# 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