1869 in science

The year 1869 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Events

• November 4 - The first issue of scientific journal Nature is published in London, edited by Norman Lockyer.

Chemistry

Mendeleev's 1869 periodic table

• Dmitri Mendeleev makes a periodic table.
• Publication of Adolphe Wurtz's Dictionnaire de chimie pure et appliquée begins in Paris.

Life sciences

• Paul Langerhans discovers the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas.
• Friedrich Miescher discovers deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) in the pus of discarded surgical bandages. Found in the nuclei of cells, Miescher names it "nuclein".
• French missionary and naturalist Père Armand David receives the skin of a giant panda from a hunter, the first time this species has become known to a Westerner.^[1]
• Alfred Russell Wallace publishes The Malay Archipelago.

Mathematics

• W. Stanley Jevons publishes The Substitution of Similars and has a "Logic Piano" constructed to work out problems in symbolic logic.^[2]

Awards

• Copley Medal: Henri Victor Regnault
• Wollaston Medal for Geology: Henry Clifton Sorby

Births

• February 14 - C. T. R. Wilson (died 1959), Scottish winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics.
• April 8 - Harvey Cushing (died 1939), American neurosurgeon.
• August 23 - Robert Gunther (died 1940), English historian of science.
• October 3 - Robert W. Paul, (died 1943), English pioneer of cinematography.

Deaths

• July 22 - John A. Roebling (born 1806), German American bridge engineer.
• September 11 - Thomas Graham (born 1805), Scottish chemist.

References