1882 in science

• September – Great Comet of 1882 sighted. • December 6 – Transit of Venus, 1882. as seen from Cape Town by David Gill ==Biology==

• March 24 – Robert Koch announces his discovery of the bacterium responsible for tuberculosis, Mycobacterium tuberculosis. • Élie Metchnikoff discovers phagocytosis. ==Chemistry==

• Italian physicist Luigi Palmieri detects helium on Earth for the first time through its D3 spectral line when he analyzes the lava of Mount Vesuvius. ==Earth sciences==

• Clarence Dutton's Tertiary History of the Grand Cañon District is published by the United States Geological Survey. ==Mathematics==

• June – German mathematician Ferdinand von Lindemann publishes proof that is a transcendental number and that squaring the circle is consequently impossible. • December – Swedish mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler establishes the journal Acta Mathematica. • Felix Klein first describes the Klein bottle. ==Medicine==

• March 28 – Paul Beiersdorf patents an adhesive bandage in Germany, the foundation of the Beiersdorf company. • Vladimir Bekhterev publishes Provodiashchie puti mozga ("The Conduction Paths in the Brain and Spinal Cord"), beginning to note the role of the hippocampus in memory. ==Technology==

• January 12 – Holborn Viaduct power station in the City of London, the world's first coal-fired public electricity generating station, begins operation. • By March – Étienne-Jules Marey invents a chronophotographic gun capable of photographing 12 consecutive frames per second on the same plate. • April 29 – Werner von Siemens demonstrates his Electromote, the first form of trolleybus, in Berlin. • June 6 – Henry W. Seeley patents the electric clothes iron in the United States. • September 4 – Thomas Edison starts the United States' first commercial electrical power plant, lighting one square mile of lower Manhattan. • English mechanical engineer James Atkinson invents his "Differential Engine". • American electrical engineer Schuyler Wheeler produces an electric fan. • Alfred P. Southwick publishes his proposals for use of the electric chair as an execution method in the United States. • Nikola Tesla claims this is when he conceives the rotating magnetic field principle, which he later uses to invent his induction motor. ==Events==

• First International Polar Year, an international scientific program, begins. • The Chartered Institute of Patent Agents, the modern-day Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys, is founded in the United Kingdom. ==Awards==

• Copley Medal: Arthur Cayley • Wollaston Medal for Geology: Franz Ritter von Hauer ==Births==

• March 14 – Wacław Sierpiński (died 1969), Polish mathematician. • March 23 – Emmy Noether (died 1935), German mathematician. • March 30 – Melanie Klein (died 1960), Viennese-born psychoanalyst. • April 27 – Harry Allan (died 1957), New Zealand botanist. • June 17 – Harold Gillies (died 1960), New Zealand-born plastic surgeon. • July 12 – Traian Lalescu (died 1929), Romanian mathematician. • July 21 – Herbert E. Ives (died 1953), American optical engineer. • September 30 – Hans Geiger (died 1945), German inventor of the Geiger counter. • October 5 – Robert Goddard (died 1945), American rocket scientist. • October 26 – Marietta Pallis (died 1963), Indian-born Graeco-British ecologist. • November 18 – Frances Gertrude McGill (died 1959), pioneering Canadian forensic pathologist. • December 11 – Max Born (died 1970), German physicist and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1954. • December 28 – Arthur Eddington (died 1944), English astrophysicist. • Israel Aharoni (died 1946), Belarusian-born Jewish zoologist. ==Deaths==

• January 11 – Theodor Schwann (born 1810), German physiologist. • April 19 – Charles Darwin (born 1809), English naturalist and geologist. • August 24 – John Dillwyn Llewelyn (born 1810), Welsh botanist and photographer. • September 23 – Friedrich Wöhler (born 1800), German chemist. • October 27 – Christian Heinrich von Nagel (born 1803), German geometer. • November 20 – Henry Draper (born 1837), doctor, American astronomer. • December 24 • Johann Benedict Listing (born 1808), German mathematician. • Charles Vincent Walker (born 1812), English telegraph engineer. ==References==