1860s - Science and Technology

Science and Technology

  • The First Transcontinental Railroad in the USA was completed.
  • The Suez Canal in Egypt is opened in 1869.
  • The submarine is invented in 1869.
  • The first transatlantic telegraph cable is successfully laid in 1866, enabling almost instant communication between America and Europe.
  • Alfred Nobel creates dynamite in Germany
  • James Clerk Maxwell publishes his equations that quantify the relationship between electricity and magnetism, and shows that light is a form of electromagnetic radiation
  • Gregor Mendel formulates Mendel's laws of inheritance, the basis for genetics
  • Dimitri Mendeleev develops the modern periodic table
  • Helium was first detected during the total solar eclipse of August 18, 1868 in parts of India. It was the first eclipse expedition in which a spectroscope was used.
  • J. Norman Lockyer and Pierre Janssen are honored for their discovery of the nature of the Sun's prominences. They were the first to notice bright spectral emission lines when viewing the limb of the Sun without the aid of a total solar eclipse.

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