# 1831 in science

The year 1831 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

## Astronomy

* January 7 – Great Comet of 1831 (C/1831 A1, 1830 II) first observed by John Herapath.
* March 7 – Royal Astronomical Society receives its Royal Charter.
* Heinrich Schwabe makes the first detailed drawing of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter.
* Mary Somerville translates Laplace's Mécanique céleste as The Mechanism of the Heavens.

## Biology

* September 1 – Zoological Gardens, Dublin, open in Ireland.
* Robert Brown names the cell nucleus, in a paper to the Linnean Society of London.

## Chemistry

* A. A. Bussy publishes his Mémoire sur le Radical métallique de la Magnésie describing his method of isolating magnesium.
* The Kaliapparat, a laboratory device for the analysis of carbon in organic compounds, is invented by Justus von Liebig.

## Exploration

* June 1 – British Royal Navy officer James Clark Ross locates the position of the North Magnetic Pole on the Boothia Peninsula.
* December 27 – Charles Darwin starts his voyage on HMS Beagle from Plymouth.

## Medicine

* May 16 – Middlesex County Asylum for pauper lunatics opens at Hanwell near London under the humane superintendence of William Charles Ellis.
* Dr C. Turner Thackrah publishes The Effects of the Principal Arts, Trades, and Professions, and of Civic States and Habits of Living, on Health and Longevity, with a particular reference to the trades and manufactures of Leeds, and suggestions for the removal of many of the agents which produce disease and shorten the duration of life, a pioneering study of occupational and public health in a newly industrialised English city.

## Paleontology

* Henry Witham publishes Observations on fossil vegetables, accompanied by representations of their internal structure, as seen through the microscope in Edinburgh.

## Technology

* April 12 – Broughton Suspension Bridge over the River Irwell in England collapses under marching troops.
* August 29 – Michael Faraday demonstrates electromagnetic induction at the Royal Society of London. Joseph Henry recognises it at about the same time.
* October 28 – Faraday develops the Faraday Wheel, a homopolar generator.
* Joseph Henry invents the electric bell.
* James Meadows Rendel erects the first bascule bridge with a hydraulic mechanism, on the Kingsbridge Estuary in England.
* William Wallace invents the eidograph.

## Institutions

* September 27 – British Association for the Advancement of Science first meets, in York.

## Awards

* Copley Medal: George Biddell Airy
* Wollaston Medal (first award): William Smith

## Births

* January 20 – Edward Routh (died 1907), Canadian-born English mathematician.
* January 26 – Heinrich Anton de Bary (died 1888), German surgeon, botanist, microbiologist and mycologist.
* February 28 – Edward James Stone (died 1897), English astronomer.
* March 3 – George Pullman (died 1897), American inventor.
* May 16 – David E. Hughes (died 1900), British inventor.
* June 13 – James Clerk Maxwell (died 1879), Scottish-born mathematician.
* August 20 – Eduard Suess (died 1914), Austrian geologist.
* October 6 – Richard Dedekind (died 1916), German mathematician.
* October 15 – Isabella Bird (died 1904), English explorer, writer, photographer and naturalist.
* October 21 – Hermann Hellriegel (died 1895), German agricultural chemist, discoverer of the mechanism by which leguminous plants assimilate the free nitrogen of the atmosphere.
* October 29 – Othniel Charles Marsh (died 1899), American paleontologist.

## Deaths

* February 14 – Henry Maudslay (born 1771), English mechanical engineer.
* March 26 - Pierre Amable Jean-Baptiste Trannoy (born 1772), French physician, hygienist and botanist.
* June 27 – Sophie Germain (born 1776), French mathematician.
* October 14 – Jean-Louis Pons (born 1761, French astronomer.
* December 22 – François Huber (born 1750), blind Swiss naturalist.