1848 in science

The year 1848 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Events

 * September 20 – The American Association for the Advancement of Science is set up in Pennsylvania by re-formation of the Association of American Geologists and Naturalists, with William Charles Redfield as its first president.

Astronomy

 * September 16 – William Cranch Bond and William Lassell discover Hyperion, Saturn's moon.
 * Lord Rosse studies M1 and names it the Crab Nebula.
 * Édouard Roche calculates the Roche limit.
 * Rudolf Wolf (in Zürich) devises a way of quantifying sunspot activity, the Wolf number.

Botany

 * April 16 – Joseph Dalton Hooker arrives at Darjeeling to begin the first European plant collecting expedition in the Himalayas.

Chemistry

 * Edward Frankland, working in Germany, discovers the organometallic compound diethylzinc.

Exploration

 * Admiral Nevelskoi demonstrates that the Strait of Tartary is a strait.

Medicine

 * September 13 – Vermont railroad worker Phineas Gage survives a 3-foot-plus (1 m) iron rod being driven through his head, providing a demonstration of the effects of damage to the brain's frontal lobe.
 * November 1 – The first medical school for women, The Boston Female Medical School, opens in Boston, Massachusetts.
 * Alfred Baring Garrod recognises that excess uric acid in the blood is the cause of gout.
 * Rudolf Virchow produces a Report on the Typhus Epidemic in Upper Silesia advocating broad social as well as public health measures to counter such outbreaks.

Physics

 * Lord Kelvin establishes concept of absolute zero, the temperature at which all molecular motion ceases.
 * Nicholas Callan of Maynooth College invents an improved form of battery.
 * Hippolyte Fizeau and John Scott Russell present studies of the Doppler effect in electromagnetic and sound waves respectively.

Technology

 * August 15 – James Warren submits a U.K. patent application for the Warren truss.
 * James Bogardus erects the first free-standing cast-iron architectural façade, the Milhau Pharmacy Building in New York City.
 * French civil engineer A. Boucher promotes the ribbed ("false") skew arch.
 * Completion of palm houses at Kew Gardens, London, and the National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin, by Richard Turner of Dublin.
 * Joseph-Louis Lambot constructs the first ferrocement boat, in France.
 * Linus Yale Sr., invents the modern pin tumbler lock.
 * John Stringfellow flies a steam-powered monoplane model for a short distance in a powered glide in England.

Awards

 * Copley Medal: John Couch Adams
 * Wollaston Medal for Geology: William Buckland

Births

 * March 8 – LaMarcus Adna Thompson (died 1919), American inventor.
 * April 9 – Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti (died 1930), British-born electrical engineer and inventor
 * May 23 – Otto Lilienthal (died 1896), German aviation pioneer.
 * June 12 – Albertina Carlsson (died 1930) Swedish zoologist.
 * June 22 – William Macewen (died 1924), Scottish surgeon.
 * July 7 – Cuthbert Hilton Golding-Bird (died 1939), English surgeon.
 * July 27 – Loránd Eötvös (died 1919), Hungarian physicist.
 * August 14 – Margaret Lindsay (died 1915), Irish astronomer.
 * November 1 – Caroline Still Anderson (died 1919), African American physician, educator and activist.
 * November 8 – Gottlob Frege (died 1925), German mathematician.
 * November 27 – Henry A. Rowland (died 1901), American physicist.

Deaths

 * January 9 – Caroline Herschel (born 1750), German astronomer.
 * January 12 – Christophe-Paulin de La Poix de Fréminville (born 1787), French explorer and naturalist.
 * January 24 – Horace Wells, American dentist, pioneer of the use of anesthesia, suicide (born 1815).
 * August 7 – Jöns Jakob Berzelius (born 1779), Swedish chemist.
 * August 12 – George Stephenson (born 1781), English locomotive engineer.
 * December 18 – Bernard Bolzano (born 1781), Bohemian mathematician.