1750-1914: Science, Technology, and Health: Chronology

Important Events of 1750-1914

Important Events of 1750-1914

1751-1772

• Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert’s twenty-four-volume Encyclopédie is published in France.

1753

• British colonist and scientist Benjamin Franklin invents the lightning conductor in Philadelphia.

1754

• The Royal Society of Arts is founded in London.

1764

• English inventor James Hargreaves invents the spinning jenny, which he patents in 1770.

1769

• In England, inventor Richard Arkwright develops and patents a water-powered spinning frame to produce thread for the textile industry.

1772

• English chemists Daniel Rutherford and Joseph Priestley independently isolate the element nitrogen.

1775

• Priestley discovers hydrochloric and sulfuric acids.

1776

• Scottish engineer James Watt begins manufacturing his version of the steam engine, which he invented in 1765 and patented in 1769.

1779

• English inventor Samuel Crompton develops the spinning mule, which enables the production of large quantities of high-quality yarns and threads.

1780s

• Italian physician Luigi Galvani, a professor of anatomy who experiments with electricity and muscles, notices that frogs’ legs contract if an electrical jolt is applied to them.

1783

• In Annonay, France, brothers Jacques-Etienne and Joseph-Michel Montgolfier inaugurate hot-air-balloon travel.

1784

• Englishman Henry Cort develops the puddling process for smelting iron.

1784

• French chemist Claude-Louis Berthollet develops a method for chlorine bleaching of textiles.

1785

• British inventor and clergyman Edmund Cartwright invents the power loom; it is patented in stages over the next three years.

1794

• The first telegraph line, for transmitting military information, is set up between Paris and Lille.
• The National Institute is created in Paris.
• The metric system is introduced in France.

1798

• English physician Edward Jenner develops a vaccination against smallpox.

1799

• Scottish chemist Charles Tennant combines chlorine and lime to create a bleaching powder for use on textiles.

1800

• Italian physicist Alessandro Volta invents a means of storing electricity in a battery composed of zinc and copper plates.
• English scientist William Nicholson uses electricity to break water into its constituent elements—oxygen and hydrogen.
• English engineer Richard Trevithick constructs the model for a new, high-pressure steam engine, making possible the development of steamboats and railroad locomotives.

1830

• English chemist and physicist John Dalton develops an explanation of the atomic nature of matter.

1810

• French chef Nicolas Appert develops a technique for preserving food in tin cans.

1820

• Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted discovers electromagnetism.

1821

• In England, chemist Michael Faraday develops the principle of the electric motor and describes the fundamentals of electromagnetism.

1822

• Joseph Nicéphore Niépce invents the heliograph, the first permanently captured optical image.

1823

• Mechanics’ institutes are founded in London and Glasgow to provide training for artisans and the working classes.

1825

• English inventor George Stephenson develops an effective steam locomotive, based on his first prototype of 1814.

1829

• British chemist James Smithson leaves his fortune to found the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

1831-1836

• English naturalist Charles Darwin sails on the HMS Beagle, a surveying vessel, to the Pacific Islands, South American coast, and Australasia.

1837

• English scientists Charles Wheatstone and William F. Cooke patent an early form of the electric telegraph.

1839

• French painter Louis Daguerre perfects his daguerreotype, the first practical form of photography.

1851

• An International Exhibition opens in London, featuring the Crystal Palace, a building in which more than thirteen thousand manufactured objects are displayed.

1855

• English nurse Florence Nightingale introduces battlefield nursing care during the Crimean War (1853-1856).

1856

• The first artificial dye is fabricated by English chemist William Henry Perkin.

1857

• Austrian monk and botanist Gregor Mendel performs experiments on heredity by hybridizing varieties of peas.
• French scientist Louis Pasteur proves that living organisms cause fermentation.

1859

• Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, based on his observations during his 1831-1836 voyage aboard the Beagle.
• In Belgium, inventor Etienne Lenoir builds an internal-combustion engine.

1864

• Pasteur invents the process of pasteurization of wine.

1865

• At Cambridge University, Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell illustrates that light is an electromagnetic phenomenon.

1867

• Swedish manufacturer Alfred Bernhard Nobel patents dynamite.
• English surgeon Joseph Lister introduces antiseptic practices in hospitals.

1869

• Russian chemist Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleyev formulates the modern form of the periodic table of elements.

1871

• Darwin publishes The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, focusing on the evolution of humankind and pointing out its physiological and psychological similarities to the great apes.

1877

• German engineer Nikolaus Otto, who built his first gasoline-powered engine in 1861, invents the four-stroke internal-combustion engine.

1879

• American inventor Thomas Alva Edison and English chemist Joseph Wilson Swan each develop a carbon-filament electric light.

1884

• In England, American-born inventor Hiram Stevens Maxim, a naturalized British subject, develops the first practical single-barrel, rapid-fire machine gun.

1885

• German engineer Karl Friedrich Benz builds his first gasoline-powered vehicle.

1886

• German engineers Gottlieb Wilhelm Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach produce their first automobile.

1888

• German physicist Heinrich Rudolph Hertz and English physicist Oliver Joseph Lodge independently identify the link between radio waves and light waves.

1895

• French chemists and brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière invent a motion-picture camera.
• German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen discovers X-rays.

1896

• Italian physicist Guglielmo Marconi patents the wireless telegraphy.
• In Paris, physicist Antoine-Henri Becquerel reports his discovery of radioactivity during his experiments with uranium.

1897

• English physicist Joseph John Thomson discovers the electron.

1898

• French scientist Pierre Curie and his Polish wife, Marie, a physical chemist, discover the elements radium and polonium.

1900

• German physicist Max Planck defines the general principles of quantum theory.
• Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud publishes Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams).

1905

• German physicist Albert Einstein publishes his special theory of relativity while working as a patent clerk in Switzerland.

1909

• German chemist Fritz Haber develops a process to create synthetic ammonia.

1913

• Danish physicist Niels Bohr applies quantum theory to subatomic physics.

*DENOTES CIRCA DATE