1859 in science

Archaeology

• May 26 & June 2 – Geologist Joseph Prestwich and amateur archaeologist John Evans report the results of their investigations of gravel-pits in the Somme valley and elsewhere, extending human history back to what will become known as the Paleolithic Era.

Astronomy

• August 28–September 2 – The solar storm of 1859, the largest geomagnetic solar storm on record, causes the Northern lights aurora to be visible as far south as Cuba and knocks out telegraph communication. This is also called the Carrington event, Richard Carrington being the first known person to observe solar flares, due to this storm. It is also the first major solar radiation storm to be recorded.
• Marian Albertovich Kowalski publishes the first usable method to deduce the rotation of the Milky Way.
• English clergyman Thomas William Webb publishes the first edition of his popular amateur guide Celestial Objects for Common Telescopes.
• Attempting to explain Mercury's solar orbit, French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier proposes the existence of a hypothetical planet, Vulcan, inside its orbit and amateur astronomer Edmond Modeste Lescarbault claims to have observed it on March 26.

Biology

• March 21 – The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania issues the charter establishing the Zoological Society of Philadelphia, the first organization of its kind in the United States and founder of the nation's first zoo.
• November 3 – Alfred Russel Wallace's paper "On the Zoological geography of the Malay Archipelago", introducing the Wallace Line, is read by Charles Darwin to the Linnean Society of London.
• November 24 – Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species.
• December – Joseph Dalton Hooker's Introductory Essay to the Flora Tasmaniae supports Darwin's theories.
• Pollen is identified as the cause of allergic rhinitis by Charles Harrison Blackley.
• Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, in the second volume of Histoire naturelle générale des Règnes organiques, introduces the term ethology.
• Wilhelm Peters first describes the guppy from Venezuela.
• Rudolf Virchow publishes Vorlesungen über Cellularpathologie in ihrer Begründung auf physiologischer und pathologischer Gewebelehre, a major textbook on cellular pathology.

Chemistry

• Benjamin Collins Brodie reports the highly lamellar structure of thermally reduced graphite oxide.
• Aleksandr Butlerov discovers hexamine.
• August von Hofmann isolates sorbic acid.
• Gustav Robert Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen invent an improved spectroscope.
• Pinacol is discovered through Pinacol coupling reaction by Wilhelm Rudolph Fittig.

Climatology

• John Tyndall discovers that some gases block infrared radiation. He suggests that changes in the concentration of these gases could bring climate change.

Geography

• The Royal Geographical Society of London is granted a Royal Charter by Queen Victoria.
• French mathematician Nicolas Auguste Tissot first proposes Tissot's indicatrix in cartography.

Mathematics

• Emanoil Bacaloglu develops the "Bacaloglu pseudosphere".
• Arthur Cayley produces the first Cayley–Klein metric.
• Bernhard Riemann publishes his paper on number theory, die Anzahl der Primzahlen unter einer gegebenen including the Riemann zeta function and Riemann hypothesis.

Medicine

• Florence Nightingale publishes Notes on Nursing: What it is and What it is Not in London.
• District nursing begins in Liverpool, England, when philanthropist William Rathbone employs Mary Robinson to nurse the sick poor in their own homes.

Technology

• May 2 – Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Royal Albert Bridge for the Cornwall Railway at Saltash in England is officially opened.
• November 24 – French ironclad Gloire launched, the first ocean-going ironclad battleship.
• Thomas Aveling of Rochester, Kent, England, produces the first traction engine, by modification of an existing machine.
• Étienne Lenoir, working in Paris, produces the first single-cylinder two-stroke Lenoir cycle gas engine with an electric ignition system.

Physics

• Gustav Kirchhoff first states Kirchhoff's law of thermal radiation in several papers.

Awards

• February 23 – William Armstrong created a Knight Bachelor
• Copley Medal: Wilhelm Weber
• Wollaston Medal for geology: Charles Darwin

Births

• January 8 – Fanny Bullock Workman, American mountaineer, explorer and cartographer.
• January 19 – Alice Eastwood, Canadian-born botanist.
• February 14
• * George Washington Gale Ferris Jr., American civil engineer, inventor of the Ferris wheel.
• * Henry Valentine Knaggs, English practitioner of naturopathic medicine.
• February 19 – Svante Arrhenius, Swedish winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
• February 28 – Florian Cajori, Swiss historian of mathematics.
• March 4 – Alexander Stepanovich Popov, Russian physicist.
• March 10 – Frank Leverett, American glaciologist.
• March 14 – Dorothea Pertz, English botanist.
• April 7 – Jacques Loeb, German physiologist.
• May 15 – Pierre Curie, French winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics.
• May 18 – Harry Fielding Reid, American geophysicist.
• May 28 – Edward Hopkinson, English electrical engineer.
• June 25 – Gerhard Heilmann, Danish paleo-ornithologist.
• July 31 – Theobald Smith, American bacteriologist.
• September 7 – Margaret Crosfield, British palaeontologist and geologist.
• November 22 – Cecilia Grierson, Argentine physician and reformer.

Deaths

• May 1 – John Walker, English chemist.
• May 5 – Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet, German mathematician.
• May 6 – Alexander von Humboldt, German naturalist and explorer.
• June 8 – Walter Hunt, American inventor.
• July 8 - Charlotte von Siebold, German gynecologist.
• September 10 – Thomas Nuttall, English naturalist.
• September 15 – Isambard Kingdom Brunel, British civil engineer.
• October 12 – Robert Stephenson, English railway engineer.