1849 in science |
---|
Fields |
Technology |
Social sciences |
|
Paleontology |
Extraterrestrial environment |
Terrestrial environment |
Other/related |
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5a/Lettre_manuscrite_d%27Ambroise_Comarmond_du_1849_f01r.tif/lossy-page1-88px-Lettre_manuscrite_d%27Ambroise_Comarmond_du_1849_f01r.tif.jpg)
The year 1849 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.
YouTube Encyclopedic
-
1/5Views:3 058 0741 9951 329 7015 052248 308
-
How simple ideas lead to scientific discoveries
-
Science#science and other subject 1849||General Knowledge ||Gk question and answer|| hindi gk| short
-
Comment on a mesuré la vitesse de la lumière ? #physique #science
-
Edgar Allan Poe "To Science" Poem animation
-
The 1859 Carrington Event
Transcription
One of the funny things about owning a brain is that you have no control over the things that it gathers and holds onto, the facts and the stories. And as you get older, it only gets worse. Things stick around for years sometimes before you understand why you're interested in them, before you understand their import to you. Here's three of mine. When Richard Feynman was a young boy in Queens, he went for a walk with his dad and his wagon and a ball. And he noticed that when he pulled the wagon, the ball went to the back of the wagon. And he asked his dad, "Why does the ball go to the back of the wagon?" And his dad said, "That's inertia." He said, "What's inertia?" And his dad said, "Ah. Inertia is the name that scientists give to the phenomenon of the ball going to the back of the wagon. But in truth, nobody really knows." Feynman went on to earn degrees at MIT, Princeton, he solved the Challenger disaster, he ended up winning the Nobel Prize in Physics for his Feynman diagrams describing the movement of subatomic particles. And he credits that conversation with his father as giving him a sense that the simplest questions could carry you out to the edge of human knowledge. And that that's where he wanted to play. And play he did. Now Eratosthenes was the third librarian at the great Library at Alexandria, and he made many contributions to science. But the one he is most remembered for began in a letter that he received as the librarian, from the town of Swenet, which was south of Alexandria. The letter included this fact that stuck in Eratosthenes' mind, and the fact was that the writer said at noon on the solstice, when he looked down this deep well, he could see his reflection at the bottom, and he could also see that his head was blocking the sun. Now, I should tell you – the idea that Christopher Columbus discovered that the world is spherical is total bull. It's not true at all. In fact, everyone who was educated understood that the world was spherical since Aristotle's time. And Aristotle had proved it with a simple observation. He noticed that every time you saw the Earth's shadow on the Moon it was circular. And the only shape that constantly creates a circular shadow is a sphere – Q.E.D. the Earth is round. But nobody knew how big it was until Eratosthenes got this letter with this fact. So he understood that the sun was directly above the city of Swenet, because looking down a well, it was a straight line all the way down the well, right past the guy's head up to the sun. Eratosthenes knew another fact. He knew that a stick stuck in the ground in Alexandria at the same time and the same day, at noon – the sun's zenith, on the solstice. The sun cast a shadow that showed that it was 7.2 degrees off-axis. Now, if you know the circumference of this circle, and you have two points on it, all you need to know is the distance between those two points, and you can extrapolate the circumference. Three hundred and sixty degrees divided by 7.2 equals 50. I know it's a little bit of a round number, and it makes me suspicious of this story too, but it's a good story, so we'll continue with it. He needed to know the distance between Swenet and Alexandria, which is good, because Eratosthenes was good at geography. In fact, he invented the word geography. The road between Swenet and Alexandria was a road of commerce, and commerce needed to know how long it took to get there. It needed to know the exact distance. So he knew, very precisely, that the distance between the two cities was 500 miles. Multiply that times 50, you get 25,000, which is within one percent of the actual diameter of the Earth. He did this 2,200 years ago. Now, we live in an age where multi-billion-dollar pieces of machinery are looking for the Higgs boson. We're discovering particles that may travel faster than the speed of light, and all of these discoveries are made possible by technology that's been developed in the last few decades. But for most of human history, we had to discover these things using our eyes, and our ears, and our minds. Armand Fizeau was an experimental physicist in Paris. His speciality was actually refining and confirming other people's results, and this might sound like a bit of an also-ran, but in fact this is the soul of science, because there is no such thing as a fact that cannot be independently corroborated. And he was familiar with Galileo's experiments in trying to determine whether or not light had a speed. So, Galileo had worked out this really wonderful experiment where he and his assistant had a lamp, each one of them was holding a lamp, and Galileo would open his lamp, and his assistant would open his lamp. And they got the timing down really good. They just knew their timing. And then they stood at two hilltops, two miles distant, and they did the same thing, on the assumption from Galileo that if light had a discernible speed, he'd notice a delay in the light coming back from his assistant's lamp. But light was too fast for Galileo. He was off by several orders of magnitude when he assumed that light was roughly 10 times as fast as the speed of sound. Fizeau was aware of this experiment. He lived in Paris, and he set up two experimental stations, roughly five and a half miles distant, in Paris. And he solved this problem of Galileo's, and he did it with a really relatively trivial piece of equipment. He did it with one of these. I'm going to put away the clicker for a second because I want to engage your brains in this. So this is a toothed wheel. It's got a bunch of notches and it's got a bunch of teeth. This was Fizeau's solution to sending discrete pulses of light. He put a beam behind one of these notches. If I point a beam through this notch at a mirror, five miles away, that beam is bouncing off the mirror and coming back to me through this notch. But something interesting happens as he spins the wheel faster. He notices that it seems like a door is starting to close on the light beam that's coming back to his eye. Why is that? It's because the pulse of light, it's not coming back through the same notch. It's actually hitting a tooth. And he spins the wheel fast enough and he fully occludes the light. And then, based on the distance between the two stations, and the speed of his wheel, and the number of notches in the wheel, he calculates the speed of light to within two percent of its actual value. And he does this in 1849. This is what really gets me going about science. Whenever I'm having trouble understanding a concept, I go back and I research the people that discovered that concept. I look at the story of how they came to understand it. And what happens when you look at what the discoverers were thinking about, when they made their discoveries, is you understand that they are not so different from us. We are all bags of meat and water. We all start with the same tools. I love the idea that different branches of science are called fields of study. Most people think of science as a closed, black box, when in fact it is an open field. And we are all explorers. The people that made these discoveries just thought a little bit harder about what they were looking at, and they were a little bit more curious. And their curiosity changed the way people thought about the world, and thus it changed the world. They changed the world, and so can you. Thank you. (Applause)
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.
Biology
- Arnold Adolph Berthold pioneers endocrinology with his observations on the operation of the testicles in roosters.[1]
- Nikolai Annenkov begins publication of Flora Mosquensis Exsiccata, the first Russian Flora.[2]
- Richard Owen publishes On the Nature of Limbs and begins publication of A History of British Fossil Reptiles.
- William Thompson begins publication (in London) of The Natural History of Ireland with the first volume on birds.
Chemistry
- Charles-Adolphe Wurtz obtains methylamine.
- Louis Pasteur discovers that the racemic form of tartaric acid is a mixture of the levorotatory and dextrotatory forms, thus clarifying the nature of optical rotation and advancing the field of stereochemistry.[3]
Mathematics
- George Gabriel Stokes shows that solitary waves can arise from a combination of periodic waves.
Medicine
- January 23 – English-born Elizabeth Blackwell is awarded her M.D. by the Medical Institute of Geneva, New York, becoming the first woman to qualify as a doctor in the United States.
- British physician Dr. Thomas Addison first describes Addison's disease in his On the Constitutional and Local Effects of Disease of the Suprarenal Capsules.
- London physician Dr. John Snow first publishes his theory that cholera is a contagious disease of the human gastrointestinal tract in his pamphlet On the Mode of Communication of Cholera.[4]
Physics
- Hippolyte Fizeau measures the speed of light in air
Technology
- March 10 – George Henry Corliss is granted a United States patent for the rotary valve Corliss steam engine.
- April 10 – Walter Hunt is granted a United States patent for the modern safety pin.[5][6]
- May 22 – Abraham Lincoln's patent: Abraham Lincoln is granted a United States patent for a buoyancy mechanism to lift boats over river shoals, the only patent ever granted to a President of the United States.[7]
- June 12 – Lewis Haslett is granted the first United States patent for a form of gas mask.[8]
- June 20 – First tube of Robert Stephenson's Britannia Bridge is floated into position on the Menai Strait for the Chester and Holyhead Railway's North Wales Coast Line with many leading British railway civil engineers present.[9]
- Completion of Wheeling Suspension Bridge over the Ohio River at Wheeling, West Virginia, designed by Charles Ellet, with a world record main span (at this date) of 1,010 ft (310 m) tower to tower.
- Completion of Roebling's Delaware Aqueduct, a wire suspension bridge carrying the Delaware and Hudson Canal over the Delaware River between Minisink Ford, New York, and Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania, designed by Russell F. Lord and John A. Roebling with a span of 535 ft (175 m).
- Eugene Bourdon patents the Bourdon gauge for pressure measurement in France.[10]
- David Brewster perfects the stereoscope.
- Erastus Biglow first applies power to a carpet weaving loom, in the United States.
- James B. Francis develops the radial flow Francis turbine.
Awards
- Copley Medal: Roderick Murchison[11]
- Wollaston Medal for Geology: Joseph Prestwich
Births
- March 7 – Luther Burbank (died 1926), American plant breeder.
- March 17 – Cornelia Clapp (died 1934),, American marine biologist.[12]
- April 19 – John Uri Lloyd (died 1936), American pharmacist and science fiction author.
- April 25 – Felix Klein (died 1925), German mathematician.
- May 25 – Louise Hammarström (died 1917), Swedish chemist.
- 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
- February 28 – Regina von Siebold (born 1771), German obstetrician.
- March 23 – Andrés Manuel del Río (born 1764), Spanish-born chemist.
- March 24 – Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner (born 1780), German chemist.
- March 27 - Mauro Ruscóni (born 1776), Italian physician and zoologist[13]
- December 12 – Marc Isambard Brunel (born 1769), French-born engineer.
References
- ^ Berthold, A. A. (1849). "Transplantation der Hoden". Arch. Anat. Physiol. Wiss. Med. 16: 42–6.
- ^ Petrunkevitch, Alexander (1920). "Russia's Contribution to Science". Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Sciences. 23: 232.
- ^ "History of Chirality". Stheno Corporation. 2006. Archived from the original on 2007-03-07. Retrieved 2007-03-12.
- ^ Hempel, Sandra (2006). The Medical Detective: John Snow and the mystery of cholera. London: Granta Books. ISBN 9781862078420.
- ^ "Walter Hunt... Dress-Pin: Specification of Letters Patent No. 6,281". United States Patent and Trademark Office. 1849-04-10. Retrieved 2011-12-05.
- ^ "Walter Hunt". National Inventors Hall of Fame. 2002. Archived from the original on 2011-08-05. Retrieved 2011-12-05.
- ^ "Letters Patent No. 6,469". Google Patents. Retrieved 2011-12-29.
- ^ US 6529 "Inhaler or Lung Protector". Christianson, Scott (2010). Fatal Airs: The Deadly History and Apocalyptic Future of Lethal Gases that Threaten Our World. ABC-CLIO. ISBN 9780313385520.
- ^ "Britannia Bridge". Engineering Timelines. Retrieved 2014-06-10.
- ^ Bellis, Mary. "Bourdon Tube Pressure Gauge". Inventors. About.com. Archived from the original on January 19, 2014. Retrieved 2014-01-19.
- ^ "Copley Medal | British scientific award". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 23 July 2020.
- ^ Reynolds, Moira Davison (2004). American Women Scientists: 23 Inspiring Biographies, 1900-2000. Jefferson NC: McFarland. p. 5. ISBN 978-0-78642-161-9.
- ^ Constantin von Wurzbach, ed. (1874). Wikisource. [scan
] (in German). Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums Oesterreich – via
![](/s/i/modif.png)