Events in Science & History
19th Century
(Still under Construction)
1800s
World population now some
820 million
1800: Richard
Trevithick builds a high-pressure steam engine. The following year, he
builds a steam-powered vehicle.
------------------------------------
1801: First known asteroid
Ceres, discovered.
1802: Thomas Young publishes
the first of his papers, utilizing the double-slit experiment.
***** William Wollaston becomes
the first person to notice dark lines in the solar spectrum, although he does
not appreciate their significance at this time.
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1803: John Dalton publishes
the first table of atomic weights.
***** Successful trials of Robert
Fulton's steam-powered boat on the Seine.
------------------------------------
1804: Napolen becomes
Emperor of France
1805: Battle of Trafalgar
1806: Beaufont invents
his wind scale
1807: Young introduces the concept,
and the word, 'energy'.
***** First use of gas to light
London streets.
***** Improved steamboat tested
in the East River off New York by Robert Fulton.
------------------------------------
1807 & 1808: Etienne Malus
discovers the polarization of light. By his hypothesis light consists
of a stream of particles, each with a specific orientation. In double refraction,
there are two routes that a beam of light can follow - one permits light of
one polarization to pass, the other permits light of the other polarization
to pass. Therefore the beam splits.
------------------------------------
1808: John Dalton publishes
the first volume of his book New System of Chemical Philosophy which
puts forward for the first time the idea that atoms of different elements have
different weights, and concludes that atoms can be neither created nor destroyed
- chemical reactions represent simply a rearrangement of the atoms.
***** Joseph Gay-Lussac
publishes his discovery of the law that gases combine with one another in simple
whole-number proportions by volume, which is to become known as Gay Lussac's
Law.
***** William Wollaston observes
that an understanding of the three dimensional arrangment of atoms in a substance
would be useful in explaining it properties.
***** Humphrey Davy invents the
electric arc light.
***** Richard Thevithick builds
a passenger railway in London.
------------------------------------
1809: Charles Darwin born
1810s
1810: Foundation
of the University of Berlin.
1811: Amodeo Avogado realises
that equal volumes of gas at the same temperature and pressure contain equal numbers
of molecules (Avogedro's Law
1812: Hands Oersted predicts
that an electric current should produce a magnetic field
***** Napoleon invades Russia
------------------------------------
1814: Joseph von Frauhofer
becomes the first person to study in detail the rainbow pattern produced by passing
light through a prism, using intense magnification. To his surprise he discovered
(independently of Woolston) that there are many dark lines in the spectrum of
white light from the Sun. Fraunhcfer soon counts 574 lines in the solar spectrum,
and finds many of the same lines in light from Venus & from many stars.
***** George Stephenson's first
steam locomotive starts work
------------------------------------
1815: Battle of Waterloo.
***** First steam-powered warship
built in America.
***** Humphrey Davy invents the
coal miners safety lamp
1816: Augustin Fresnel develops
his version of the wave theory of light.
***** Thomas Young estimates that
'particles of water' must have a size in the range from 5 to 25 billionths of
a centimetre, only about ten times bigger than the modern estimate.
***** Stethoscop invented
***** Rossini writes The Barber
of Seville.
------------------------------------
1817: Fresnel submits his
explanation of diffraction to the French Academy of Science. The theory suggests
a wave theory of light which runs contary to the thought of most of the judges.
One of the judges, Simeon Poisson, uses the theory to predict that if light is
a wave there should be a bright spot in the centre of the shadow cast by a circular
object, caused by diffraction. The experiment is carried out, the bright spot
(now known as the Poisson spot) found, & Fresnel duly awarded the prize.
------------------------------------
1819: Oersted discovered
connection between current and magnetism
***** Paddle steamer Savannah
crossed the Atlantic.
***** Birth of Queen Victoria.
1820s
1820: Fresnel
develops a type of lens now known as a Fresnel lens, which will find widespread
use in concentrating the beams of light from lighthouses
***** Hans Oersted for the first
time measures the magnetic field produced by an electric current.
------------------------------------
1821: Catholic Church lifts
its ban on teaching the Copernican theory.
***** Fresnel explains polarization
in terms of transverse waves, rather than the particles suggested by Malus.
------------------------------------
1821 - 32: Great war of
Independence (from Ottoman Empire)
1822: Charles Babage designed
his ‘Difference Engine’
1823: Charles Mactintosh
invents a waterproof coat.
1825: First passenger steam
train
1826: Heinrich Olbers publishes
a landmark paper outlining the problem with having an infinitely large Universe
& a dark night sky. he reaches a conclusion similiar to that reached by de
Chesaux - that the light from distant stars is absorbed in a thin gruel of material
between the stars.
***** Delacroix paints Greece in
the Ruins of Missolonhi.
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1827: Robert Brown discovers
that tiny particles of pollen suspended in water can be seen under the microscope
to be in continuous eratic movement.
***** William Hamilton finds that
he can modify the equation of motion derived by Lagrange into a set of equations
which is in some ways simpler than Lagrange's equations. The version of the equations
will be widely used in the early days of quantum mechanice.
1830s
1830: Joseph
Henry discovers the principle of the dynamo, but does not publish his discovery.
He publishes after the same discovery is announced by Michael Faraday.
***** First volume of Principles
of Geology published by Charles Lyell.
***** Spred of English-speaking Americans
west begins.
------------------------------------
1831: Michael Faraday &
Joseph Henry Independently discover electromagnetic induction
***** Earliest version of the second
law of thermodynamics developed by Benoit Clapeyron.
***** Darwin begins his voyage
on the Beagle.
------------------------------------
1832: Reform
Bill extends the franchise in Britian
1833:
Karl Gauss and William Weber develop an electric telegraph which sends signals
between two stations 2km apart.
***** Babbage
builds his 'difference engine', Ada Lovelace writes the first computer
program to run on it.
------------------------------------
1834: Louis
Braille perfects system of reading for the blind
1835: Samual
Colt patents his revolver.
***** John
Constable paints The Valley Form.
***** Halley's
Comet makes its second return since Halley's death.
***** August
Conte says that mankind will never know the chemical composition of the stars
***** Gustave
Coriolis describes the force which now bears his name.
------------------------------------
1837: Sameul
Morse patents his electric telegraph
1838: The
first stellar distance determined by parallax, the distance to 61 Cygni, is
published. Parallax is the apparent movement of an object across the sky when
it is seen from two different points, and can be used to calculate the distance
to the object by triangulation.
*****: Morse
produced his Code
***** Cooke
and Wheatstone developed first telegraph for public use
------------------------------------
1839: Louis
Daguerre describes a technique for making photographs.
***** Charles
Goodyear develops a technique for 'vulcanizing' rubber.
1840s
1840: Penny
post introduced in the UK
1842: The Doppler effect
first predicted by Christian Doppler. The effect shows how a change may be made
in frequency of light, or in the pitch of a sound, by the motion of the object
emitting the light or making the sound
***** Julius Meyer is the first
person to state the law of conservation of energy.
------------------------------------
1843: Joule measured mechanical
equivalent of heat
***** First tunnel under the Thames
opened.
***** Screw-driven steamer Great
Britian crosses the Atlantic
------------------------------------
1844: Fredrich Engels writes
The condition of the working class in England.
1845: A 73 inch reflecting
telescope is built at Birr Castle, central Ireland, by the Earl of Rosse. This
telescope is the most powerful in the world for many years.
***** The first galaxy (then
known as nebula) in which spiral structure is seen is discovered by Lord Rosse.
This is the whirlpool galaxy, a particulary striking & photogenic example
of a disc galaxy with well-defined spiral arms, & is also known by its catalogue
number as M51 or NCC5194.
***** Faraday suggests that
light is a form of electromagnetic wave
***** First publication
of Scientific American
------------------------------------
1846: Faraday suggests that
light is 'a high species of vibration in the lines of force which are known to
connect particles', attempting to dismiss the notion of the ether.
***** Foundation of the Smithsonian
Institution in Washington DC
------------------------------------
1846 - 51: Potato famine
in Ireland.
------------------------------------
1847: James Joule independently
discovers the law of conservation of evergy.
***** William Thomson proposes
the idea that electric & magnetic fields are distributed throughout space,
a step towards the comprehensive field thory of electromagnetism developed by
James Clark Maxwell a little later.
------------------------------------
1848: Julius Meyer calculates
that the Sun would cool in only 5,000 years if it had no source of evergy.
***** Hippolyte Fizeau suggests
that the Doppler effect should also apply to light, & predicts a redshift
in light from the object moving away from the observer.
***** Edgar Allen Poe speculates
that the sky might be dark at night, even in a Universe that is infinite in extent,
if the distances involved are so immense that the light from many stars has yet
to reach us.
***** William Thomson, later Baron
Kelvin of Largs, defines the absolute scale of temperature that is to become known
as teh Kelvin scale.
------------------------------------
1848: Karl Marx & Friedrich
Eugels produce the Communist Manifesto.
------------------------------------
1849: Fizeau measures the
speed of light to within 5% of the accepted modern value.
***** William Thomson (later Lord
Kelvin) coins the term 'thermodynamics'.
***** California gold rush
1850s
Late 19th century:
Henri Poincare shows that an 'ideal' gas trapped in a box, must eventually
pass through every possible arrangement of particles that is allowed by the laws
of thermodynamics. However, even a small box of gas might contain 10 to power
22 atoms, and it would take that many atoms a time much longer than the age of
the Universe to pass through every possible arrangement of atoms.
***** Ludwig Boltzmann suggests
that the Universe might be a gigantic statisical freak. It is possible, he suggests,
that we are simply a chance collection of atoms - a state of temporary order within
a more permanent disorder.
------------------------------------
1850: Leon Foucault shows
that the speed of light is greater in air than it is in water
1851: Leon Foucault makes
use of a long pendulum to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth - such a pendulum
becomes known as Foucault's pendulum. As the Earth rotates, the pendulum remains
swinging in the same plane. This means that the pendulum appears to drift slowly
relative to the ground.
***** William Thomson develops
his concept of absolute zero of temperature and shows that it corresponds to -273
degrees C. he also formulates the second law of thermodynamics.
***** Crystal Palace opened by
Queen Victoria for the Great Exhibition.
------------------------------------
1852: Leon Foucalt invents
the gyroscope.
1854: First electric telegraph
link between London and Paris
***** Hermann von Heimholtz
suggest that the Sun is kept hot by gravitational every, released as it shrinks
slowly under its own weight.
------------------------------------
1854-6 Crimean War.
1855: Louvre opens in Paris
1856: Henry Bessmer invents
a cheap process for manufacuring steel.
1857: Leon Foucalt begins
to manufacture glass mirrors coated with a thin film of silver to use in astronomical
telescopes.
------------------------------------
1858: First Atlantic telegraph
cable
1859: Gustav Kirchoff &
Robert Bunsen develop the use of spectroscopy for chemical analysis.
***** Gustav Kirchoff states
Kirchoff's Law for the first time. The law demands that, at a given temperature,
the rate of emission of electromagnetic energy given by an object is equal to
the rate at which the object absorbs electromagnetic energy of the same wavelength
(frequency).
***** Kirchoff detects sodium in
the Sun
***** Construction of the
Suez Canal begins, it will be completed in 1869.
***** Publication of the
Origin of Species.
***** First internal combustion
engine (using gas as its fuel) developed by Jean Lenor.
***** First oil well drilled in
Titusville, PA.
1860s
Early 1860s:
James Clark Maxwell develops a statistical treatment of the behaviour of gases,
based on the idea that a gas is made up of a large number of particles in rapid,
random motion.
1860: First vehicle driven
by an internal combustion engine developed by Jean Lenoir.
1861: Anders Angstrom begins
a study of the Solar System that will show hydrogen is present in the Sun.
***** Cooke discovers the element
thallium.
***** Kirchoff's Law is proven,
by him, for the first time.
***** Unification of Italy.
***** First telegraph linking
San Francisco to New York.
***** American Civil War
begins
------------------------------------
1662: The companion star
to Sirius, predicted by Friedrich Bessel, is found by American telescope maker
Alvan Clark. This is the first white dwarf to be discovered and is known as Sirius
B. A white dwarf is a star with about the same mass as the Sun but occupying a
volume about the same as that of the Earth.
***** Fourcault obatins a measurement
of the speed of light, 298,005km/sec, within 1% of the best modern determination.
***** The proof of his law leads
Gustav Kirchoff to develop the idea of a black body, & black body radiation,
which will lead Max Planck to introduce the idea of Quanta into physics.
***** Richard Gatling invents the
machine gun
***** Maxwell finds that the electromagnetic
waves he invokes to explain the behaviour of electric & magnetic fields must
travel at the speed of light, a finding he publishes in the paper On Pysical
Lines of Force.
------------------------------------
1863: William Huggins uses
spectroscopy to show that the same chemical elements exist in the atmospheres
of stars as exist on Earth.
***** Ernst Mach publishes. The
Machonik, in which he spells out the idea now known as Mach's Principle, which
says that an object possesses inertial mass only by virtue of the presence of
all other masses in the Universe.
***** John Tyndall publishes a
discussion of the atmospheric greenhouse effect.
***** National Academy of
Science founded in USA.
------------------------------------
1864: James Clark Maxwell
publishes his work A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field. This
paper solves all classical problems of electric & magnetic phenomena in four
equations; in doing this, it also predicts the existence of radio waves.
------------------------------------
1865: Johann Loschmidt calculates
the number of molecules of gas in a cubic centimeter of air, obtaining a figure
about 30 times smaller than modern estimates.
***** John Newlands produces the
first periodic table of the elements. However, this work is ridiculed by establishment
critics.
***** Lewis Carrol (Charles
Lutwidge Dodgson) writes Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
***** American Civil War
ends.
------------------------------------
1866: A transatlantic telegraph
cable link is established, using principles proposed by William Thomson,
later Baron Kelvin.
1868: Lockyer & Jamssen,
independently of one another, discover helium, present in the Sun
------------------------------------
1867: Publication of Das
Kapital.
1869: Dmitri Mendeleyev
publishes the first periodic table in which the elements are grouped according
to their chemical properties.
***** John Tyndall discovers the
Tyndall effect - the scattering of light by tiny particles suspended in
a liquid - and suggests that the reason the sky looks blue might be because of
particles suspended in the air.
***** First publication of the
science journal Nature.
***** First railway line
linking the west and east coasts of the US completed.
***** Suez Canal opens.
1870s.
1870: Willaim
Crookes, studying the effects of electric currents passed through traces of gas
in discharge tubes, finds a stream of positively charged particles are repelled
from the anode. Crookes called these 'molecular rays' they would now be called
ions.
***** Vladimir llyich Lenin
(originally Ulyanov) born.
***** French Prussian War.
------------------------------------
1871: The Cavendish Laboratory
is established in Cambridge, England.
1872: Sarah Bernhardt begins
to work with the Comedie-Francais in Paris.
1874: Cavendish Laboratory
completed.
***** First exhibition of
Impressionist paintings in Paris.
***** Levi Statues invents blue
jeans with rivets.
------------------------------------
1875: Crookes invents his
famous 'radiometer', a small four-bladed paddle wheel mounted in a glass vessel
in a vacuum. Each blade of the panel is black on one side and shiny on the other.
When light shines on it, it moves rapidly because the black side of the panel
is hotter than the shiny side, so that the molecules of air left in the vessel
bounce off the dark side more vigorously and push it.
***** Lorentz publishes his Ph.D
thesis, titled The Theory of Reflection and Refraction of Light which shows
how to solve Maxwell's equations at a boundary between two materials.
***** Maxwell says that atoms have
a more complex structure than rigid bodies.
***** George Bizet writes
Carmen.
------------------------------------
1876: Bell filed patent
for telephone
1877: The two moons of Mars
are found by Asaph Hall.
***** Giovanni Schiaparelli
reports that he has seen channels (mistranslated as 'canals' ) on Mars.
***** Edison devised carbon microphone
and phonograph
------------------------------------
1878: Rayleigh publishes
the first volume of his work The Theory of Sound;' the second volume follows
the year after.
***** Telephone is Invented.
***** First use of selenium cell
by Bell and Tainter.
***** Swan produced incandescent
electric lamp
------------------------------------
1879: Josef Stefan becomes
the first person following experiments by John Tyndall, to identify the relationship
between the rate at which an object radiates evergy and its temperature - a relationship
which becomes known as the Stefan-Boltzmann Law.
***** Forerunner of the modern electric light bulb invented
independently by Joseph Swan in England & Thomas Edison in America.
***** Lev Davidowich Bronstein (Leon Trotsky) born.
***** First performance of Eugen Onegin by Tchoaikovsky.
***** Mary Cassatt paints The Cup of Tea.
***** First electric railway, in Berlin.
1880s
1880: Bishop
Berkeley's suggestion that all motion is relative, and must be measured against
something, is taken up by Ernst Much, wito suggests that if we want to explain
the equatorial bulge of the Earth as due to centrifugal force, it does not matter
if we think of the Earth as turning round on its axis, or at rest while the fixed
stars revolve around it - it is the relative motion that is responsible for the
bulge. This principle is later to be dubbed Mach's Principle by Einstein.
***** Ned Kelly captured.
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1881: First practical electric
generation and distribution system.
1882: Electric light introduced
in New York.
***** Franklin Delano Roosevelt
born
------------------------------------
1883: System of four time
zones officially adopted in the USA.
***** Gottlieb Daimler invents
the first version of the modern Internal combustion engine, and tests it in a
boat.
------------------------------------
1884: An international committee
establishes the meridian through the Royal Greenwich Observatory as the 'prime
meridian' from which longitude is to be measured.
***** Svante Arrhenius submits
a doctoral thesis containing the essence of his work on solutions, which for the
first time explains, that when a chemical compound dissolves in water it dissociates
into electrically charged ions.
***** Balmer gives an explanation
for the way lines in a spectrum are distributed. He succeeds in finding an equation
that not only reproduces the relationship between the four bright lines known
in the spectrum of hydrogen at that time, but also predicts the existance of a
fifth line, at the edge of visibility, that was soon detected.
***** John Newlands finally publishes
the paper concerning the periodic relationship between the properties of the chemical
elements which had been ridiculed by the establishment in 1866.
***** Ludwig Boltzmann refines
the Stefan-Boltzman Law first derived by Josef Stefan in 1879.
------------------------------------
1885: Automobile and motorbike
invented
1886: Hertz demonstrated
existense of radio waves
1887: Michelson-Morley experiment
carried out, in an attempt to detect the motion of Earth through the ether, by
measuring differences in the speed of light determined along the line of the Earth's
motion and at right angles to that line. These experiments show, through demonstrating
that no effects attributable to the motion of the Earth can be seen in any measurements
of the speed of light, that the ether does not exist.
***** Joseph Lockyer's spectroscopic
study of the Sun leads to the discovery of helium
***** Alternating current
electric motor invented by Nicola Tesla.
------------------------------------
1888: The long-wavelength
radiation predicted by Maxwell is first produced artificially by the German physicist
Heinrich Hertz.
***** First measurements of the
velocities of stars using the Doppler effect.
***** William Burroughs patents
his adding machine.
***** Oscar Wilde writes The
Happy Prince.
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1889: Eiffel Tower completed.
1890s
1890: Edward
Pickering establishes the first standard system of measuring the temperature of
a star by taking measurements at two seperate wavelengths of light from that star,
the comparisn of which enable him to work out the star's temperature.
***** John Poynting determines
the density of the Earth, and makes an accurate measurement of the gravitational
constant.
***** London Underground opens.
------------------------------------
1893: William Wien discovers
the relationship between the wavelength of maximum intensity of 'black body' radiation
and its temperature; this enables astronomers to measure the temperatures of stars.
***** Mormon Temple completed
in Salt Lake City.
***** Zip fastener invented.
***** Mao Tse-tung born
------------------------------------
1894: Philipp Lenard shows
that cathode rays can pass right through a piece of metal foil, so they cannot
(as Crookes had guessed) be electriccally charged molecues.
***** William Rumsay, Lord Rayleight
and william Crookes are the first to discover a 'noble' gas, argon.
***** Manchester Ship Canal
completed.
***** Guglieimo Marconi develops
a radio transmitter that will ring a bell at a distance of 10m.
1895: X-rays are discovered
by Wilhelm Rontgen; initially called Rontgen rays.
***** Helium is identified
on Earth, by William Ramsay & William Crookes.
***** Jean Baptiste Perin produces
his study of cathode rays, which provides a rough indication of the ratio of the
charge on an electron to its mass, and paves the way for the definitive work by
J. J. Thomson which establishes that the electron behaves as a particle.
***** Lumiere brothers present
moving pictures to the public.
------------------------------------
1896: First photographic
atlas of the Moon published by Lick Observatory.
***** Henri Becquerel, stimulated
by the discovery of x-rays, discovers another form of radiation, produced spontaneously
by atoms of uranium.
**** Charles Wilson surmises, through
the use of the cloud chamber, that the droplets are condensed around electrically
charged particles (ions) and proves this by operating the cloud chamber beside
a source of x-rays, and seeing it fill with condensation as the x-rays ionize
the atoms within the chamber.
***** Discovery of radioactivity.
1897: J. J Thomson discovers
that the so-called cathode rays are in fact a stream of tiny charged particles
broken off from atoms. These particles he calls 'corpuscles', but they soon became
known as electron, a name suggested by Dutch physicist Hendrick Lorentz.
***** Camille Pisarro paints
Boulevord des Italians.
------------------------------------
1898: Radioactivity named
by Marie Curie
***** Ludwig Boltzmann publishes
details of the calculations concerning atoms.
*****
Poulsen developed magnetic recording
------------------------------------
1899: Ernest Rutherford discovers that there are two
forms of radioactivity, hich he calls alpha and beta radiation; a third form,
gamma radiation, is identified later.
***** Phillipp Lenard commences his investigations of the photoelectric
effect; he also studies the nature of cathode rays, and is awarded the Nobel Prize
for Physics for this work in 1905.
***** Hendrik Lorentz coins the name 'electron'.
***** Aspirin marketed.
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- Compiled by D. Brewer - April 2000