1855 in science

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The year 1855 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Biology

• Robert Remak publishes Untersuchungen über die Entwickelung der Wirbelthiere in Berlin, providing evidence for cell division, which is supported (but not acknowledged) by Rudolf Virchow.^[1][2]

Cartography

• September – Rev. James Patterson presents the Gall orthographic projection for celestial and terrestrial equal-area cartography.^[3]

Chemistry

• May 10 – The Bunsen burner is invented by Robert Wilhelm Bunsen.
• Friedrich Gaedcke first isolates the cocaine alkaloid, which he names "erythroxyline".^[4]
• William Odling proposes that carbon is tetravalent.
• Charles-Adolphe Wurtz publishes the Wurtz reaction.^[5]
• Benjamin Silliman, Jr. pioneers methods of petroleum cracking, which makes the entire modern petrochemical industry possible.^[6]

Exploration

• November 17 – Dr David Livingstone becomes the first European to see the Victoria Falls.

Medicine

• March – Mary Seacole opens the British Hotel at Balaklava, a nursing and convalescent establishment for Crimean War officers.^[7]
• October – The Renkioi temporary hospital, prefabricated in wood to a design by I. K. Brunel, is erected in Turkey to serve Crimean War invalids.^[8]
• Thomas Addison describes Addison's disease in On the Constitutional and Local Effects of Disease of the Suprarenal Capsules.

Paleontology

• The first archaeopteryx fossil is found in Bavaria, but will not be identified until 1970.^[9]

Physics

• James Clerk Maxwell unifies electricity and magnetism into a single theory, classical electromagnetism, thereby showing that light is an electromagnetic wave.
• Heinrich Geißler designs a mercury pump capable of producing a significant vacuum.

Technology

• October 17 – Henry Bessemer files his patent for the Bessemer process of steelmaking.^[10]
• William Armstrong produces the rifled breech-loading Armstrong Gun.

Institutions

• Opening of Eidgenössische Polytechnische Schule in Zurich, Switzerland.

Publications

• Matthew Fontaine Maury publishes The Physical Geography of the Sea.

Awards

• Copley Medal: Léon Foucault
• Wollaston Medal for Geology: Henry De la Beche

Births

• January 5 – King Camp Gillette (died 1932), inventor.
• January 21 – John Moses Browning (died 1926), inventor.
• January 28 – William Seward Burroughs (died 1898), inventor of the adding machine.
• March 13 – Percival Lowell (died 1916), astronomer.
• May 29 – David Bruce (died 1931), microbiologist.
• November 5 – Léon Teisserenc de Bort (died 1913), meteorologist.
• November 7 – Edwin Hall (died 1938), American physicist who discovered the "Hall effect".

Deaths

• February 23 – Carl Friedrich Gauss (born 1777), mathematician.
• March 20 – Joseph Aspdin (born 1778), inventor.
• April 13 – Henry De la Beche (born 1796), geologist.
• June 29 – John Gorrie (born 1803), physician and inventor.
• July 6 – Andrew Crosse (born 1784), 'gentleman scientist', pioneer experimenter in electricity.
• July 8 – William Edward Parry (born 1790), Arctic explorer.
• October 7 – François Magendie (born 1783), physiologist.
• December 6 – William John Swainson (born 1789), naturalist.

References

1. Virchow, R. Archiv für pathologische Anatomie und Physiologie und für klinische Medicin 8 (1855).
2. Lagunoff, David (2002). "A Polish, Jewish Scientist in 19th-Century Prussia". Science 298 (5602): 2331. doi:10.1126/science.1080726.
3. At Glasgow meeting of British Association for the Advancement of Science.
4. Gaedcke, F. (1855). "Ueber das Erythroxylin, dargestellt aus den Blättern des in Südamerika cultivirten Strauches Erythroxylon Coca". Archiv der Pharmazie 132 (2): 141–150. doi:10.1002/ardp.18551320208.
5. Wurtz, Adolphe (1855). "Sur une nouvelle classe de radicaux organiques". Annales de chimie et de physique 44: 275–312. Retrieved 2012-02-07.
6. "Benjamin Silliman, Jr. (1816–1885)". Picture History. Picture History LLC. 2003. Retrieved 2007-03-24.
7. Seacole, Mary (1858). Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands. London: Blackwood.
8. Silver, Christopher (2007). Renkioi: Brunel's Forgotten Crimean War Hospital. Sevenoaks: Valonia Press. ISBN 978-0-9557105-0-6.
9. Carroll, Sean B. (2009). Remarkable Creatures: epic adventures in the search for the origins of species. London: Quercus. pp. 172–4.
10. van Dulken, Stephen (2001). Inventing the 19th Century: the great age of Victorian inventions. London: British Library. pp. 30–1. ISBN 0-7123-0881-4.