# 1848 in science

The year 1848 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

## Events

* September 20 – The American Association for the Advancement of Science is set up in Pennsylvania by re-formation of the Association of American Geologists and Naturalists, with William Charles Redfield as its first president.

## Astronomy

* September 16 – William Cranch Bond and William Lassell discover Hyperion, Saturn's moon.
* Lord Rosse studies M1 and names it the Crab Nebula.
* Édouard Roche calculates the Roche limit, the limiting radius of tidal destruction and tidal creation for a body held together only by its own gravity, which explains why the rings of Saturn do not condense into a satellite.
* Rudolf Wolf (in Zürich) devises a way of quantifying sunspot activity, the Wolf number.

## Botany

* April 16 – Joseph Dalton Hooker arrives at Darjeeling to begin the first European plant collecting expedition in the Himalayas.

## Chemistry

* Edward Frankland, working in Germany, discovers the organometallic compound diethylzinc.

## Exploration

* Admiral Nevelskoi demonstrates that the Strait of Tartary is a strait.

## Medicine

* September 13 – Vermont railroad worker Phineas Gage survives a 3-foot-plus (1 m) iron rod being driven through his head, providing a demonstration of the effects of damage to the brain's frontal lobe.
* November 1 – The first medical school for women, The Boston Female Medical School, opens in Boston, Massachusetts.
* Alfred Baring Garrod recognises that excess uric acid in the blood is the cause of gout.
* Rudolf Virchow produces a Report on the Typhus Epidemic in Upper Silesia advocating broad social as well as public health measures to counter such outbreaks.

## Physics

* Lord Kelvin establishes concept of absolute zero, the temperature at which all molecular motion ceases.
* Nicholas Callan of Maynooth College invents an improved form of battery.
* Hippolyte Fizeau and John Scott Russell present studies of the Doppler effect in electromagnetic and sound waves respectively.

## Technology

* August 15 – James Warren submits a U.K. patent application for the Warren truss.
* James Bogardus erects the first free-standing cast-iron architectural façade, the Milhau Pharmacy Building in New York City.
* French civil engineer A. Boucher promotes the ribbed ("false") skew arch.
* Completion of palm houses at Kew Gardens, London, and the National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin, by Richard Turner of Dublin.
* Jonathan J. Couch of Philadelphia, PA, invents a "percussion drill" (jackhammer).
* Walter Hunt of New York patents his "Volition" repeating rifle, although it is not practicable at this time.
* Joseph-Louis Lambot constructs the first ferrocement boat, in France.
* Linus Yale Sr., invents the modern pin tumbler lock.
* John Stringfellow flies a steam-powered monoplane model for a short distance in a powered glide in England.

## Awards

* Copley Medal: John Couch Adams
* Wollaston Medal for Geology: William Buckland

## Births

* March 8 – LaMarcus Adna Thompson (died 1919), American inventor.
* April 9 – Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti (died 1930), British-born electrical engineer and inventor
* May 23 – Otto Lilienthal (died 1896), German aviation pioneer.
* June 12 – Albertina Carlsson (died 1930) Swedish zoologist.
* June 22 – William Macewen (died 1924), Scottish surgeon.
* July 7 – Cuthbert Hilton Golding-Bird (died 1939), English surgeon.
* July 27 – Loránd Eötvös (died 1919), Hungarian physicist.
* August 14 – Margaret Lindsay (died 1915), Irish astronomer.
* November 1 – Caroline Still Anderson (died 1919), African American physician, educator and activist.
* November 8 – Gottlob Frege (died 1925), German mathematician.
* November 27 – Henry A. Rowland (died 1901), American physicist.

## Deaths

* January 9 – Caroline Herschel (born 1750), German astronomer.
* January 12 – Christophe-Paulin de La Poix de Fréminville (born 1787), French explorer and naturalist.
* January 24 – Horace Wells, American dentist, pioneer of the use of anesthesia, suicide (born 1815).
* August 7 – Jöns Jakob Berzelius (born 1779), Swedish chemist.
* August 12 – George Stephenson (born 1781), English locomotive engineer.
* December 18 – Bernard Bolzano (born 1781), Bohemian mathematician.