1758 in science

The year 1758 in science and technology involved some significant events.

AstronomyEdit

December 25 – Halley's Comet is sighted by Johann Georg Palitzsch, confirming Edmund Halley's 1705 prediction of its periodicity.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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John Champion patents a process for calcining zinc sulphide into an oxide usable in the retort process.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

French midife Angélique du Coudray demonstrates the first obstetric mannequin.
Scottish physician Francis Home makes the first attempt to deliver a measles vaccine.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Ruđer Bošković publishes his atomic theory in Philosophiæ naturalis theoria redacta ad unicam legem virium in natura existentium ("Theory of natural philosophy reduced to one law of the forces existing in nature").<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
John Dolland presents his "Account of some experiments concerning the different refrangibility of light" (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (London)) describing the discovery of a means of constructing doublet achromatic lenses by the combination of crown and flint glasses, reducing chromatic aberration.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

January 1 – Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus (Carl von Linné) publishes in Stockholm the first volume (Animalia) of the 10th edition of Systema Naturae, the starting point of modern zoological nomenclature, introducing binomial nomenclature for animals to his established system of Linnaean taxonomy.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Among the first examples of his system of identifying an organism by genus and then species, Linnaeus identifies the lamprey with the name Petromyzon marinus.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> He introduces the term Homo sapiens. (Date of January 1 assigned retrospectively.)<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

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