1883 in science

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

Earth sciences

• August 26 - Krakatoa begins its final phase of eruptions at 1:06pm local time. These produce a number of tsunami, mainly in the early hours of the next day, which result in about 36,000 deaths on the islands of Sumatra and Java. The final explosion at 10:02am 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.^[1]

Medicine

• 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.

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 quagga dies at the Artis Magistra zoo in Amsterdam.

Awards

• Copley Medal: William Thomson, Lord Kelvin
• Wollaston Medal for Geology: William Thomas Blanford

Births

• May 13 - Georgios Papanikolaou (died 1962), inventor of the Pap smear.
• June 24 - Victor Francis Hess (died 1964), American physicist.
• October 2 - Karl von Terzaghi (died 1963), Austrian "father of soil mechanics".
• October 8 - Otto Heinrich Warburg (died 1970), German physiologist and winner of the 1931 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Deaths

• May 13 - James Young (born 1811), Scottish chemist.
• June 18 - John Waterston (born 1811), Scottish physicist and civil engineer (drowned).
• June 26 - General Sir Edward Sabine (born 1788), Anglo-Irish physicist, astronomer and explorer.
• December 8 - François Lenormant (born 1837), French assyriologist and numismatist.

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