1862 in science

The year 1862 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy

 * January 31 – Alvan Graham Clark makes the first observation of Sirius B, a white dwarf star, through an eighteen-inch telescope at Northwestern University in Illinois.

Biology

 * May 15 – Charles Darwin publishes On the various contrivances by which British and foreign Orchids are fertilised by insects, and on the good effects of intercrossing.
 * Henry Walter Bates publishes "Contributions to an insect fauna of the Amazon valley. Lepidoptera: Heliconidae" describing Batesian mimicry.
 * George Bentham and Joseph Dalton Hooker begin publication of Genera plantarum based on the collections of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, England.
 * John Gwyn Jeffreys begins publication of British Conchology, or an account of the Mollusca which now inhabit the British Isles and the surrounding seas.

Chemistry

 * Chemist and composer Alexander Borodin describes the first nucleophilic displacement of chlorine by fluorine in benzoyl chloride.
 * Mineralogist Alexandre-Emile Béguyer de Chancourtois makes the first proposal to arrange the chemical elements in order of atomic weights, although this is largely ignored by chemists.
 * Alexander Parkes exhibits Parkesine, one of the earliest synthetic polymers, at the International Exhibition in London. This discovery forms the foundation of the modern plastics industry.

Earth sciences

 * Friedrich Albert Fallou publishes "Pedologie oder allgemeine und besondere Bodenkunde" (Pedology or general and special soil science), founding soil science.

Medicine

 * Maurice Raynaud describes the vasospastic syndrome named after him in his doctoral dissertation.
 * Hermann Snellen publishes the Snellen chart for testing visual acuity.

Technology

 * July 8 – Theodore Timby is granted a United States patent for discharging guns in a revolving turret, using electricity.
 * November 4 – Richard Jordan Gatling is granted a United States patent for the Gatling gun.
 * Brown & Sharpe produce the first Universal Milling machine.
 * David Kirkaldy publishes Results of an Experimental Inquiry into the Comparative Tensile Strength and other properties of various kinds of Wrought-Iron and Steel in Glasgow describing his pioneering work in tensile testing.

Awards

 * Copley Medal: Thomas Graham
 * Wollaston Medal for geology: Robert Godwin-Austen

Births

 * January 23 – David Hilbert (died 1943), German mathematician
 * February 14 – Agnes Pockels (died 1935), German chemist (in Venice)
 * March 14 – Vilhelm Bjerknes (died 1951), Norwegian physicist and meteorologist
 * May 27 – John Edward Campbell (died 1924), Irish-born mathematician
 * June 7 – Philipp Lenard (died 1947), German physicist
 * June 9 – Ernest William Moir (died 1933), British civil engineer
 * July 2 – William Henry Bragg (died 1942), English winner of the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics
 * August 2 – Paul Bujor (died 1952), Romanian animal morphologist, politician and short story writer
 * October 12 – Theodor Boveri (died 1915), German geneticist
 * October 19 – Auguste Lumière (died 1954), French inventor, film pioneer
 * November 23 - Ernest Guglielminetti (died 1943), Swiss physician
 * William Hoskins (died 1934), American inventor

Deaths

 * January 10 – Samuel Colt (born 1814), American inventor
 * February 3 – Jean-Baptiste Biot (born 1774), French physicist
 * February 7 – Prosper Ménière (born 1799), French physician who first described the symptoms of Ménière's disease
 * February 11 – Luther V. Bell (born 1806), American psychiatric physician
 * March 1 – Peter Barlow (born 1776), English mathematician
 * April 3 – Sir James Clark Ross (born 1800), English explorer of the Polar regions
 * May 6 – Olry Terquem (born 1782), French Jewish geometer
 * October 8 – James Walker (born 1781), Scottish-born civil engineer
 * October 21 – Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, 1st Baronet (born 1783), English physiologist
 * December 18 – Lucas Barrett (born 1837), English naturalist (drowned)
 * December 20 – Robert Knox (born 1791), Scottish anatomist
 * December 21 – Karl Kreil (born 1798), Austrian astronomer