1883 in science

Astronomy

• March 2 – The Hong Kong Observatory is established.
• May 6 – A total solar eclipse occurred and was observed at the Caroline Island by astronomers aboard the USS Hartford.

Chemistry

• April 5 – Liquid oxygen is produced for the first time.
• Svante Arrhenius develops ion theory to explain conductivity in electrolytes.
• The Claus process is first patented by German chemist Carl Friedrich Claus.
• The Schotten–Baumann reaction is first described by chemists Carl Schotten and Eugen Baumann.

Earth sciences

• August 26 – Krakatoa begins its final phase of eruptions at 1:06pm local time. These produce a number of tsunami, mainly in the early hours of the next day, which result in about 36,000 deaths on the islands of Sumatra and Java. The final explosion at 10:02am on August 27 destroys the island of Krakatoa itself and is heard up to 3000 miles away.
• Vasily Dokuchaev publishes Russian Chernozem.

Genetics

• The concept and term Eugenics are formulated by Francis Galton.

Medicine

• German psychiatrist Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum identifies a disorder characterized by recurring mood cycles which he and his student Ewald Hecker name cyclothymia.
• Thomas Clouston publishes Clinical Lectures on Mental Diseases.
• Emil Kraepelin publishes Compendium der Psychiatrie.American Medical Association">Americans">American Medical Association first published under this title.

Physics

• Osborne Reynolds popularizes use of the Reynolds number in fluid mechanics.

Technology

• February 13 – Seth Wheeler is granted a United States patent for toilet paper in a perforated roll supported in the center with a tube.
• January 19 – The first electric lighting system employing overhead wires begins service in Roselle, New Jersey, United States, installed by Thomas Edison.
• May 24 – Brooklyn Bridge opens to traffic in New York. Designed by John A. Roebling with project management assisted by his wife Emily, its main suspension span of List of [longest suspension bridge spans#History of longest suspension spans|exceeds the previous record] by, and will not be surpassed for twenty years.
• Charles Fritts constructs the first solar cell using the semiconductor selenium on a thin layer of gold to form a device giving less than 1% efficiency.

Zoology

• August 12 – The last quagga dies at the Artis Magistra zoo in Amsterdam.

Awards

• Copley Medal: William Thomson, Lord Kelvin
• Wollaston Medal for Geology: William Thomas Blanford

Births

• January 4 – Johanna Westerdijk, Dutch plant pathologist.
• February 10 – Edith Clarke, American electrical engineer, inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
• March 4 – Julius Fromm, German businessman, inventor known for the Condom machine
• May 5 – Anna Johnson Pell Wheeler, American mathematician.
• May 13 – Georgios Papanikolaou, Greek-born cytopathologist, inventor of the Pap smear.
• June 24 – Victor Francis Hess, American physicist.
• July 15 – Orii Hyōjirō, Japanese animal specimen collector.
• August 4 – Sydney Smith, New Zealand-born forensic pathologist.
• August 6 – Constance Georgina Adams, South African botanist.
• October 2 – Karl von Terzaghi, Austrian "father of soil mechanics".
• October 8 – Otto Heinrich Warburg, German physiologist, winner of the 1931 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Deaths

• January 23 – George Miller Beard, American neurologist.
• April 10 - Maurice Krishaber, naturalised French Hungarian otorhinolaryngologist.
• April 14 – William Farr, English epidemiologist.
• April 28 – Rev. John Russell, English dog breeder.
• May 13 – James Young, Scottish chemist.
• June 18 – John Waterston, Scottish physicist and civil engineer.
• June 26 – General Sir Edward Sabine, Anglo-Irish physicist, astronomer and explorer.
• September 15 – Joseph Plateau, Belgian physicist.
• December 8 – François Lenormant, French assyriologist and numismatist.
• December 13 – John Stringfellow, English pioneer of heavier-than-air flight.