1758 in science

Astronomy

• December 25 – Halley's Comet is sighted by Johann Georg Palitzsch, confirming Edmund Halley's 1705 prediction of its periodicity.

Chemistry

• John Champion patents a process for calcining zinc sulphide into an oxide usable in the retort process.

Medicine

• French midwife Angélique du Coudray demonstrates the first obstetric mannequin.
• Scottish physician Francis Home makes the first attempt to deliver a measles vaccine.

Physics

• Ruđer Bošković publishes his atomic theory in Philosophiæ naturalis theoria redacta ad unicam legem virium in natura existentium.
• John Dolland presents his "Account of some experiments concerning the different refrangibility of light" describing the discovery of a means of constructing doublet achromatic lenses by the combination of crown and flint glasses, reducing chromatic aberration.

Zoology

• January 1 – Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus publishes in Stockholm the first volume of the 10th edition of Systema Naturae, the starting point of modern zoological nomenclature, introducing binomial nomenclature for animals to his established system of Linnaean taxonomy. Among the first examples of his system of identifying an organism by genus and then species, Linnaeus identifies the lamprey with the name Petromyzon marinus. He introduces the term Homo sapiens.

Awards

• Copley Medal: John Dollond

Births

• January 20 – Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze, French chemist
• March 9 – Franz Joseph Gall, German-born neuroanatomist
• March 14 – Franz Bauer, Moravian-born botanical illustrator
• June 29 – Clotilde Tambroni, Italian philologist and linguist
• July 31 –, Swiss naturalist
• October 11 – Heinrich Wilhelm Matthäus Olbers, German astronomer

Deaths

• January 18 – François Nicole, French mathematician
• April 22 – Antoine de Jussieu, French naturalist
• August 15 – Pierre Bouguer, French mathematician
• September 5 – Dmitry Ivanovich Vinogradov, Russian chemist
• October – Elizabeth Blackwell, British botanical illustrator