1760 in science
The year 1760 in science and technology involved some significant events.
Chemistry
- Louis Claude Cadet de Gassicourt investigates inks based on cobalt salts and isolates cacodyl from cobalt mineral containing arsenic, pioneering work in organometallic chemistry.
Geology
- John Michell suggests earthquakes are caused by one layer of rocks rubbing against another.
Medicine
- April 30 – Swiss mathematician Daniel Bernoulli presents a paper at the French Academy of Sciences in Paris in which "a mathematical model was used for the first time to study the population dynamics of infectious disease."
- Samuel-Auguste Tissot publishes L'Onanisme in Lausanne, a treatise on the supposed ill-effects of masturbation.
Physics
- Johann Heinrich Lambert publishes Photometria, a pioneering work in photometry, including a formulation of the Beer–Lambert law on light absorption and the introduction of the albedo as a reflection coefficient.
Technology
- Liègeois mechanician John Joseph Merlin first experiments with roller skates in London.
Events
- Mathematician Leonhard Euler begins writing his Letters to a German Princess to Friederike Charlotte of Brandenburg-Schwedt and her younger sister Louise.
Awards
Births
- April 13 – Thomas Beddoes, reforming English physician
- June 5 – Johan Gadolin, Finnish chemist and mineralogist
- October 23 – Hanaoka Seishū, Japanese surgeon
- Clelia Durazzo Grimaldi, Italian botanist
Deaths
- September 11 – Louis Godin, French astronomer