The year 1860 in
science and
technology involved some significant events, listed below.
Astronomy
July 18 – Total
solar eclipse.
Warren De La Rue's photographs of this event, taken in
Spain, together with those of
Angelo Secchi, demonstrate the solar character of the prominences or red flames seen around the limb of the Moon during such an eclipse.[1]
John Curtis publishes Farm Insects, being the natural history and economy of the insects injurious to the field crops of Great Britain and Ireland... with suggestions for their destruction in Glasgow.
Botany
Joseph Dalton Hooker concludes publication of The Botany of the Antarctic Voyage of H.M. Discovery Ships Erebus and Terror ... 1839–1843 with issue of the final part of Flora Tasmaniae in
London.[2]
Chemistry
September 3–5 –
Karlsruhe Congress, the first international meeting of chemists.
Stanislao Cannizzaro, resurrecting Avogadro's ideas regarding diatomic molecules, compiles a table of
atomic weights and presents it at the 1860
Karlsruhe Congress, ending decades of conflicting atomic weights and molecular formulas, and leading to Mendeleev's discovery of the periodic law.[4]
Edward Samuel Ritchie, considered to be the most innovative instrument maker in nineteenth-century America, receives a U.S. patent for the first successful and practicable liquid-filled marine
compass suitable for general use.