1872 in science

Chemistry

• Robert Chesebrough patents Vaseline in the United States
• Eugen Baumann rediscovers polyvinyl chloride
• Charles-Adolphe Wurtz discovers the aldol reaction

Conservation

• March 1 – Yellowstone National Park is established in the United States, the world's first national park

Exploration

• May 13–September 26 – Benjamin Leigh Smith's 1872 expedition to Jan Mayen and Svalbard
• December 21 – Challenger expedition: sails from Portsmouth in England on the 4-year scientific expedition that lays the foundation for the science of oceanography

Mathematics

• Richard Dedekind publishes Stetigkeit und irrationale Zahlen, a theory of irrational numbers
• Felix Klein produces the Erlangen program on geometries

Medicine

• February 15 – George Huntington makes the first detailed description of Huntington's disease, in Middleport, Ohio
• Moritz Kaposi describes Kaposi's sarcoma and the manifestations of systemic lupus erythematosus
• Ferdinand Monoyer proposes the dioptre as a unit for measuring the optical power of a lens

Physics

• Ludwig Boltzmann states the Boltzmann equation for the temporal development of distribution functions in phase space, and publishes his H-theorem

Technology

• April 1 – English hangman William Marwood first uses his technique of the long drop
• April 2 – George Brayton obtains a United States patent for a constant pressure internal combustion engine, initially using vaporized gas, and marketed as 'Brayton's Ready Motor'
• John Hopkinson proposes the group flash system for distinguishing lighthouses
• Reverend C. M. Ramus of Sussex, England, devises the single-step hydroplane hull

Institutions

• October 1 – the Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College begins its first academic session
• The Polytechnic Museum in Moscow is founded

Publications

• May – the magazine Popular Science is first published in the United States
• Charles Darwin publishes ''The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals''

Awards

• Copley Medal: Friedrich Woehler
• Wollaston Medal for geology: James Dwight Dana

Births

• April 5 – Samuel Cate Prescott, American food scientist and microbiologist
• April 21 - Charles Gandy, French physician.
• May 6 – Willem de Sitter, Dutch mathematician, physicist and astronomer
• May 21 – Henry E. Warren, American inventor
• May 31 – Charles Greeley Abbot, American astrophysicist
• August 1 – Solomon Carter Fuller, Liberian-born psychiatrist
• September 23 – Marie Depage, Belgian nurse
• October 4 – Ernest Fourneau, French medicinal chemist

Deaths

• March 8 - Priscilla Susan Bury, English botanist
• April 2 – Samuel Morse, American inventor
• May 6 – George Robert Gray, English zoologist
• August 11 – Sir Andrew Smith, Scottish-born military surgeon, explorer, ethnologist and zoologist
• August 22 – Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis, French physician
• November 7 – Alfred Clebsch, German mathematician
• December 6 – Félix Archimède Pouchet, French scientist
• December 24 – William John Macquorn Rankine, Scottish physicist
• Anne Elizabeth Ball, Irish psychologist