1750 in science

Astronomy

• Thomas Wright suggests that the Milky Way Galaxy is a disk-shaped system of stars with the solar system near the centre.

  Exploration

• April 1 – Pehr Osbeck sets out on a primarily botanical expedition to China.

  Physics

• January 17 – John Canton reads a paper before the Royal Society on a method of making artificial magnets.
• Approx. date – Leonhard Euler and Daniel Bernoulli develop the Euler–Bernoulli beam equation.

  Technology

• November 18 – Westminster Bridge across the River Thames in London, designed by the Swiss-born engineer Charles Labelye, is officially opened.

  Publications

• Historia Plantarum, originally written by Conrad Gessner between 1555 and 1565.

  Awards

• Copley Medal: George Edwards

  Births

• March 16 – Caroline Herschel, German-born English astronomer
• July 2 – François Huber, Swiss naturalist
• July 5 – Aimé Argand, Swiss physicist and chemist
• September 22 – Christian Konrad Sprengel, German botanist
• October 25 – Marie Le Masson Le Golft, French naturalist
• Aaron Arrowsmith, English cartographer
• Jean Nicolas Fortin, French physicist and instrument maker who invented a portable mercury barometer in 1800

  Deaths

• December 1 – Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr, German mathematician, astronomer, and cartographer