The year 1835 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.
Astronomy
August 5 – First sighting of the return of Comet Halley by Father Dominique Dumouchel, director of the Collegio Romano at the Vatican. It is next seen on August 21 by Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Struve at the Dorpat Observatory. John Herschel had been expected to find the comet first, as he was at the time in South Africa with his 20 ft focal length reflector – at this time the world's largest telescope. He finally observes it in October and watches until it reaches perihelion November 16. It reappears in January 1836, and Herschel will be the last person to observe it in May.
August 25 – The first of six articles on discoveries of living creatures on the Moon supposedly made by Herschel and a fictitious companion named Dr. Andrew Grant is published in the New York Sun. This incident is now known as the Great Moon Hoax.
Adolphe Quetelet publishes Sur l'homme et le développement de ses facultés, ou Essai de physique sociale (translated as Treatise on Man), outlining his theory of "social physics" and describing his concept of the "average man" (l'homme moyen) who is characterized by the mean values of measured variables that follow a normal distribution.[4]
French physician Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis publishes his book Recherches sur les effets de la saignée dans quelques maladies inflammatoires et sur l'action de l'émétique et des vésicatoires dans la pneumonie in Paris, in which he analyzes case studies to demonstrate that bloodletting is largely ineffective as a treatment.[8]
Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet publishes his books Sur l'homme et le développement de ses facultés, ou Essai de physique sociale, in which he presents his theory of human variance around the average, with human traits being distributed according to a normal curve.[9]
^Murchison, R. I. (1835). "On the Silurian System of rocks". The London and Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science. 7: 46–52.
^Murchison, R. I.; Sedgwick, A. (1835). "On the Silurian and Cambrian Systems". Report of the Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science: 59–61.
^Crilly, Tony (2007). 50 Mathematical Ideas you really need to know. London: Quercus. p. 141. ISBN978-1-84724-008-8.
^Graves, R. J. (1835). "New observed affection of the thyroid gland in females" (Clinical lectures). London Medical and Surgical Journal (Renshaw) 7: 516–517. Repr. in Medical Classics (1940) 5: 33–36.