Overview of the events of 1883 in science
The year 1883 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.
Chemistry
Earth sciences
- August 26 – Krakatoa begins its final phase of eruptions at 1:06pm local time. These produce a number of tsunami, mainly in the early hours of the next day, which result in about 36,000 deaths on the islands of Sumatra and Java. The final explosion at 10:02am on August 27 destroys the island of Krakatoa itself and is heard up to 3000 miles away.
- Vasily Dokuchaev publishes Russian Chernozem.
Genetics
Medicine
Microbiology
Physics
Technology
Zoology
Awards
Births
- January 4 – Johanna Westerdijk (died 1961), Dutch plant pathologist.
- February 10 – Edith Clarke (died 1959), American electrical engineer, inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
- May 5 – Anna Johnson Pell Wheeler (died 1966), American mathematician.
- May 13 – Georgios Papanikolaou (died 1962), Greek-born cytopathologist, inventor of the Pap smear.
- June 24 – Victor Francis Hess (died 1964), American physicist.
- July 15 – Orii Hyōjirō (died 1970), Japanese animal specimen collector.
- August 6 – Constance Georgina Adams (died 1968), South African botanist.
- October 2 – Karl von Terzaghi (died 1963), Austrian "father of soil mechanics".
- October 8 – Otto Heinrich Warburg (died 1970), German physiologist, winner of the 1931 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Deaths
- January 23 – George Miller Beard (born 1839), American neurologist.
- April 10 - Maurice Krishaber (born 1836), naturalised French Hungarian otorhinolaryngologist.
- April 14 – William Farr (born 1807), English epidemiologist.
- April 28 – Rev. John Russell (born 1795), English dog breeder.
- May 13 – James Young (born 1811), Scottish chemist.
- June 18 – John Waterston (born 1811), Scottish physicist and civil engineer (drowned).
- June 26 – General Sir Edward Sabine (born 1788), Anglo-Irish physicist, astronomer and explorer.
- September 15 – Joseph Plateau (born 1801), Belgian physicist.
- December 8 – François Lenormant (born 1837), French assyriologist and numismatist.
- December 13 – John Stringfellow (born 1799), English pioneer of heavier-than-air flight.