The year 1773 in science and technology involved some significant events.

Astronomy
Whirlpool Galaxy

October 13 - French astronomer Charles Messier discovers the Whirlpool Galaxy (pictured), an interacting, grand-design spiral galaxy located at a distance of approximately 23 million light-years in the constellation Canes Venatici.
Lagrange presents his work on the secular equation of the Moon to the Académie française, introducing the idea of the potential of a body. He also publishes on the attraction of ellipsoids.

Chemistry

Hilaire Rouelle discovers urea.

Exploration

January 17 - Captain James Cook becomes the first European explorer to cross the Antarctic Circle.

Linguistics

Scottish judge James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, begins publication of Of the Origin and Progress of Language, a contribution to evolutionary ideas of the Enlightenment.

Mathematics

Lagrange considers a functional determinant of order 3, a special case of a Jacobian. He also proves the expression for the volume of a tetrahedron with one of the vertices at the origin as one sixth of the absolute value of the determinant formed by the coordinates of the other three vertices.

Medicine

Medical Society of London founded by John Coakley Lettsom.

Awards

Copley Medal: John Walsh
John Harrison receives the Longitude prize for his invention of the first marine chronometer.[1]

Births

January 29 - Friedrich Mohs, mineralogist (died 1839)
May 19 - Arthur Aikin, chemist, mineralogist (died 1854)
June 13 - Thomas Young, physicist (died 1829)
July 23 - Thomas Brisbane, astronomer (died 1860)
August 23 - Abraham Colles, surgeon (died 1843)
December 21 - Robert Brown, botanist (died 1858)
December 27 - George Cayley, pioneer of heavier-than-air flight (died 1857)

Deaths

July 23 - George Edwards, naturalist (born 1693)

References

^ "Icons, a portrait of England 1750-1800". Archived from the original on 17 August 2007. Retrieved 2007-08-25.