1864 in science

Astronomy

• August 29 – William Huggins is the first to take the spectrum of a planetary nebula when he analyzes NGC 6543.

  Botany

• English botanist Richard Spruce completes a 15-year expedition to the Andes and Amazon Basin during which he has collected more than 30,000 plant specimens.

  Chemistry

• August 20 – John Alexander Reina Newlands produces the first periodic table of the elements.
• Lothar Meyer develops an early version of the periodic table, with 28 elements organized by valence.
• Cato Maximilian Guldberg and Peter Waage, building on Claude Louis Berthollet's ideas, propose the law of mass action.
• Barbituric acid was first synthesized on November 27, 1864, by German chemist Adolf von Baeyer.

  Conservation

• June 30 – The Yosemite Grant is created in the United States.

  Mathematics

• Alfred Enneper publishes his parametrization of the Enneper surface in connection with minimal surface theory.

  Physics

• December 8 – James Clerk Maxwell presents his paper A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field to the Royal Society in London, treating light as an electromagnetic wave and presenting Maxwell's equations.

  Technology

• February 17 – In the American Civil War, the tiny Confederate hand-propelled submarine H. L. Hunley sinks the USS Housatonic using a spar torpedo in Charleston Harbor, becoming the first submarine to sink an enemy ship.
• December 8 – The Clifton Suspension Bridge across the Bristol Avon in England, designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel and completed as a memorial to him, opens to traffic.
• Oriel Chambers, Liverpool, England, the world's first metal-framed glass curtain walled building, designed by Peter Ellis, is built.
• Henry Roscoe and Robert Bunsen carry out what is reputed to be the first flashlight photography, using magnesium as a light source.
• Possible date – Siegfried Marcus builds the first motorized cart, in Vienna.

  Zoology

• The species Homo neanderthalensis is formally described by William King.
• The Central Park Zoo opens in New York City as a menagerie.

  Awards

• Copley Medal: Charles Darwin
• Wollaston Medal for Geology: Roderick Murchison

  Births

• January – George Washington Carver, African American agricultural botanist.
• January 13 – Wilhelm Wien, German physicist.
• March 12 – W. H. R. Rivers, English psychiatrist.
• April 21 – Max Weber, German sociologist.
• June 14 – Alois Alzheimer, German neuroscientist.
• June 25 – Walther Nernst, German chemist.
• June 22 – Hermann Minkowski, Lithuanian-German mathematician.
• December 1 – Carsten Borchgrevink, Norwegian Antarctic explorer.

  Deaths

• January 14 – Father Nicholas Callan, physicist.
• March 21 – Luke Howard, meteorologist and manufacturing chemist.
• May 3 – William Lobb, plant collector.
• May 5 - Elizabeth Andrew Warren, Cornish botanist and marine algolologist.
• November 23 – Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Struve, astronomer.
• December 8 – George Boole, mathematician.
• December 12 – John Fowler, agricultural engineer.