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HISTORY

1700

• "Idiot cages" are used to confine and display mentally ill people, usually as a source of public entertainment.

• German scientist George Stahl proposes that objects burn or rust because they lose a combustible substance called phlogiston, a theory disproved by Antoine Lavoisier in 1772.

• Leibniz explains that any base such as 10, 12, or 2 can be used for positional notation and that a system with a base of 2, the binary system, is particularly useful. This system, consisting of the symbols 0 and 1, will one day become the basis for digital computers.

• French physicist Joseph Sauveur coins the term "acoustics" for describing the relations of musical tones.

1702

• Dutch chemist William Homberg discovers boric acid.

• David Gregory, Savilian Profesor of astronomy at Oxford, publishes "Astronomiae physicae & geometricae elementa", the first textbook of astronomy based on Newtonian principles.

• The "Daily courant", the first daily newspaper, begins publication in London. 3 years later the first regular newspaper in the American colonies, the weekly "News-Letter", is published in Boston.

1703

• Newton is elected president of the Royal Society, a post in which he will serve until his death in 1727.

1704

• Newton publishes "De quadratura curvarum" (written in 1676), "Enumeration of curves of the third degree" (written in 1676), and "optics". In "optics" Newton argues that light is made up of particles called corpuscles, a view that conflicts with Christian Huygen's wave theory of light.

• Leibniz finishes his "New essays on understanding", in which he disputes John Locke's theory that empirical knowledge is human's only source of truth. Leibniz says the human mind has innate intelligence, inborn ideas, truths, dispositions, habits, and potentials.

1705

• Edmund Halley theorizes that the comet of 1682 is a regular visitor, observed since antiquity (240 BC) and correctly predicts it will return 76 years later, in December 1758.

1706

• The Greek letter pi is first used as the symbol for the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter.

1707

• Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler is born. He will produce 560 books and papers during his lifetime and hundreds more will be published afterward. He will contribute to every mathematical field of his day as well as to such related areas as astronomy,
  hydraulics, artillery, shipbuilding, and optics.

1712

• English blacksmith Thomas Newcommen invents the steam engineer that bears his name, which uses steam to drive a piston to generate power.

1713

• The first schooner is built, by Scottish American captain Andrew Robinson in Massachusetts. Schooners will become important to the growing American fishing industry.

1714

• German physicist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit invents the mercury thermometer and the Fahrenheit scale.

1715

• English mathematician Brook Taylor publishes the Taylor series along with other components of the calculus in his "Methodus incrementorum".

1718

• Potatoes, originally an Andean crop, are introduced to Boston, their first appearance in England's American colonies.

• French-born English mathematician Abraham de Moivre publishes his "Doctrine of chances", an important work on probability.

1724

• The possibility of cross-fertilizing corn is established.

• Fahrenheit describes the supercooling of water.

1727

• Leonhard Euler introduces the letter "e" to represent the base of the system of natural logarithms. This notation will become standard.

• A basic photography is discovered by German chemist Schulze, who determines that light, not heat, activates the chemicals involved in the process of deriving silver salts from silver nitrate.

1728

• Danish navigator Vitus Bering discovers the passage now called the Bering strait, proving that North America is not connected by land to Asia.

1729

• Dutch physicist Pieter van Musschenbroek is one of the first people in modern times to use the word "physics", a term dating back to Aristotle, to mean natural philosophy.

1731

• Benjamin Franklin improves and enlarges the postal service by streamlining routes throughout the colonies.

1732

• German philosopher begins to develop the field of rational
  psychology, a subdivision of empirical psychology that depends
  more in reason than experience.

1733

• Leonhard Euler publishes a seminal work of modern mathematical analysis.

1735

• Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus presents his first system of plant classification, "systema naturae", sorting flora according to their stamens and pistils. This will lead further to the botanical classification, including Linnaeus's use of binomial nomenclature to record plant genera and species. Linnaeus's method of classification will presist to the present day.

• Geographic expeditions to equatorial and polar regions confirm Isaac Newton's 1687 theory that the earth is an oblate spheroid.

1736

• Leonhard Euler writes "Mechanics", the first book to devoted to that subject.

1738

• Swiss physicist Daniel Bernoulli publishes what will be called the Bernoulli theorem, stating that at any point in a pipe of flowing fluid the sum of the pressure energy, kinetic energy, and potential energy is constant.

1739

• Scottish philosopher and diplomat David Hume publishes "A treatise on human nature", claiming that complex ideas are formed from simple ones based on 3 laws of association: resemblance, continuity, and cause-and-effect relationships.

1741

• Irish physician Fielding Ould draws attention to the benefits of cutting the female perineum during delivery to prevent the baby's head and shoulders from tearing the woman's pelvic
  floor. This procecure will become known as episiotomy.

1742

• German-Russian mathematician Christian Goldbach frames "Goldbach's conjecture"- that any even number greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two prime numbers. The conjecture has never been either proven or disproven.

• Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius invents the Centigrade or Celsius scale of temperature.

• Ben Franklin invents the Franklin stove, which heats a room by circulating preheated air.

1743

• French physicist Jean Le Rond d'Alembert formulates d'Alembert's principle: in a closed system of moving bodies, actions and reactions are in equilibrium.

1744

• Euler discovers transcendental numbers, numbers that can never be a solution to a polynomial algebraic equation. He also publishes the first exposition of the calculus of variations, including Euler's equations.

• Russian physicist Mikhail Lomonosov correctly proposes that heat is a form of motion.

• French physicist Pierre Louis de Maupertuis formulates the principle of least action: Nature operates in such a way that action - the product of force, distance, and time - is at a minimum.

1746

• American philosopher and theologian Jonathan Edwards writes on psychological questions in relation to religion. His "Treatise concerning religious affections" will be considered one of the firs books of psychology written by an American. Edwards believes
  that there is no free will; that all human choices are made by God.

1747

• French mathematician Alexis-Claude Clairaut publishes the first approximate resolution of the three body problem, examining how 3 celestial bodies interact.

• French physicist Jean le Rond d'Alembert publishes the general solution of the partial differential wave equation in 2 dimensions.

1748

• James Bradley discovers the nutation (wobbling) of the earth's axis, an irregular periodic oscillation of the earth's poles caused by perturbation from the sun and moon.

• Euler publishes "Introductio in analysin infinitorum", which establishes the strictly analytic treatment of trigonometric functions. This book contains the Euler identities, an algebraic
  theory of elimination, an exposition on infinite series, and a chapter on the Zeta function.

• French physicist Jean-Antoine Nollet discovers osmosis, the passage of a solvent such as water through a semipermeable membrane separating two solutions that have different concentrations. He also identifies osmotic pressure, the pressure required
  to stop the flow from a pure solvent into a solution.

• French philosopher Julien Offroy de La Mettrie pioneers French materialism. In his book "L'homme machine" (man as machine) he argues that the body and soul are mortal and that life and thought are nothing more than the nervous system's mechanical action.

1749

• Linnaeus describes how nature limits competition between species by allotting each its own geographical location and placement in the food chain. He claims that reproductive rates and predators maintain a species' proper numerical proportions.

• In his "Natural history", French naturalist Georges Louis Leclerc deBuffon speculates that the earth formed 75000 years ago through collision of the sun with a comet. Though incorrect, these speculations open the door to further study of the age of the earth.

• Scottish astronomer Alexander Wilson is the first to use kites for exploring the properties of the atmosphere, attaching thermometers to them to try to measure temperature at a height.

1751

• Flying a kite attached to a metal key in a thunderstorm, Ben
  Franklin proves that lightning is electricity.
  
  1752:
  +Building on his studies of lightning and electricity, Franklin
  invents the lightning rod.
  +d'Alembert formulates certain principles of hydrodynamics.
  
  1754:
  +Scottish physician William Smellie pioneers midwifery by men.
  +Scottish chemist Joseph Black heats limestone (calcium carbonate)
  producing carbon dioxide and lime (calcium oxide). On finding
  that the process can be reversed by combining calcium oxide
  with carbon dioxide or simply leaving carbon oxide in the open
  air, he discovers that carbon dioxide must be a component of air.
  +Rosseau publishes his "Discourse on the inequalities of men".
  In this and "the social contract" (1762) Rosseau expounds his
  influential views about the "noble" natural condition of humans,
  the corrupting influence of civilization, and the formation of
  the social contract to correct inequalities.
  
  1755:
  +German philosopher Immanuel Kant speculates about the existence
  of distant collections of stars or "island universes".
  +Euler publishes "Institutiones calculi differentialis", an
  influential textbook on differential calculus, followed in
  1768-1774 by "Institutiones calculi integralis".
  
  1756:
  English physicist John Canton observes magnetic storms in the
  earth's magnetic field.
  
  1758:
  +As predicted by Edmund Halley in 1705, the comet of 1682 returns
  on 25 December 1758, the first such return ever predicted. The
  object is named Halley's comet in his honor.
  +French botanist Henri du Monceau describes tree structure and
  physiology.
  +Swedish chemist Axel Cronstedt begins to classify minerals by
  their chemical structure as well as apperance when he distinguishes
  4 classes of minerals: bitumens, earths, metals, and salts.
  
  1760:
  +d'Alembert formulates the limit concept in calculus.
  +Between 1760-1762, Dutch anatomist Pieter Camper publishes "Demon-
  strationum anatomico-pathologicarum", a 2-volume work comparing
  anatomy in different human races.
  
  1761:
  +French revolutionist Jean-Baptiste Robinet publishes the first
  volume of a 5-volume work in which he claims that the Creator
  made organic beings on a scale and that they all have the internal
  energy to move upward toward the top, where humans are.
  +German mathematician Johann Lambert proves that pi is an irrational
  number,
  
  1762:
  +British astronomer James Bradley completes a catalog of 60000 stars.
  +Scottish chemist Joseph Black discovers latent heat, the quantity
  of heat absorbed or released when a substance changes its physical
  phase at constant temperature
  
  1765:
  +Swiss scientist Horace Benedict de Saussure invents the electro-
  meter, a device for measuring voltage differences without drawing
  an appreciable amount of current from the source.
  +The steam engine is refined by Scottish engineer James Watt.
  
  1766:
  British chemist Henry Cavendish discovers an inflammable gas he
  calls fire air, produced by reaction between acid and certain
  metals. It is now known to be the element hydrogen.
  
  1767:
  British chemist Joseph Priestley publishes "the history and present
  state of electricity", in which he suggests that electrical forces,
  like gravitational ones, increase or decrease in inverse proportion
  to the square of the distance.
  
  1768:
  Italian biologist Lazzaro Spallanzani determines that food can
  be protected from microorganisms by being sealed to prevent air
  penetration.
  
  1769:
  +wine grapes are first planted in California
  +James Watt patents the steam engine he developed in 1765, which
  will play a major role in the industrial revolution.
  
  1770:
  Spallanzani experiments with artificial insemination in dogs
  and proves that sperm is necessary for fertilization of the ovum.
  
  1771:
  British philologist Sir William Jones discovers relationships
  among Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit that will lead to reconstruction
  of Indo-European and the development of modern comparative philo-
  logy.
  
  1772:
  +By burning a diamond and producing carbon dioxide, Lavoisier
  discovers that diamonds consist of carbon and are related to coal.
  +Rubber is made by British scientist Joseph Priestley for its
  ability to erase penciled errors through rubbing.
  
  1775:
  +Priestley identifies hydrochloric and sulfuric acids.
  +Italian physicist Volta invents a device that can generate
  and store static electricity.
  +The first patent for a flush toilet is issued to British
  inventor Alexander Cummings, though such toilets will not
  become common until the 19th century.
  
  1776:
  +Swedish chemists Carl Scheele and Torbern Bergman indepent-
  ly discover uric acid.
  +American physician and statesman Benjamin Rush signs the
  Declaration of Independence.
  +Chemist Matthew Dobson proves that the sweetness in diabetic
  blood and urine is due to sugar and suggests that diabetes is
  not a kidney problem but rather a malfunction of metabolism
  and digestion.
  +German anatomist and natural historian Johann Friedrich Blu-
  menbach publishes "On the natural varieties of mankind", which
  divides the human race into American indian, Caucasian,
  Ethiopian, Malayan, and Mongolian branches. He also postulates
  that Caucasians were the original human race which then "degen-
  erated" into other divisions under different environment demands.
  
  1780:
  British physician David Pitcairn is first to note that rheumatic
  fever can damage the heart.
  
  1781:
  +William Herschel discovers Uranus, the seventh planet from
  the sun and the first to be discovered by telescope.
  +A smallpox outbreak among Spanish settlers in Texas spreads
  north to Canada. More than 130,000 native Americans die.
  +Immanuel Kant argues against the empiricist viewpoint that all
  human beings are born with equal potential and are the product
  of education and environment. In his "Critique of pure reason"
  Kant takes instead the nativist viewpoint, stressing that in-
  herited characteristics and inborn intuitions frame human exper-
  ience but are not dependent on it.
  +After 3 months of construction, the first all-iron bridge is
  put into operation in Shropshire, England. The 378-ton bridge
  spans 100 feet.

1783

• Jacques and Joseph Montgolfier of France send up the first flying ballon, filled with smoke.

• Swedish chemist Carl Scheele discovers glycerine.

• Frenchmen Jean de Rozier and Marquis d'Arlandes make the first manned free-balloon flight, reaching a height of about 500 feet and travelling about 5.5 miles during their 20 minute flight.
  
  1784:
  +Cavendish discovers that water is composed of hydrogen and
  oxygen, from which he gives hydrogen its name (from the Greek
  for "water former").
  +Carl Scheele identifies citric acid.
  +French aeronaut Jean Pierre Blanchard invents the parachute
  and he makes and survives the first jump.
  +Ben Franklin invents bifocal lenses.
  
  1785:
  +William Herschel theorizes that the Milky Way is a flattened
  system of stars, or galaxy.
  +Pierre Simon de Laplace publishes his "Theory on the attraction
  of spheroids and the shape of planets" which contains what is now
  known as the Laplace equation. This partial differential equation
  describes electromagnetic, gravitational, and other potentials.
  +French physicist Charles de Coulomb defines Coulomb's law: the
  force between 2 stationary electric charges is proportional to
  the product of the charges and inversely proportional to the
  square of the distance between them.
  
  1786:
  +William Herschel will publish 3 catalogs listing 2500 nebulae.
  These will become the basis for the "New General Catalogue" (NGC)
  of 1864 and 1888.
  +A nail-making machine is invented and patented by Massachusetts
  inventor Ezekiel Reed.
  
  1787:
  +Herschel discovers Titania and Oberon, 2 moons of Uranus
  +Lavoisier and colleagues publish "The method of chemical
  nomenclature", a systematic approach to naming chemical
  substances and processes. This system soon gains universal
  acceptance among chemists.
  +French chemist Claude-Louis Berthollet identifies the compos-
  ition of ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, and prussic acid.
  +In 2 separate events, the first steamboats are demonstrated
  by US inventors, one on the Potomac river, by James Rumsey,
  the other on the Delaware, by John Fitch.
  +The processes of grinding grain and sifting flour are autom-
  ated by a system developed by US inventor Oliver Evans, sim-
  plifying the labor and time needed to produce bread.
  
  1788:
  +In a posthumous publication, Swedish mineralogist Torbern
  Bergman presents tables of affinities marking the extent to
  which given chemical interact, including predictions about
  reactions as yet unobserved.
  +French mathematician Joseph Louis Lagrange formulates the
  function now called the Lagrangian that expresses the
  difference between kinetic and potential energy for every
  point in an object's path. In his "analytical mechanics",
  Lagrange works out general equations through which algebra
  and calculus, rather than geometry, can be used to solve
  mechanical problems.
  
  1789:
  +Herschel discovers the Saturnian moons Mimas and Enceladus.
  He also completes the world's then-largest telescope, a
  reflecting telescope with a 48-inch mirror.
  +German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth discovers the elements
  Uranium and zirconium.
  +In a textbook on chemistry, Lavoisier states the principle of
  conservation of mass: In a closed system, the total amount of
  mass remains the same regardless of physical or chemical
  changes. This law will eventually be revised by Einstein in
  his 1905 law of the conservation of mass-energy.
  +Corn-based bourbon whiskey is first produced in the Kentucky
  territory, by a minister named Elijah Craig.
  
  1791:
  +British minister William Gregor discovers the element titanium
  +French author Donatien-Alphonse-Francois de Sade, better known
  as the Marquis de Sade, publishes the novel "Justine", in which
  he describes the sexual gratification derived from inflicting
  pain on a loved onem an abnormal sexual practice later called
  "sadism".
  +The French national assembly recommends making an attempt to
  standardize measurements for the meter and quadrant. They suggest
  that the meter represent one ten-millionth part of a quadrant
  of the surface of the earth and the gram one cubic centimeter of
  water at 4 degrees Celsius.
  
  1792:
  The Mint of the US opens, to produce coins based on a decimal
  system.
  
  1794:
  +German physicist Ernst Chladni argues that meteorities are
  extraterrestrial in origin.
  +Finnish chemist Johan Gadolin discovers yttrium, the first
  rare earth element.
  +French mathematician Adrien Marie Legendre publishes his
  highly influential textbook "Elements of geometry".
  +In Pennsylvania the Lancaster road, a toll road, opens to
  join Lancaster and its surrounding areas with the Philadelphia
  area.
  
  1795:
  +In his "Theory of the earth" Scottish naturalist James Hutton
  elaborates the "uniformitarian principle" that geological proc-
  esses, such as erosion, work at a more or less uniform rate.
  The principle implies that the earth is much older than
  previously believed.
  +French mathematician Gaspard Monge publishes "Feuilles d'analyze"
  In this and 1802 memoir with Jean Hachette, he systematizes solid
  analytic geometry and elementary differential geometry in what
  approximates their present state. These works include the two
  Monge theorems.
  +German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss discovers, indep-
  ently of Euler, the law of quadratic reciprocity in number
  theory.
  +German-Austrian physician Franz Joseph Gall behins writing
  on phrenology, the science of mind. He claims that personality
  can be judged by physical apperances, especially skull
  characteristics, and argues that qualities such as honesty and
  depravity are directly associated with bumps and ridges of the
  skull over specific brain regions.
  +Sensory psychophysiologist Ernst Heinrich Weber is born in
  Wittenberg, Germany. He will be the first to study touch and
  kinesthesis, in elaborate experiments. He will also discover a
  major psychophysical principle, which Gustav Fechner will
  identify as Weber's law, that the just-noticeable increment in
  stimulus intensity is a constant fraction of the intensity
  already present.
  
  1796:
  +French astronomer Pierre Simon de Laplace publishes his theory
  that the solar system formed by condensation from a cloud of gas.
  This "nebular hypothesis" is the basis of present-day theories of
  the solar system's origin.
  +Chemist J Lowitz isolates pure ethyl alcohol.
  +Gauss invents a method for constructing a heptadecagon (a polygon
  with 17 sides of equal lengths) with compass and straight edge,
  and shows that an equilateral heptagon (a polygon with 7 equal
  sides) could not be built the same way. His discoveries, which
  mark the first notable advance in geometry since ancient Greece,
  show the value in mathematics of proving impossibility.
  +British physician Edward Jenner inoculates the arm of 8 year
  old James Phipp with pus from a cowpox sore on a milkmaid's arm.
  The boy develops a similar sore, but does not get sick. By 1823
  Jenner's treatment will be practiced throughout the world, making
  smallpox the first disease to be conquered by vaccination.
  
  1797:
  Cigarettes, small cigars in paper wrappers, are produced in Cuba.
  
  1798:
  +Laplace proposes the existence of the objects later known as
  black holes.
  +Cavendish determines the gravitational constant, the only
  unknown to date in Newton's law of gravitation, and the mass and
  density of the earth.
  +British economist Thomas Malthus publishes his "Essay on the
  principle of population", in which he argues that population
  tends to increase in geometric progression but food supply in
  arithmetic progression, so that population will tend to outstrip
  food supply until it is reduced by famine, disease, or war.
  +The printing process of lithography is devoloped by Bavarian
  printer Aloys Senefelder.
  
  1799:
  +From now to 1825, Laplace's five-volume work "Celestial mechanics"
  is published, summarizing and extending current knowledge. Laplace
  shows that the solar system is stable, despite periodic perturb-
  ations.
  +French chemist Joseph Louis Proust articulates Proust's law or
  the law of definite (constant) proportions: the proportions of
  the elements in a compound are always the same, no matter how the
  compound is made.
  +In his dissertation, Gauss gives the first rigorous proof of
  what he calls the "fundamental theorem of algebra".
  +In Siberia a mammoth is found preserved in ice.
  +The first suspension bridge using iron chains for support is
  built by US engineer James Finley.

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