1868 in science

The year 1868 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

List of years in science (table)
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Biology

• January 30 – Publication of Charles Darwin's The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (by John Murray in London), including his theory of heredity, which he calls pangenesis.
• Jules-Emile Planchon and colleagues propose Phylloxera as the cause of the Great French Wine Blight.[1]
• Roland Trimen reads a paper to the Linnaean Society explaining Batesian mimicry in African butterflies.[2][3]
• T. H. Huxley discovers what he thinks is primordial matter and names it Bathybius haeckelii. He admits his mistake in 1871.[4]
• The Granny Smith apple cultivar originates in Eastwood, New South Wales, Australia, from a chance seedling propagated by Maria Ann Smith (née Sherwood, 1799–1870).[5]

Chemistry

• August 18 – The element later named as helium is first detected in the spectrum of the Sun's chromosphere by French astronomer Jules Janssen during a total eclipse in Guntur, India, but assumed to be sodium.[6]
• October 20 – English astronomer Norman Lockyer observes and names the D₃ Fraunhofer line in the solar spectrum and concludes that it is caused by a hitherto unidentified element which he later names helium.[7]
• Louis Arthur Ducos du Hauron patents methods of color photography.[8]

Medicine

• Jean-Martin Charcot describes and names multiple sclerosis.[9][10]
• Adolph Kussmaul performs the first esophagogastroduodenoscopy on a living human.[11][12][13][14]

Paleontology

• March – French geologist Louis Lartet discovers the first identified skeletons of Cro-Magnon, the first anatomically modern humans (early Homo sapiens sapiens), at Abri de Crô-Magnon, a rock shelter at Les Eyzies, Dordogne, France.

Technology

• October 28 – American inventor Thomas Edison applies for his first patent, for a form of electronic voting machine.
• Ernest and Auguste Bollée first patent the Éolienne Bollée wind turbine in France.[15]

Awards

• Copley Medal: Charles Wheatstone[16]
• Wollaston Medal for Geology: Carl Friedrich Naumann

Births

• January 9 – S. P. L. Sørensen (died 1939), Danish chemist.
• January 31 – Theodore William Richards (died 1928), American chemist, recipient of Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
• February 7 – Aleen Cust (died 1937), Anglo-Irish veterinary surgeon.
• March 15 – Grace Chisholm Young (died 1944), English mathematician.
• March 22 – Robert Andrews Millikan (died 1953), American physicist, recipient of Nobel Prize in Physics.
• April 4 – Philippa Fawcett (died 1948), English mathematician.
• April 5 – Percy Furnivall (died 1938), English surgeon.
• April 8 – Herbert Spencer Jennings (died 1947), American zoologist.
• April 14 – Annie S. D. Maunder, née Russell (died 1947), Irish astronomer.
• April 28 – Georgy Voronoy (died 1908), Ukrainian mathematician.
• April 30 – J. B. Christopherson (died 1955), English physician.
• May 2 – Robert W. Wood (died 1955), American optical physicist.
• June 6 – Robert Falcon Scott (died 1912), English explorer.
• June 14 – Karl Landsteiner (died 1943), Austrian physiologist.
• July 4 – Henrietta Swan Leavitt (died 1921), American astronomer.
• October 23 – Frederick W. Lanchester (died 1946), English automotive engineer.
• November 8 – Felix Hausdorff (died 1942), German mathematician.
• November 14 – Karl Landsteiner (died 1943), Austrian-born physiologist, recipient of Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
• November 15 – Emil Racoviță (died 1947), Romanian biologist, speleologist and explorer.
• December 9 – Fritz Haber (died 1934), German chemist.

Deaths

• February 11 – Léon Foucault (born 1819), French physicist.
• February 24 – John Herapath (born 1790), English physicist.
• May 22 – Julius Plücker (born 1801), German mathematician and physicist.
• June 25 – Alexander Mitchell (born 1780), Irish engineer and inventor of the screw-pile lighthouse.
• July 15 – William T. G. Morton (born 1819), American dentist.
• September 26 – August Ferdinand Möbius (born 1790), German mathematician.
• December 25 – Linus Yale, Jr. (born 1821), American inventor.
• December 31 – James David Forbes (born 1809), Scottish-born physicist, glaciologist and seismologist.

References

1. "The Great French Wine Blight". Wine Tidings. 96. July–August 1986. Archived from the original on 17 July 2011. Retrieved 2011-08-01.
2. Published in Transactions 26(3) (1870): 497.
3. "Roland Trimen, 1840-1916". Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 91 (641): xviii–xxvii. 1920. doi:10.1098/rspb.1920.0020. JSTOR 80995.
4. Ley, Willy (1959). Exotic Zoology. New York: Viking Press.
5. Martin, Megan (2005). "Smith, Maria Ann (1799–1870)". Australian Dictionary of Biography. Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. Retrieved 2012-01-27.
6. Kochhar, R. K. (1991). "French astronomers in India during the 17th –19th centuries". Journal of the British Astronomical Association. 101 (2): 95–100. Bibcode:1991JBAA..101...95K.
7. Hampel, Clifford A. (1968). The Encyclopedia of the Chemical Elements. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. pp. 256–268. ISBN 0-442-15598-0.
8. Coe, Brian (1978). Colour Photography: the first hundred years 1840-1940. London: Ash & Grant. ISBN 0-904069-24-9.
9. Enerson, Ole Daniel. "Jean-Martin Charcot". Whonamedit?. Archived from the original on 14 May 2011. Retrieved 2011-04-11.
10. Charcot, J.-M. (1868). "Histologie de la sclerose en plaques". Gazette des Hopitaux. Paris. 41: 554–55.
11. Killian, Gustvan (1911). "The history of bronchoscopy and esophagoscopy" (PDF). The Laryngoscope. 21 (9): 891–7. doi:10.1288/00005537-191109000-00001.
12. Modlin, Irvin M.; Kidd, Mark; Lye, Kevin D. (2004). "From the Lumen to the Laparoscope". Archives of Surgery. 139 (10): 1110–26. doi:10.1001/archsurg.139.10.1110. PMID 15492154. Retrieved 2011-10-17.
13. Elewaut, A.; Cremer, M. (2002). "The History of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy — The European Perspective". In Classen, Meinhard; Tytgat, Guido N.J.; Lightdale, Charles J. (eds.). Gastroenterological endoscopy. Stuttgart: Thieme. p. 17. ISBN 978-1-58890-013-5. Retrieved 2010-09-06.
14. Vilardell, F. (2006). "Rigid gastroscopes". Digestive endoscopy in the second millennium: from the Lichtleiter to echoendoscopy. Stuttgart: Thieme. pp. 32–5. ISBN 978-3-13-139671-6. Retrieved 2010-09-06.
15. No 79985.
16. "Copley Medal | British scientific award". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 23 July 2020.