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The year 1872 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Chemistry

  • Robert Chesebrough patents Vaseline in the United States
  • Eugen Baumann rediscovers polyvinyl chloride
  • Charles-Adolphe Wurtz discovers the aldol reaction

Conservation

  • March 1 – Yellowstone National Park is established in the United States, the world's first national park

Exploration

  • May 13–September 26 – Benjamin Leigh Smith's 1872 expedition to Jan Mayen and Svalbard
  • December 21 – Challenger expedition: sails from Portsmouth in England on the 4-year scientific expedition that lays the foundation for the science of oceanography

Mathematics

  • Richard Dedekind publishes Stetigkeit und irrationale Zahlen, a theory of irrational numbers
  • Felix Klein produces the Erlangen program on geometries
  • Moritz Kaposi describes Kaposi's sarcoma and the manifestations of systemic lupus erythematosus
  • Ferdinand Monoyer proposes the dioptre as a unit for measuring the optical power of a lens

Physics

  • Ludwig Boltzmann states the Boltzmann equation for the temporal development of distribution functions in phase space, and publishes his H-theorem

Technology

  • April 1 – English hangman William Marwood first uses his technique of the long drop (on uxoricide William Frederick Horry at Lincoln Castle)
  • April 2 – George Brayton obtains a United States patent for a constant pressure internal combustion engine, initially using vaporized gas, and marketed as 'Brayton's Ready Motor'
  • John Hopkinson proposes the group flash system for distinguishing lighthouses
  • Reverend C. M. Ramus of Sussex, England, devises the single-step hydroplane hull

Institutions

  • October 1 – the Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College begins its first academic session
  • The Polytechnic Museum in Moscow is founded

Publications

  • May – the magazine Popular Science is first published in the United States
  • Charles Darwin publishes The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals

Awards

  • Copley Medal: Friedrich Woehler
  • Wollaston Medal for geology: James Dwight Dana

Births

  • April 5 – Samuel Cate Prescott (died 1962), American food scientist and microbiologist
  • April 21 - Charles Gandy (died 1943), French physician.
  • May 6 – Willem de Sitter (died 1934), Dutch mathematician, physicist and astronomer
  • May 21 – Henry E. Warren (died 1957), American inventor
  • May 31 – Charles Greeley Abbot (died 1973), American astrophysicist
  • August 1 – Solomon Carter Fuller (died 1953), Liberian-born psychiatrist
  • September 23 – Marie Depage (died in sinking of the RMS Lusitania 1915), Belgian nurse
  • October 4 – Ernest Fourneau (died 1949), French medicinal chemist

Deaths

  • March 8 &ndash; Priscilla Susan Bury (born 1799), English botanist
  • April 2 – Samuel Morse (born 1791), American inventor
  • May 6 – George Robert Gray (born 1808), English zoologist
  • August 11 – Sir Andrew Smith (born 1797), Scottish-born military surgeon, explorer, ethnologist and zoologist
  • August 22 – Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis (born 1787), French physician
  • November 7 – Alfred Clebsch (born 1833), German mathematician
  • December 6 – Félix Archimède Pouchet (born 1800), French scientist
  • December 24 – William John Macquorn Rankine (born 1820), Scottish physicist
  • Anne Elizabeth Ball (born 1808), Irish psychologist

References