1883 in science

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "1883 in science" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (January 2012) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

The year 1883 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Chemistry

• Svante Arrhenius develops ion theory to explain conductivity in electrolytes.^[1][2]
• The Claus process is first patented by German chemist Carl Friedrich Claus.^[3]
• The Schotten–Baumann reaction is first described by chemists Carl Schotten and Eugen Baumann.

Earth sciences

• August 26 –
  Java
  . The final explosion at 10:02 am on August 27 destroys the island of Krakatoa itself and is heard up to 3000 miles away.
• Vasily Dokuchaev publishes Russian Chernozem.

Genetics

• The concept and term Eugenics are formulated by Francis Galton.^[4]

Medicine

• German psychiatrist Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum identifies a disorder characterized by recurring mood cycles which he and his student Ewald Hecker name cyclothymia.^[5][6]
• Thomas Clouston publishes Clinical Lectures on Mental Diseases.
• Emil Kraepelin publishes Compendium der Psychiatrie.
• Journal of the American Medical Association
  first published under this title.

Microbiology

• Robert Koch isolates Vibrio cholerae, the cholera bacillus.

Physics

• Osborne Reynolds popularizes use of the Reynolds number in fluid mechanics.^[7][8]

Technology

• May 24 – Brooklyn Bridge opens to traffic in New York. Designed by John A. Roebling with project management assisted by his wife Emily, its main suspension span of 1,595 feet 6 inches (486.31 m) exceeds the previous record by 330 feet (100 m), and will not be surpassed for twenty years.
• Charles Fritts constructs the first solar cell using the semiconductor selenium on a thin layer of gold to form a device giving less than 1% efficiency.

Zoology

• August 12 – The last
  Artis Magistra zoo in Amsterdam
  .

• William Thomson, Lord Kelvin^[9]
• Wollaston Medal for Geology: William Thomas Blanford

Births

• January 4 – Johanna Westerdijk (died 1961), Dutch plant pathologist.
• February 10 – Edith Clarke (died 1959), American electrical engineer, inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
• March 4 – Julius Fromm (died 1945), German businessman, inventor known for the Condom machine
• May 5 – Anna Johnson Pell Wheeler (died 1966), American mathematician.
• May 13 –
  Pap smear
  .
• June 24 – Victor Francis Hess (died 1964), American physicist.
• July 15 – Orii Hyōjirō (died 1970), Japanese animal specimen collector.
• August 4 – Sydney Smith (died 1969), New Zealand-born forensic pathologist.
• August 6 – Constance Georgina Adams (died 1968), South African botanist.^[10]
• October 2 – Karl von Terzaghi (died 1963), Austrian "father of soil mechanics".
• October 8 –
  physiologist, winner of the 1931 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
  .

• January 23 –
  neurologist
  .
• April 10 -
  otorhinolaryngologist.^[11]
• April 14 –
  epidemiologist
  .
• April 28 – Rev.
  dog breeder
  .
• May 13 –
  James Young (born 1811), Scottish chemist
  .
• June 18 – John Waterston (born 1811), Scottish physicist and civil engineer (drowned).
• June 26 – General Sir
  Anglo-Irish physicist, astronomer and explorer
  .
• September 15 – Joseph Plateau (born 1801), Belgian physicist.
• December 8 – François Lenormant (born 1837), French assyriologist and numismatist.
• December 13 – John Stringfellow (born 1799), English pioneer of heavier-than-air flight.

References