1883 in science

Chemistry

• Svante Arrhenius develops ion theory to explain conductivity in electrolytes.
• The Claus process is first patented by German chemist Carl Friedrich Claus.
• The Schotten–Baumann reaction is first described by chemists Carl Schotten and Eugen Baumann.

  Earth sciences

• August 26 – Krakatoa begins its final phase of eruptions at 1:06pm local time. These produce a number of tsunami, mainly in the early hours of the next day, which result in about 36,000 deaths on the islands of Sumatra and Java. The final explosion at 10:02am on August 27 destroys the island of Krakatoa itself and is heard up to 3000 miles away.
• Vasily Dokuchaev publishes Russian Chernozem.

  Genetics

• The concept and term Eugenics are formulated by Francis Galton.

  Medicine

• Thomas Clouston publishes Clinical Lectures on Mental Diseases.
• Emil Kraepelin publishes Compendium der Psychiatrie.
• Journal of the American Medical Association first published under this title.

  Microbiology

• Robert Koch isolates Vibrio cholerae, the cholera bacillus.

  Physics

• Osborne Reynolds popularizes use of the Reynolds number in fluid mechanics.

  Technology

• May 24 – Brooklyn Bridge opens to traffic in New York. Designed by John A. Roebling with project management assisted by his wife Emily, its main suspension span of exceeds the previous record by, and will not be surpassed for twenty years.
• Charles Fritts constructs the first solar cell using the semiconductor selenium on a thin layer of gold to form a device giving less than 1% efficiency.

  Zoology

• August 12 – The last quagga dies at the Artis Magistra zoo in Amsterdam.

  Awards

• Copley Medal: William Thomson, Lord Kelvin
• Wollaston Medal for Geology: William Thomas Blanford

  Births

• January 4 – Johanna Westerdijk, Dutch plant pathologist.
• February 10 – Edith Clarke, American electrical engineer, inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame
• May 13 – Georgios Papanikolaou, Greek-born cytopathologist, inventor of the Pap smear.
• June 24 – Victor Francis Hess, American physicist.
• October 2 – Karl von Terzaghi, Austrian "father of soil mechanics".
• October 8 – Otto Heinrich Warburg, German physiologist and winner of the 1931 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

  Deaths

• January 23 – George Miller Beard, American neurologist.
• April 14 – William Farr, English epidemiologist.
• April 28 – Rev. John Russell, English dog breeder.
• May 13 – James Young, Scottish chemist.
• June 18 – John Waterston, Scottish physicist and civil engineer.
• June 26 – General Sir Edward Sabine, Anglo-Irish physicist, astronomer and explorer.
• September 15 – Joseph Plateau, Belgian physicist.
• December 8 – François Lenormant, French assyriologist and numismatist.
• December 13 – John Stringfellow, English pioneer of heavier-than-air flight.