1773 in science

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The year 1773 in science and technology involved some significant events.

Astronomy

Whirlpool Galaxy

• October 13 – French astronomer Charles Messier discovers the Whirlpool Galaxy (pictured), an interacting, grand design spiral galaxy located at a distance of approximately 23 million light-years in the constellation Canes Venatici.
• Lagrange presents his work on the secular equation of the Moon to the Académie française, introducing the idea of the potential of a body. He also publishes on the attraction of ellipsoids.

Chemistry

• Hilaire Rouelle discovers urea.
• Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Joseph Priestley independently isolate oxygen, called by Priestley "dephlogisticated air" and Scheele "fire air".^[1][2]
• Antoine Baumé publishes his textbook Chymie expérimentale et raisonnée in Paris.

Exploration

• January 17 – Captain James Cook becomes the first European explorer to cross the Antarctic Circle.
• Spring – Tobias Furneaux explores the coast of Van Diemen's Land.

Linguistics

• Scottish judge James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, begins publication of Of the Origin and Progress of Language, a contribution to evolutionary ideas of the Enlightenment.

Mathematics

• Lagrange considers a functional determinant of order 3, a special case of a Jacobian. He also proves the expression for the volume of a tetrahedron with one of the vertices at the origin as one sixth of the absolute value of the determinant formed by the coordinates of the other three vertices.

Medicine

• October 12 – North America's first insane asylum opens for 'Persons of Insane and Disordered Minds' in Williamsburg, Virginia.
• Medical Society of London founded by John Coakley Lettsom.
• Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau proposes the use of "muriatic acid gas" (hydrogen chloride) for fumigation of buildings.

Institutions

• Istanbul Technical University is established (under the original name of Royal School of Naval Engineering) as the world's first comprehensive institution of higher learning dedicated to engineering education.

Awards

• Copley Medal: John Walsh
• John Harrison receives the Longitude prize for his invention of the marine chronometer.^[3]

Births

• January 29 – Friedrich Mohs, German mineralogist (died 1839)
• May 19 – Arthur Aikin, English chemist and mineralogist (died 1854)
• June 13 – Thomas Young, English physicist (died 1829)
• June 29 (bapt.) – John Bostock, English physician and geologist (died 1846)
• July 23 – Thomas Brisbane, Scottish astronomer (died 1860)
• August 23 – Abraham Colles, Anglo-Irish surgeon (died 1843)
• December 21 – Robert Brown, Scottish botanist (died 1858)
• December 27 – George Cayley, English pioneer of heavier-than-air flight (died 1857)

Deaths

• July 16 – Nils Rosén von Rosenstein, Swedish pediatrician (born 1706)
• July 23 – George Edwards, English naturalist (born 1693)

References

1. "Joseph Priestley". Chemical Achievers: The Human Face of Chemical Sciences. Chemical Heritage Foundation. 2005. Retrieved 2007-02-22.
2. "Carl Wilhelm Scheele". History of Gas Chemistry. Center for Microscale Gas Chemistry, Creighton University. 2005-09-11. Retrieved 2007-02-23.
3. "Icons, a portrait of England 1750-1800". Archived from the original on 17 August 2007. Retrieved 2007-08-25.