendulum-and-hydrostat control for the Whitehead torpedo developed by Robert Whitehead.

## Awards

[edit]

* Copley Medal: Charles Wheatstone[18]
* Wollaston Medal for Geology: Carl Friedrich Naumann

## Births

[edit]

* January 9 – S. P. L. Sørensen (died 1939), Danish chemist.
* January 31 – Theodore William Richards (died 1928), American chemist, recipient of Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
* February 7 – Aleen Cust (died 1937), Anglo-Irish veterinary surgeon.
* March 15 – Grace Chisholm Young (died 1944), English mathematician.
* March 22 – Robert Andrews Millikan (died 1953), American physicist, recipient of Nobel Prize in Physics.[19]
* April 4
* Philippa Fawcett (died 1948), English mathematician.
* Henrietta Swan Leavitt (died 1921), American astronomer[20]
* April 5 – Percy Furnivall (died 1938), English surgeon.
* April 8 – Herbert Spencer Jennings (died 1947), American zoologist.
* April 14 – Annie S. D. Maunder, née Russell (died 1947), Irish astronomer.
* April 28 – Georgy Voronoy (died 1908), Ukrainian mathematician.
* April 30 – J. B. Christopherson (died 1955), English physician.
* May 2 – Robert W. Wood (died 1955), American optical physicist.
* June 6 – Robert Falcon Scott (died 1912), English explorer.
* June 7 – John Sealy Townsend (died 1957), Irish mathematical physicist.[21]
* June 14 – Karl Landsteiner (died 1943), Austrian physiologist.
* July 4 – Henrietta Swan Leavitt (died 1921), American astronomer.[22]
* October 23 – Frederick W. Lanchester (died 1946), English automotive engineer.
* November 8 – Felix Hausdorff (died 1942), German mathematician.
* November 14 – Karl Landsteiner (died 1943), Austrian-born physiologist, recipient of Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.[23]
* November 15 – Emil Racoviță (died 1947), Romanian biologist, speleologist and explorer.
* November 17 – Korbinian Brodmann (died 1918), German neurologist.
* December 5 – Arnold Sommerfeld (died 1951), German theoretical physicist.[24]
* December 9 – Fritz Haber (died 1934), German chemist.[25]

## Deaths

[edit]

* February 10 – Sir David Brewster, Scottish physicist (born 1781)[26]
* February 11 – Léon Foucault (born 1819), French physicist.[27]
* February 24 – John Herapath (born 1790), English physicist.
* May 22 – Julius Plücker (born 1801), German mathematician and physicist.
* June 25 – Alexander Mitchell (born 1780), Irish engineer and inventor of the screw-pile lighthouse.
* June 29 – Sir John Lillie, British army officer, entrepreneur and inventor (born 1790)
* July 15 – William T. G. Morton (born 1819), American dentist.
* August 29 – Christian Friedrich Schönbein, German chemist and inventor of the fuel cell (born 1799)[28]
* September 26 – August Ferdinand Möbius (born 1790), German mathematician and astronomer[29]
* December 25 – Linus Yale, Jr. (born 1821), American engineer and inventor.[30]
* December 31 – James David Forbes (born 1809), Scottish-born physicist, glaciologist and seismologist.

## References

[edit]

1. ^ "The Great French Wine Blight". Wine Tidings. 96. July–August 1986. Archived from the original on 17 July 2011. Retrieved 2011-08-01.
2. ^ Published in Transactions 26(3) (1870): 497.
3. ^ "Roland Trimen, 1840-1916". Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 91 (641): xviii–xxvii. 1920. doi:10.1098/rspb.1920.0020. JSTOR 80995.
4. ^ Ley, Willy (1959). Exotic Zoology. New York: Viking Press.
5. ^ Martin, Megan (2005). "Smith, Maria Ann (1799–1870)". Australian Dictionary of Biography. Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. Retrieved 2012-01-27.
6. ^ Kochhar, R. K. (1991). "French astronomers in India during the 17th –19th centuries". Journal of the British Astronomical Association. 101 (2): 95–100\. Bibcode:1991JBAA..101...95K.
7. ^ Hampel, Clifford A. (1968). The Encyclopedia of the Chemical Elements. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. pp. 256–268\. ISBN 0-442-15598-0.
8. ^ Coe, Brian (1978). Colour Photography: the first hundred years 1840-1940. London: Ash & Grant. ISBN 0-904069-24-9.
9. ^ Enerson, Ole Daniel. "Jean-Martin Charcot". Whonamedit?. Archived from the original on 14 May 2011. Retrieved 2011-04-11.
10. ^ Charcot, J.-M. (1868). "Histologie de la sclerose en plaques". Gazette des Hopitaux. 41. Paris: 554–55.
11. ^ Killian, Gustvan (1911). "The history of bronchoscopy and esophagoscopy". The Laryngoscope. 21 (9): 891–7\. doi:10.1288/00005537-191109000-00001. S2CID 73388145.
12. ^ Modlin, Irvin M.; Kidd, Mark; Lye, Kevin D. (2004). "From the Lumen to the Laparoscope". Archives of Surgery. 139 (10): 1110–26\. doi:10.1001/archsurg.139.10.1110. PMID 15492154. Retrieved 2011-10-17.
13. ^ Elewaut, A.; Cremer, M. (2002). "The History of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy — The European Perspective". In Classen, Meinhard; Tytgat, Guido N.J.; Lightdale, Charles J. (eds.). Gastroenterological endoscopy. Stuttgart: Thieme. p. 17\. ISBN 978-1-58890-013-5. Retrieved 2010-09-06.
14. ^ Vilardell, F. (2006). "Rigid gastroscopes". Digestive endoscopy in the second millennium: from the Lichtleiter to echoendoscopy. Stuttgart: Thieme. pp. 32–5\. ISBN 978-3-13-139671-6. Retrieved 2010-09-06.
15. ^ US79265.
16. ^ No 79985.
17. ^ Maxwell, James Clerk (1868). "On Governors". Proceedings of the Royal Society. 16 (100). London: 270–283\. doi:10.1098/rspl.1867.0055. JSTOR 112510.
18. ^ "Copley Medal | British scientific award". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 23 July 2020.
19. ^ "Robert A. Millikan - Biographical". www.nobelprize.org.
20. ^ Lamb, Gregory M. (July 5, 2005). "Before computers, there were these humans..." Christian Science Monitor. Retrieved January 1, 2020.
21. ^ Von Engel, A. (1957). "John Sealy Edward Townsend. 1868-1957". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 3: 256–272\. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1957.0018.
22. ^ Todd, Deborah; Angelo, Joseph (2003). A to Z of Scientists in Space and Astronomy. New York: Facts of File. p. 200\. ISBN 978-0-81604-639-3.
23. ^ Rous, P. (1947). "Karl Landsteiner. 1868–1943". Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society. 5 (15): 294–324\. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1947.0002. JSTOR 769085. S2CID 161789667.
24. ^ Born, Max, Arnold Johannes Wilhelm Sommerfeld, 1868–1951, Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society Volume 8, Number 21, pp. 274–296 (1952)
25. ^ Goran, Morris (1967). The Story of Fritz Haber. University of Oklahoma Press. p. 38\. ISBN 978-0-8061-0756-1. Retrieved 30 April 2021.
26. ^ Gordon, Margaret Maria (1881). The home life of sir David Brewster. D. Douglas. pp. 231–236. Retrieved 18 September 2011.
27. ^ John Guy Porter; Patrick Moore (1967). Yearbook of Astronomy. W. W. Norton. p. 47.
28. ^ Partington, J. R. (1964). History of Chemistry. London: Macmillan Education, Limited. p. 190\. ISBN 9781349005543. `{{cite book}}`: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)
29. ^ Franceschetti, Donald (1999). Biographical encyclopedia of mathematicians. New York: Marshall Cavendish. p. 377\. ISBN 9780761470717.
30. ^ Day, Lance (1996). Biographical dictionary of the history of technology. London New York: Routledge. p. 1345\. ISBN 9781134650194.

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