Timeline of Scientific Discoveries - 19th Century

19th Century

• 1800 – Alessandro Volta: discovers electrochemical series and invents the battery
• 1802 – Jean-Baptiste Lamarck: teleological evolution
• 1805 – John Dalton: Atomic Theory in (Chemistry)
• 1824 – Carnot: described the Carnot cycle, the idealized heat engine
• 1827 – Georg Ohm: Ohm's law (Electricity)
• 1827 – Amedeo Avogadro: Avogadro's law (Gas law])
• 1828 – Friedrich Wöhler synthesized urea, destroying vitalism
• 1830 - Nikolai Lobachevsky created Non-Euclidean geometry
• 1831 – Michael Faraday discovers electromagnetic induction
• 1833 – Anselme Payen isolates first enzyme, diastase
• 1838 – Matthias Schleiden: all plants are made of cells
• 1838 – Friedrich Bessel: first successful measure of stellar parallax (to star 61 Cygni)
• 1842 – Christian Doppler: Doppler effect
• 1843 – James Prescott Joule: Law of Conservation of energy (First law of thermodynamics), also 1847 – Helmholtz, Conservation of energy
• 1846 – William Morton: discovery of anesthesia
• 1846 – Johann Gottfried Galle and Heinrich Louis d'Arrest: discovery of Neptune
• 1848 – Lord Kelvin: absolute zero
• 1858 – Rudolf Virchow: cells can only arise from pre-existing cells
• 1859 – Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace: Theory of evolution by natural selection
• 1865 – Gregor Mendel: Mendel's laws of inheritance, basis for genetics
• 1865 – Rudolf Clausius: Definition of Entropy
• 1869 – Dmitri Mendeleev: Periodic table
• 1871 – Lord Rayleigh: Diffuse sky radiation (Rayleigh scattering) explains why sky appears blue
• 1873 – James Clerk Maxwell: Theory of electromagnetism
• 1875 – William Crookes invented the Crookes tube and studied cathode rays
• 1876 – Josiah Willard Gibbs founded chemical thermodynamics, the phase rule
• 1877 – Ludwig Boltzmann: Statistical definition of entropy
• 1887 – Albert Michelson and Edward Morley: lack of evidence for the aether
• 1895 – Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovers x-rays
• 1896 – Henri Becquerel discovers radioactivity
• 1897 – J.J. Thomson discovers the electron in cathode rays
• 1898 - J.J. Thomson proposed the Plum pudding model of an atom
• 1900 – Max Planck: Planck's law of black body radiation, basis for quantum theory