1872 in science

The year 1872 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

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

 * December 21 – Challenger expedition: HMS Challenger (1858) 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 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 (died 1962), American food scientist and microbiologist
 * April 21 - Charles Gandy (died 1943), French physician.
 * May 6 – Willem de Sitter (died 1934), Dutch mathematician, physicist and astronomer
 * May 21 – Henry E. Warren (died 1957), American inventor
 * May 31 – Charles Greeley Abbot (died 1973), American astrophysicist
 * August 1 – Solomon Carter Fuller (died 1953), Liberian-born psychiatrist
 * September 23 – Marie Depage (died in sinking of the RMS Lusitania 1915), Belgian nurse
 * October 4 – Ernest Fourneau (died 1949), French medicinal chemist

Deaths

 * March 8 – Priscilla Susan Bury (born 1799), English botanist
 * April 2 – Samuel Morse (born 1791), American inventor
 * May 6 – George Robert Gray (born 1808), English zoologist
 * August 11 – Sir Andrew Smith (born 1797), Scottish-born military surgeon, explorer, ethnologist and zoologist
 * August 22 – Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis (born 1787), French physician
 * November 7 – Alfred Clebsch (born 1833), German mathematician
 * December 6 – Félix Archimède Pouchet (born 1800), French scientist
 * December 24 – William John Macquorn Rankine (born 1820), Scottish physicist
 * Anne Elizabeth Ball (born 1808), Irish psychologist