1855 in science

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The year 1855 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Biology

• Robert Remak publishes Untersuchungen über die Entwickelung der Wirbelthiere in Berlin, providing evidence for cell division, which is supported (but not acknowledged) by Rudolf Virchow.

Cartography

• September – Rev. James Patterson presents the Gall orthographic projection for celestial and terrestrial equal-area cartography.

Chemistry

• May 10 – The Bunsen burner is invented by Robert Wilhelm Bunsen.
• Friedrich Gaedcke first isolates the cocaine alkaloid, which he names "erythroxyline".
• William Odling proposes that carbon is tetravalent.
• Charles-Adolphe Wurtz publishes the Wurtz reaction.
• Benjamin Silliman, Jr. pioneers methods of petroleum cracking, which makes the entire modern petrochemical industry possible.

Exploration

• November 17 – Dr David Livingstone becomes the first European to see the Victoria Falls.

Medicine

• March – Mary Seacole opens the British Hotel at Balaklava, a nursing and convalescent establishment for Crimean War officers.
• October – The Renkioi temporary hospital, prefabricated in wood to a design by I. K. Brunel, is erected in Turkey to serve Crimean War invalids.
• Thomas Addison describes Addison's disease in On the Constitutional and Local Effects of Disease of the Suprarenal Capsules.

Paleontology

• The first archaeopteryx fossil is found in Bavaria, but will not be identified until 1970.

Physics

• James Clerk Maxwell unifies electricity and magnetism into a single theory, classical electromagnetism, thereby showing that light is an electromagnetic wave.
• Heinrich Geißler designs a mercury pump capable of producing a significant vacuum.

Technology

• October 17 – Henry Bessemer files his patent for the Bessemer process of steelmaking.
• William Armstrong produces the rifled breech-loading Armstrong Gun.

Institutions

• Opening of Eidgenössische Polytechnische Schule in Zurich, Switzerland.

Publications

• Matthew Fontaine Maury publishes The Physical Geography of the Sea.

Awards

• Copley Medal: Léon Foucault
• Wollaston Medal for Geology: Henry De la Beche

Births

• January 5 – King Camp Gillette (died 1932), inventor.
• January 21 – John Moses Browning (died 1926), inventor.
• January 28 – William Seward Burroughs (died 1898), inventor of the adding machine.
• March 13 – Percival Lowell (died 1916), astronomer.
• May 29 – David Bruce (died 1931), microbiologist.
• November 5 – Léon Teisserenc de Bort (died 1913), meteorologist.
• November 7 – Edwin Hall (died 1938), American physicist who discovered the "Hall effect".

Deaths

• February 23 – Carl Friedrich Gauss (born 1777), mathematician.
• March 20 – Joseph Aspdin (born 1778), inventor.
• April 13 – Henry De la Beche (born 1796), geologist.
• June 29 – John Gorrie (born 1803), physician and inventor.
• July 6 – Andrew Crosse (born 1784), 'gentleman scientist', pioneer experimenter in electricity.
• July 8 – William Edward Parry (born 1790), Arctic explorer.
• October 7 – François Magendie (born 1783), physiologist.
• December 6 – William John Swainson (born 1789), naturalist.