The year 1789 in science and technology involved some significant events.

Anatomy

Antonio Scarpa publishes Anatomicæ disquisitiones de auditu et olfactu, a classic treatise on the hearing and olfactory organs.[1]

Astronomy

28 Augus & September 17 - William Herschel discovers Saturn's moons Enceladus and Mimas, which he describes to the Royal Society of London on November 12.[2]

Botany

Erasmus Darwin publishes his poem The Loves of the Plants, a popular rendering of Linnaeus' works.
Antoine Laurent de Jussieu publishes Genera Plantarum: secundum ordines naturales disposita, juxta methodum in Horto regio parisiensi exaratam, anno M.DCC.LXXIV, providing a basis for the system of natural classification of flowering plants largely still in use.[3]

Chemistry

Antoine Lavoisier's Traité élémentaire de chimie presents a unified view of new theories of chemistry, containing a clear statement of the law of conservation of mass, defining the nature of elements and denying the existence of phlogiston.

Exploration

July 10 - Alexander Mackenzie reaches the Mackenzie River Delta.

Mathematics

The Slovene mathematician Jurij Vega presents his approximation of π to 140 decimal places of which the first 126 are correct,[4] a feat not exceeded for more than half a century.

Medicine

February 4 - James Parkinson gives the first description of human injury from lightning strikes, in a paper read to the Medical Society of London.
Andrew Duncan delivers the first lectures on forensic medicine in Britain, at the University of Edinburgh.[5]

Awards

Copley Medal: William Morgan.

Births

February 26 - Eaton Hodgkinson, English structural engineer (d. 1861)
August 21 - Augustin Louis Cauchy, French mathematician (d. 1857)
September 28 - Richard Bright, English physician (d. 1858)
October 25 - Heinrich Schwabe, German astronomer (d. 1875)

4 July 1789 Birth of Fearon Fallows in Cockermouth, Cumbria , England

Deaths

April 7 - Petrus Camper, Dutch comparative anatomist (b. 1722)
May 25 - Anders Dahl, Swedish botanist for whom the dahlia is named (b. 1751)
undated - Angélique du Coudray, French pioneer of modern midwifery (b. 1712)

References

^ Richardson, Benjamin Ward (1886). "Antonio Scarpa, F.R.S., and Surgical Anatomy". The Asclepiad (London: Longmans, Green and Co.) 4 (16): 128–157. Retrieved 2008-06-10.
^ Herschel, William (1 January 1790). "Account of the Discovery of a Sixth and Seventh Satellite of the Planet Saturn; with Remarks on the Construction of its Ring, its Atmosphere, its Rotation on an Axis, and its spheroidical Figure". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (London) 80: 1–20. doi:10.1098/rstl.1790.0001. Retrieved 2011-11-23.
^ This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "De Jussieu". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
^ Vega, Géorge (1789-08-20). "Détermination de la Demi-Circonférence d'un Cercle". Nova Acta Academiae Scientiarum Imperialis Petropolitanae (Saint Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Arts and Sciences) 9. Retrieved 2012-01-06.
^ Forbes, Thomas Rogers (1985). Surgeons at the Bailey: English Forensic Medicine to 1878. New Haven: Yale University Press. p. 7. ISBN 0-300-03338-9.

Antoine Lavoisier publishes Traité élémentaire de chimi (Elements of Chemistry), the first modern chemistry textbook. It is a complete survey of (at that time) modern chemistry, including the first concise definition of the law of conservation of mass, and thus also represents the founding of the discipline of stoichiometry or quantitative chemical analysis.

Genera Plantarum by Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu

Discovery of Zirconium (Martin Heinrich Klaproth) and Uranium4 July 1789 Birth of Fearon Fallows in Cockermouth, Cumbria , England