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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Famous quotes containing the words science and/or technology:

    “I exulted like “a pagan suckled in a creed” that had never been worn at all, but was brand-new, and adequate to the occasion. I let science slide, and rejoiced in that light as if it had been a fellow creature. I saw that it was excellent, and was very glad to know that it was so cheap. A scientific explanation, as it is called, would have been altogether out of place there. That is for pale daylight.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “If the technology cannot shoulder the entire burden of strategic change, it nevertheless can set into motion a series of dynamics that present an important challenge to imperative control and the industrial division of labor. The more blurred the distinction between what workers know and what managers know, the more fragile and pointless any traditional relationships of domination and subordination between them will become.”
    —Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)