1849 in science

The year 1849 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy

• Édouard Roche finds the limiting radius of tidal destruction and tidal creation for a body held together only by its self gravity, called the Roche limit, and uses it to explain why Saturn's rings do not condense into a satellite.

Botany

• Nikolai Annenkov begins publication of Flora Mosquensis Exsiccata, the first Russian Flora.^[1]

Chemistry

• Charles-Adolphe Wurtz obtains methylamine.

Mathematics

• George Gabriel Stokes shows that solitary waves can arise from a combination of periodic waves.

Medicine

• British physician Dr. Thomas Addison first describes Addison’s disease in his On the Constitutional and Local Effects of Disease of the Suprarenal Capsules.

Physics

• Hippolyte Fizeau and Léon Foucault measure the speed of light to be about 298,000 km/s.

Technology

• April 10 - Walter Hunt is granted a United States patent for the modern safety pin.^[2][3]
• David Brewster perfects the stereoscope.
• James B. Francis develops the radial flow Francis turbine.

Awards

• Copley Medal: Roderick Murchison.
• Wollaston Medal for Geology: Joseph Prestwich.

Births

• March 7 - Luther Burbank (died 1926), American plant breeder.
• April 25 - Felix Klein (died 1925), German mathematician.
• May 26 - Ernst Remak (died 1911), German neurologist.
• July 12 - William Osler (died 1919), Canadian physician.
• July 27 - John Hopkinson (died 1898), English electrical engineer.
• September 14 - Ivan Pavlov (died 1936), Russian physiologist.
• October 26 - Ferdinand Georg Frobenius (died 1917), German mathematician.

Deaths

• December 12 - Marc Isambard Brunel (born 1769), engineer.

References