| 1800 – |
Volta invents the battery |
| 1800 – |
Jacquard Loom |
| 1800 – |
Lamark publishes a theory of evolution. |
| 1800 – |
Erasmus Darwin publishes Phytologia declaring that leaves breathe air through tiny pores, sugar and starch are the products of plant "digestion," and nitrates and phosphorus promote vegetation. |
| 1800 – |
Ampere discovered properties of magnetic field produced by electric current. |
| 1801 – |
British engineer William Symington developed a practical steamboat for towing barges on the Forth and Clyde Canal in Scotland. In 1807, the American inventor Robert Fulton successfully demonstrated his steamboat by making a run between New York City and Albany on the Hudson River. |
| 1802 – |
Gas began to be used in London in 1802 to light street lamps. (Also see 1792.) |
| 1802 – |
In Natural Theology, William Paley uses the analogy of a watch requiring a watchmaker to argue that the universe implies an intelligent designer. |
| 1802 – |
Humphrey Davy demonstrates that metal strips can be heated to incandescence by passing a strong electric current through the strips. |
| 1803 – |
Dalton composed the law of definite proportions in chemistry. |
| 1803 – |
Dalton composed the law of definite proportions in chemistry. |
| 1803 – |
U.S. President Thomas Jefferson appoints Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the uncharted West. Among the marvels Lewis and Clark are expected to find are erupting volcanoes, mountains of salt, unicorns, mastodons and seven-foot-tall beavers. |
| 1803 – |
William Murdock lights his main factory with coal gas. This is the first building to be routinely lit in this way. |
| 1804 – |
Georges Cuvier suggests that fossils found in the area around Paris are "thousands of centuries" old. His observations pushes the age of the Earth well beyond its commonly accepted limits. Cuvier also notes that the fossils he has studied bear no resemblance to anything still living, an unambiguous endorsement of the theory of extinction. |
| 1804 – |
Rockets developed by the British Army Corp reached height of 1830 m. |
| 1804 – |
Frederick Albert Winsor patents an oven for the manufacture of coal gas. |
| 1804 – |
Richard Trevithick develops a steam locomotive that runs on iron rails. |
| 1806 – |
Frederick Winsor forms the world's first coal-gas lighting company. It is initially called the National Light and Heat Company but changes its name later to the Gas Light and Coke Company. |
| 1807 – |
Fulton invented the steamboat |
| 1807 – |
The Geological Society of London becomes the first scientific society devoted to the science of geology. |
| 1807 – |
The first European to visit the Yellowstone area, John Colter, probably encounters hot springs, leading to the designation "Colter's Hell". Also in 1807, settlers founded the city of Hot Springs, Arkansas, where, in 1830, As a Thompson charged one dollar each for the use of three spring-fed baths in a wooden tub, and the first known commercial use of geothermal energy occurred. |
| 1808 – |
Dalton published a periodic table based on atomic weights |
| 1808 – |
Anthracite coal was burned experimentally on an open grate by Judge Jesse Fell in his Wilkes-Barre, Penn. home. At that time, much of the populace in the U.S. regarded this type of coal as valueless. |
| 1808 – |
George Cayley builds a glider and becomes the first person to fly in a heavier-than-air machine. |
| 1809 – |
Humphrey Davy uses a high-powered battery to induce a bright light between two strips of charcoal 10 c, (4 in.) apart, creating the first arc light. |
| 1809 – |
Jean-Baptiste de Monet de Lamarck publishes Philosophie Zoologique proposing that animals can acquire new characteristics during their lives and pass those characteristics on to their offspring, an idea for which he is openly ridiculed by Georges Cuvier. |
| 1811 – |
Avogadro introduced the concept of the mole |
| 1812 – |
Georges Cuvier completes "Recherches sur les ossements fossiles des quadrupedes" in four volumes. He identifies the first known pterodactyl and identifies pterosaurs as flying reptiles. His conclusions were largely ignored for many years. |
| 1813 (March) – |
David Melville received a patent for his apparatus for making coal gas. Coal gas was used for street lighting. |
| 1814 (0ctober) – |
The first American steam-powered warship, "Demologos," was launched in New York Harbour. Designed and built by Robert Fulton, the ship was officially christened "Fulton the First." |
| 1814 (0ctober) – |
Stephenson invented the locomotive engine |
| 1816 – |
Robert Stirling of Scotland invents a power cycle that operates without a high-pressure boiler. In his engine (patented in 1816), air was heated by external combustion through a heat exchanger and then was displaced, compressed and expanded by two pistons. A successful Stirling engine was built for factory use in 1843. |
| 1817 (February) – |
Baltimore, Md. became the first city in the U.S. to establish a gas company. Gas Light Company of Baltimore was organized to provide coal gas for lighting city streets. This was the first use of coal gas as an energy source in the United States. |
| 1818 – |
Physician William Wells hypothesizes about selection and human evolution. Charles Darwin will later acknowledge Wells as someone who anticipated the theory of natural selection. |
| 1819 – |
Hans Christian Oersted accidentally discovers that a magnetized needle (or compass point) is deflected by a nearby electric current. His findings are published in 1820. |
| 1820 (May 26) – |
The first American steamboat to cross the Atlantic left Savannah, Ga., bound for Liverpool. The steamboat made the crossing in 25 days, running all but 7 days on steam. |
| 1820 – |
Warren De la Rue encloses a platinum coil in an evacuated glass tube and passes electricity through it in the first recorded attempt to produce an incandescent lamp. |
| 821 – |
Ignatz Venetez is the first to propose that glaciers once covered much of Europe. |
| 1821 – |
Michael Faraday reports his discovery of electromagnetic rotation in the paper "on some new electro-magnetical motions, and other the theory of magnetism." He creates the first two electrical "motors," although his rotating needle is not a real motor because it cannot power anything. |
| 1821 – |
Johann Seebeck observes that two different metals joined at two different places that are kept at two different temperatures will produce an electric current. This is called thermoelectricity and the Seebeck effect will later be used in the development of the semiconductor. |
| 1822 – |
Champollion translated the Rosetta Stone |
| 1824 – |
Daguerrotype Photography |
| 1825 – |
Discovery of Ampere's Force Law |
| 1827 – |
Brown discovered Brownian motion |
| 1830 – |
The first railroad (between Liverpool and Manchester, England) |
| 1831 – |
Faraday (England) and Henry (U.S.) independently discovered that a current is produced in a wire when it is moved near a magnet. |
