1862 in science

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The year 1862 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy

January 31 – Alvan Graham Clark makes the first observation of Sirius B, a white dwarf star, through an eighteen-inch telescope at Northwestern University.

May 15 – Charles Darwin publishes On the various contrivances by which British and foreign Orchids are fertilised by insects, and on the good effects of intercrossing.
Henry Walter Bates publishes "Contributions to an insect fauna of the Amazon valley. Lepidoptera: Heliconidae"^[1] describing Batesian mimicry.
George Bentham and Joseph Dalton Hooker begin publication of Genera plantarum based on the collections of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, England.^[2]
John Gwyn Jeffreys begins publication of British Conchology, or an account of the Mollusca which now inhabit the British Isles and the surrounding seas.

Chemist and composer Alexander Borodin describes the first nucleophilic displacement of chlorine by fluorine in benzoyl chloride.^[3]
Mineralogist Alexandre-Emile Béguyer de Chancourtois makes the first proposal to arrange the chemical elements in order of atomic weights, although this is largely ignored by chemists.^[4]
Alexander Parkes exhibits Parkesine, one of the earliest synthetic polymers, at the International Exhibition in London. This discovery forms the foundation of the modern plastics industry.^[5]

Brown & Sharpe produce the first Universal Milling machine.^[6]
David Kirkaldy publishes Results of an Experimental Inquiry into the Comparative Tensile Strength and other properties of various kinds of Wrought-Iron and Steel in Glasgow describing his pioneering work in tensile testing.

January 23 – David Hilbert (died 1943), German mathematician
February 14 – Agnes Pockels (died 1935), German chemist (in Venice)
June 7 – Philipp Lenard (died 1947), German physicist
July 2 – William Henry Bragg (died 1942), English winner of the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics
July 20 – Paul Bujor (died 1952), Romanian animal morphologist, politician and short story writer
October 12 – Theodor Boveri (died 1915), German geneticist
October 19 – Auguste Lumière (died 1954), French inventor, film pioneer

January 10 – Samuel Colt (born 1814), American inventor
February 3 – Jean-Baptiste Biot (born 1774), French physicist
February 7 – Prosper Ménière (born 1799), French physician who first described the symptoms of Ménière's disease
February 11 – Luther V. Bell (born 1806), American psychiatric physician
March 1 – Peter Barlow (born 1776), English mathematician
April 3 – Sir James Clark Ross (born 1800), English explorer of the Polar regions
May 6 – Olry Terquem (born 1782), French Jewish geometer
October 8 – James Walker (born 1781), Scottish-born civil engineer
October 21 – Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, 1st Baronet (born 1783), English physiologist
December 18 – Lucas Barrett (born 1837), English naturalist (drowned)
December 20 – Robert Knox (born 1791), Scottish anatomist
December 21 – Karl Kreil (born 1798), Austrian astronomer

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