1882 in science

Astronomy

• September – Great Comet of 1882 sighted.
• December 6 – Transit of Venus, 1882.

Biology

• March 24 – Robert Koch announces his discovery of the bacterium responsible for tuberculosis, Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
• Élie Metchnikoff discovers phagocytosis.

Chemistry

• Italian physicist Luigi Palmieri detects helium on Earth for the first time through its D₃ spectral line when he analyzes the lava of Mount Vesuvius.

Earth sciences

• Clarence Dutton's Tertiary History of the Grand Cañon District is published by the United States Geological Survey.

Mathematics

• June – German mathematician Ferdinand von Lindemann publishes proof that is a transcendental number and that squaring the circle is consequently impossible.
• December – Swedish mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler establishes the journal Acta Mathematica.
• Felix Klein first describes the Klein bottle.

Medicine

• March 28 – Paul Beiersdorf patents an adhesive bandage in Germany, the foundation of the Beiersdorf company.
• Vladimir Bekhterev publishes Provodiashchie puti mozga, beginning to note the role of the hippocampus in memory.

Technology

• January 12 – Holborn Viaduct power station in the City of London, the world's first coal-fired public electricity generating station, begins operation.
• By March – Étienne-Jules Marey invents a chronophotographic gun capable of photographing 12 consecutive frames per second on the same plate.
• April 29 – Werner von Siemens demonstrates his Electromote, the first form of trolleybus, in Berlin.
• June 6 – Henry W. Seeley patents the electric clothes iron in the United States.
• September 4 – Thomas Edison starts the United States' first commercial electrical power plant, lighting one square mile of lower Manhattan.
• English mechanical engineer James Atkinson invents his "Differential Engine".
• American electrical engineer Schuyler Wheeler produces an electric fan.
• Alfred P. Southwick publishes his proposals for use of the electric chair as an execution method in the United States.
• Nikola Tesla claims this is when he conceives the rotating magnetic field principle, which he later uses to invent his induction motor.

Events

• First International Polar Year, an international scientific program, begins.
• The Chartered Institute of Patent Agents, the modern-day Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys, is founded in the United Kingdom.

Awards

• Copley Medal: Arthur Cayley
• Wollaston Medal for Geology: Franz Ritter von Hauer

Births

• March 14 – Wacław Sierpiński, Polish mathematician.
• March 23 – Emmy Noether, German mathematician.
• March 30 – Melanie Klein, Viennese-born psychoanalyst.
• April 27 – Harry Allan, New Zealand botanist.
• June 17 – Harold Gillies, New Zealand-born plastic surgeon.
• July 12 – Traian Lalescu, Romanian mathematician.
• July 21 – Herbert E. Ives, American optical engineer.
• September 30 – Hans Geiger, German inventor of the Geiger counter.
• October 5 – Robert Goddard, American rocket scientist.
• October 26 – Marietta Pallis, Indian-born Graeco-British ecologist.
• November 18 – Frances Gertrude McGill, pioneering Canadian forensic pathologist.
• December 11 – Max Born, German physicist and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1954.
• December 28 – Arthur Eddington, English astrophysicist.
• Israel Aharoni, Belarusian-born Jewish zoologist.

Deaths

• January 11 – Theodor Schwann, German physiologist.
• April 19 – Charles Darwin, English naturalist and geologist.
• August 24 – John Dillwyn Llewelyn, Welsh botanist and photographer.
• September 23 – Friedrich Wöhler, German chemist.
• October 27 – Christian Heinrich von Nagel, German geometer.
• November 20 – Henry Draper, doctor, American astronomer.
• December 24
• * Johann Benedict Listing, German mathematician.
• * Charles Vincent Walker, English telegraph engineer.