1862 in science

Astronomy

• January 31 – Alvan Graham Clark makes the first observation of Sirius B, a white dwarf star, through an eighteen-inch telescope at Northwestern University.

  Biology

• May 15 – Charles Darwin publishes On the various contrivances by which British and foreign Orchids are fertilised by insects, and on the good effects of intercrossing.
• Henry Walter Bates publishes "Contributions to an insect fauna of the Amazon valley. Lepidoptera: Heliconidae" describing Batesian mimicry.
• George Bentham and Joseph Dalton Hooker begin publication of based on the collections of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, England.
• John Gwyn Jeffreys begins publication of British Conchology, or an account of the Mollusca which now inhabit the British Isles and the surrounding seas.

  Chemistry

• Chemist and composer Alexander Borodin describes the first nucleophilic displacement of chlorine by fluorine in benzoyl chloride.
• Mineralogist Alexandre-Emile Béguyer de Chancourtois makes the first proposal to arrange the chemical elements in order of atomic weights, although this is largely ignored by chemists.
• Alexander Parkes exhibits Parkesine, one of the earliest synthetic polymers, at the International Exhibition in London. This discovery forms the foundation of the modern plastics industry.

  Earth sciences

• Friedrich Albert Fallou publishes "Pedologie oder allgemeine und besondere Bodenkunde", founding soil science.

  Medicine

• Maurice Raynaud describes the vasospastic syndrome named after him in his doctoral dissertation.
• Hermann Snellen publishes the Snellen chart for testing visual acuity.

  Technology

• Brown & Sharpe produce the first Universal Milling machine.
• David Kirkaldy publishes Results of an Experimental Inquiry into the Comparative Tensile Strength and other properties of various kinds of Wrought-Iron and Steel in Glasgow describing his pioneering work in tensile testing.

  Awards

• Copley Medal: Thomas Graham
• Wollaston Medal for geology: Robert Godwin-Austen

  Births

• January 23 – David Hilbert, German mathematician
• February 14 – Agnes Pockels, German chemist
• March 14 – Vilhelm Bjerknes, Norwegian physicist and meteorologist
• May 27 – John Edward Campbell, Irish-born mathematician
• June 7 – Philipp Lenard, German physicist
• June 9 – Ernest William Moir, British civil engineer
• July 2 – William Henry Bragg, English winner of the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics
• August 2 – Paul Bujor, Romanian animal morphologist, politician and short story writer
• October 12 – Theodor Boveri, German geneticist
• October 19 – Auguste Lumière, French inventor, film pioneer
• William Hoskins, American inventor

  Deaths

• January 10 – Samuel Colt, American inventor
• February 3 – Jean-Baptiste Biot, French physicist
• February 7 – Prosper Ménière, French physician who first described the symptoms of Ménière's disease
• February 11 – Luther V. Bell, American psychiatric physician
• March 1 – Peter Barlow, English mathematician
• April 3 – Sir James Clark Ross, English explorer of the Polar regions
• May 6 – Olry Terquem, French Jewish geometer
• October 8 – James Walker, Scottish-born civil engineer
• October 21 – Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, 1st Baronet, English physiologist
• December 18 – Lucas Barrett, English naturalist
• December 20 – Robert Knox, Scottish anatomist
• December 21 – Karl Kreil, Austrian astronomer