1865 in science
The year 1865 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.
Archaeology
- John Lubbock publishes Pre-historic Times, as Illustrated by Ancient Remains, and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages, including his coinage of the term Palæolithic.
Astronomy
- Vassar College Observatory opens at Poughkeepsie, New York, with Maria Mitchell as its first director.
Chemistry
- Friedrich Kekulé proposes a ring structure for benzene.
- Adolf von Baeyer begins work on indigo dye, a milestone in modern industrial organic chemistry which revolutionizes the dye industry.
- Johann Josef Loschmidt indirectly determines the number of molecules in a mole, later named the Avogadro constant.
Economics
- William Stanley Jevons publishes his book The Coal Question, which will form the scientific basis for the Jevons paradox.
Life sciences
- Louis Pasteur shows that the air is full of bacteria.
- Joseph Lister begins to experiment with antiseptic surgery in Glasgow using carbolic acid.
- Max Schultze gives the first known description of the platelet.
- Claude Bernard publishes Principes de Médecine experimentale.
- February 8 & March 8 – Gregor Mendel reads his paper, Versuche über Pflanzenhybriden, at two meetings of the Natural History Society of Brünn in Moravia.
- May 17 – Father Armand David first observes Père David's Deer in China.
- June-August – Francis Galton formulates eugenics.
- September – John Henry Walsh gives the first definition of a dog breed standard based on physical form.
- September 28 – Elizabeth Garrett Anderson obtains a licence from the Society of Apothecaries in London to practice medicine, the first woman to qualify as a doctor in the United Kingdom, and sets up in her own practice.
Physics
- Rudolf Clausius gives the first mathematical version of the concept of entropy, and also names it.
- James Clerk Maxwell publishes A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field.
Technology
- Aveling and Porter produce the world's first steam roller at Rochester in England.
- Hermann Sprengel produces the Sprengel pump which is capable of creating a significant vacuum.
Awards
- Copley Medal: Michel Chasles
- Wollaston Medal in Geology: Thomas Davidson
Births
- January 22 – Friedrich Paschen, German physicist.
- February 1 – Henry Luke Bolley, American plant pathologist.
- March 19 – William Morton Wheeler, American entomologist.
- March 31 – Anandi Gopal Joshi, Indian physician.
- April 28 – Charles W. Woodworth, American entomologist.
- June 27 – John Monash, Australian civil engineer and General.
- August 10 – Charles Close, Jersey-born cartographer.
- October 12 – Arthur Harden, English biochemist, Nobel Prize in Chemistry recipient.
- November 4 – Chevalier Jackson, American laryngologist and pioneer of endoscopy.
Deaths
- January 14 – Marie-Anne Libert, Belgian botanist.
- January 31 – Hugh Falconer, British geologist, botanist, paleontologist and paleoanthropologist.
- April 23 – Diego de Argumosa, Spanish surgeon.
- April 30 – Robert FitzRoy, English admiral and meteorologist, suicide.
- May 27 – Charles Waterton, English naturalist and explorer.
- June 5 – Sir John Richardson, Scottish-born naturalist, explorer and naval surgeon.
- July 25 – Dr. James Barry, Irish-born military surgeon.
- August 12 – Sir William Jackson Hooker, English botanist.
- August 13 – Ignaz Semmelweis, Hungarian physician, following restraint in insane asylum.
- August 26 – Johann Franz Encke, German astronomer.
- August 29 – Robert Remak, Polish/Prussian Jewish embryologist.
- September 2 – Sir William Rowan Hamilton, Irish mathematician, physicist and astronomer.
- October 17 – Joseph-François Malgaigne, French surgeon.