# 1894 in science

The year 1894 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

## Astronomy

* March 21 (23:00 GMT) – Syzygy: Mercury transits the Sun as seen from Venus, and Mercury and Venus both simultaneously transit the Sun as seen from Saturn.

## Biology

* Patrick Manson develops the thesis that malaria is spread by mosquitoes.
* Jean Pierre Mégnin publishes La faune des cadavres application de l'entomologie à la médecine légale in Paris, an important text in forensic entomology.
* Alexandre Yersin and Kitasato Shibasaburō independently identify the bacterium later called Yersinia pestis in the 1894 Hong Kong plague.

## Chemistry

* Argon identified by Lord Rayleigh and Sir William Ramsay.
* Viscose, a form of artificial silk or rayon, is patented by Charles Frederick Cross with Edward John Bevan and Clayton Beadle.

## Physiology and medicine

* Otto Binswanger describes what will become known as Binswanger's disease.

## Psychology

* Psychological Review established in the United States by James Mark Baldwin and James McKeen Cattell.

## Technology

* August 13 – The first Allan truss bridge, designed by Percy Allan, is completed in New South Wales.
* August 14 – Oliver Lodge demonstrates "Hertzian waves" i.e. radio transmission (of Morse code) in the University of Oxford from the Clarendon Laboratory to the University Museum (200 ft; 61 m) for the British Association for the Advancement of Science using a modified Branly coherer.
* November 6 – William C. Hooker of Abingdon, Illinois is granted a United States patent for a spring-loaded mousetrap.
* Construction of the first oil-engined rail locomotive, an experimental unit designed by William Dent Priestman and built by his company, Priestman Brothers of Hull, England.
* John Joly of Dublin devises the Joly colour screen, an additive colour photographic process for producing images from a single photographic plate.
* Astronomical photographer Julius Scheiner devises a film speed measurement system.

## Awards

* Copley Medal: Edward Frankland
* Wollaston Medal for Geology: Karl von Zittel

## Births

* January 1 – S. N. Bose (died 1974), Indian physicist.
* January 13 – Dorothée Pullinger (died 1986), French-born British production engineer.
* February 11 – Izaak Kolthoff (died 1993), Dutch 'father of analytical chemistry'.
* February 16 – Constance Tipper, née Elam (died 1995), English metallurgist.
* April 29 – Marietta Blau (died 1970), Austrian physicist.
* May 5 – August Dvorak (died 1975), American educational psychologist.
* June 13 – Leo Kanner (died 1981), Austrian-born clinical child psychiatrist.
* June 14 – W. W. E. Ross (died 1966), Canadian geophysicist and poet.
* June 23 – Alfred Kinsey (died 1956), American biologist, professor of entomology and zoology, and sexologist, founder of the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University (Bloomington) in 1947.
* July 8 – Pyotr Kapitsa (died 1984), Russian physicist, Nobel Prize laureate.
* July 17 – Georges Lemaître (died 1966), Belgian physicist.
* August 2 – Bertha Lutz (died 1976), Brazilian herpetologist and women's rights campaigner.
* November 19 – Heinz Hopf (died 1971), German mathematician.

## Deaths

* January 1 – Heinrich Hertz (born 1857), German physicist.
* February 3 – Edmond Frémy (born 1814), French chemist.
* March 29 – Georges Pouchet (born 1833), French comparative anatomist.
* April 2 – Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard (born 1817), Mauritian-born physiologist and neurologist.
* April 9 – Arthur Hill Hassall (born 1817), English physician, microbiologist and chemical analyst.
* April 27 – Birdsill Holly (born 1820), American hydraulic engineer.
* November 26 – Pafnuty Chebyshev (born 1821), Russian mathematician.
* October 7 – Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (born 1809), American physician and writer.
* September 8 – Hermann von Helmholtz (born 1821), German physicist.