timelinescience - 1701 to 1750

1701 to 1750

Setting the scene

The 18th century is a busy time as science moves forward at remarkable speed. In 1702 the first daily newspaper begins (the Daily Courant in London).

In 1703/4 Isaac Newton is elected president of the Royal Society and sets about restoring it to its former glory.

In 1707 Admiral Sir Claudesley Shovel allows the British fleet to get lost in overcast weather because of the lack of a reliable way to calculate longitude. He thinks they are off Brittany, and has a sailor hung for questioning his calculations and offering some of his own. The fleet runs aground off the Scilly Isles with the loss of 4 ships and 2000 men. In the following years prizes are offered for a solution to problem of longitude.

The South Sea Bubble bursts in 1727 causing financial chaos in the developed world.

1735 sees the beginning of the period of Enlightenment and the start of the Industrial Revolution.

The science

1701	Giacomo Pylanni inoculates three children with smallpox in Constantinople in the hope of preventing more serious smallpox when they are older, thus becoming the first immunologist.
1704	Newton's Opticks combines mathematics and experiments and puts forward the particle theory of light.
1705	Edmund Halley predicts the return in 1758 of a comet which had last appeared in 1682. The comet becomes known as Halley's Comet. Thomas Newcomen invents a steam engine which uses both atmospheric pressure and low-pressure steam to pump water out of mines.
1709	Gabriel David Fahrenheit constructs an alcohol thermometer. Abraham Darby introduces the use of coke for iron smelting at Coalbrockdale, England.
1714	Fahrenheit builds a mercury thermometer, using a scale which is later named after him. The British Parliament offers a prize of £2000 for a solution to the problem of calculating longitude. The French government will offer a similar prize in 1716.
1717	Giovanni Lancisi suggests that malaria can be transmitted by a mosquito. Around this time there is a great debate about the relative merits of Newton's theory of gravitation versus the ideas of the French philosopher Descartes : Newton's theory calls for a universal force of gravitation that acts between all bodies throughout the Universe. Descartes assumes that force canot be transmitted through empty space and that the motion of the heavens is caused by "vortices". Lady Mary Wortley Montagu brings back from Turkey the practice of innoculation - she has her own two children vaccinated against smallpox.
1726	John Harrison constructs a gridiron compensating pendulum clock.
1728	Pierre Fauchard describes how to fill tooth infected with dental caries using tin, lead and gold. A debate about the nature of combustion rages among scientists. Many scientists believe that substances that burn contain "phlogiston", a substance that is released during burning. It is later shown that metals gain weight when they burn in air, which seems to suggest that the phlogiston theory is untrue. Supporters of the theory get around this by putting forward the idea that phlogiston has negative weight - so when a substances gives off phlogiston it gains weight!
1733	Charles François de Cisternay Du Fay discovers 2 types of static electricity, and that like charges repel each other whilst unlike charges attract.
1736	The first distinction is made between sodium and potassium salts.
1738	Daniel Bernoulli produces a theory explaining the relationship between the pressure of a fluid and its velocity.
1741	An animal called Steller's sea is cow discovered living off the coast of Soviet Union. Only 27 years later it has been hunted to extinction.
1742	Anders Celcius invents the Celcius temperature scale. In its original form the scale has 0 degrees for the boiling point of water and 100 degrees for its freezing point.
1743	The Celcius scale is changed by Jean Pierre Christin so that 0 degrees is the freezing point of water and 100 degrees is its boiling point.
1744	Mikhail Vasilievich Lomonosor publishes a paper which contains the first description of heat as a form of motion.
1747	The American scientist Benjamin Franklin carries out much work on electricity, although he will not carry out his famous kite experiment for another five years. The French writer Voltaire is influential in spreading Newton's ideas about gravitation and the movement of celestial bodies. In continental Europe at this time most people still accept the ideas put forward by Descartes. Voltaire lived with Madame du Chatelet who begins translating Newton's Principia during this year, until she dies in childbirth.
1749	The Chinese method of refrigeration is explained by Jean-Jacques d' Ortous de Mairan, who realises that it is based on the cooling effect of evaporation - the principle of the modern refrigerator. Comte de Buffon produces a definition of a species - "a group of organisms capable of breeding and producing fertile offspring". This definition will remain the accepted definition in the 21st century.