1873 | Science
Science
"Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism" by James Clerk Maxwell, now 42, describes properties of the electromagnetic field and gives equations that provide a basis for the electromagnetic theory of light (see 1865; Lorentz, 1875; Hertz, 1887; Feynman, 1944).
Honesdale, Pennsylvania-born physicist Henry Augustus Rowland, 24, at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, discovers the magnetic effect of electric convection.
The thermos bottle has its beginnings in the Dewar vessel invented by Scottish chemist James Dewar, 31, who will invent the thermos flask in 1892.
German chemist Johannes (Adolph) Wislicenus, 38, discovers that two compounds may have the same chemical formula but exhibit different characteristics, a phenomenon (isomerism) that he attributes to the different molecular structure or arrangement of atoms of the two compounds (see Pasteur, 1848; La Bel, 1874).
Geologist Adam Sedgwick dies at Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, January 27 at age 87 (the university will open a museum in 1903 as a memorial to him and his work); pioneer hydrographer Matthew F. Maury dies at Lexington, Kentucky, February 1 at 67, having defected to the Confederacy in 1861, experimented with electric mines, and spent the last 4 years as professor of meteorology at the Virginia Military Institute; chemist Justus von Liebig dies at Munich April 18 at age 69; naturalist Louis Agassiz at Cambridge, Massachusetts, December 12 at age 66. He has opposed Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, believing that all the world's flora and fauna were divinely created, and favored a teleological interpretation of evolution.