1738 in science

Astronomy

• Pierre Louis Maupertuis publishes Sur la figure de la terre, which confirms Newton's view that the earth is an oblate spheroid slightly flattened at the poles.

  Botany

• Publication of Hortus Cliffortianus, a detailed description by Linnaeus of George Clifford's gardens at Hartekamp, Netherlands, including the raising of exotic plants such as bananas in a greenhouse.

  Mathematics

• Abraham de Moivre publishes the second English edition of his The Doctrine of Chances containing a study of the coefficients in the binomial expansion of.

  Medicine

• February – Great Plague of 1738, an outbreak of bubonic plague, begins to spread from Banat across central Europe.
• Establishment of The Mineral Water Hospital in Bath, England.

  Metallurgy

• William Champion of Bristol patents a process to distill zinc from calamine using charcoal in a smelter.

  Technology

• June 24 – Lewis Paul and John Wyatt obtain a British patent for roller cotton-spinning machinery.
• Jacques de Vaucanson presents the world's first automaton, The Flute Player to the French Academy of Sciences.
• Black Forest clockmaker Franz Ketterer produces one of the earliest cuckoo clocks.

  Awards

• Copley Medal: James Valoue

  Births

• November 15 – William Herschel, German-born astronomer

  Deaths

• June 21 – Charles Townshend, 2nd Viscount Townshend, English agriculturalist
• September 23 – Herman Boerhaave, Dutch physician