1831 in science

Astronomy

• January 7 – Great Comet of 1831 first observed by John Herapath.
• March 7 – Royal Astronomical Society receives its Royal Charter.
• Heinrich Schwabe makes the first detailed drawing of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter.
• Mary Somerville translates Laplace's Mécanique céleste as The Mechanism of the Heavens.

Biology

• September 1 – Zoological Gardens, Dublin, open in Ireland.
• Robert Brown names the cell nucleus, in a paper to the Linnean Society of London.

Chemistry

• A. A. Bussy publishes his Mémoire sur le Radical métallique de la Magnésie describing his method of isolating magnesium.
• The Kaliapparat, a laboratory device for the analysis of carbon in organic compounds, is invented by Justus von Liebig.

Exploration

• June 1 – British Royal Navy officer James Clark Ross locates the position of the North Magnetic Pole on the Boothia Peninsula.
• December 27 – Charles Darwin starts his voyage on from Plymouth.

Medicine

• May 16 – Middlesex County Asylum for pauper lunatics opens at Hanwell near London under the humane superintendence of William Charles Ellis.
• Dr C. Turner Thackrah publishes The Effects of the Principal Arts, Trades, and Professions, and of Civic States and Habits of Living, on Health and Longevity, with a particular reference to the trades and manufactures of Leeds, and suggestions for the removal of many of the agents which produce disease and shorten the duration of life, a pioneering study of occupational and public health in a newly industrialised English city.

Paleontology

• Henry Witham publishes Observations on fossil vegetables, accompanied by representations of their internal structure, as seen through the microscope in Edinburgh.

Technology

• April 12 – Broughton Suspension Bridge over the River Irwell in England collapses under marching troops.
• August 29 – Michael Faraday demonstrates electromagnetic induction at the Royal Society of London. Joseph Henry recognises it at about the same time.
• October 28 – Faraday develops the Faraday Wheel, a homopolar generator.
• Joseph Henry invents the electric bell.
• James Meadows Rendel erects the first bascule bridge with a hydraulic mechanism, on the Kingsbridge Estuary in England.
• William Wallace invents the eidograph.

Institutions

• September 27 – British Association for the Advancement of Science first meets, in York.

Awards

• Copley Medal: George Biddell Airy
• Wollaston Medal : William Smith

Births

• January 20 – Edward Routh, Canadian-born English mathematician.
• January 26 – Heinrich Anton de Bary, German surgeon, botanist, microbiologist and mycologist.
• February 28 – Edward James Stone, English astronomer.
• March 3 – George Pullman, American inventor.
• May 16 – David E. Hughes, British inventor.
• June 13 – James Clerk Maxwell, Scottish-born mathematician.
• August 20 – Eduard Suess, Austrian geologist.
• October 6 – Richard Dedekind, German mathematician.
• October 15 – Isabella Bird, English explorer, writer, photographer and naturalist.
• October 21 – Hermann Hellriegel, German agricultural chemist, discoverer of the mechanism by which leguminous plants assimilate the free nitrogen of the atmosphere.
• October 29 – Othniel Charles Marsh, American paleontologist.
• December 5 – Hans Heinrich Landolt, Swiss-born chemist.

Deaths

• February 14 – Henry Maudslay, English mechanical engineer.
• March 26 - Pierre Amable Jean-Baptiste Trannoy, French physician, hygienist and botanist.
• June 27 – Sophie Germain, French mathematician.
• October 14 – Jean-Louis Pons, French astronomer.
• December 22 – François Huber, blind Swiss naturalist.