1891 in science

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The year 1891 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Biology

• The New Zealand government sets aside Resolution Island in Fiordland as a nature reserve.
• The New York Botanical Garden is founded in The Bronx largely due to the efforts of Nathaniel Lord Britton.
• Jane Willis Kirkaldy and Catherine Pollard become the first women to sit final examinations in biology at the University of Oxford (and achieve first class honours).

Chemistry

• Agnes Pockels first publishes the results of her researches into surface tension.

Environment

• The Japan Meteorological Agency begins taking records of the global average temperature.

Mathematics

• Fyodorov–Schoenflies theorem concluded by Yevgraf Fyodorov and Arthur Schoenflies from their work on crystallographic groups.

Medicine

• Julius Ludwig August Koch begins publication of Die psychopathischen Minderwertigkeiten in Ravensburg, introducing the concept of psychopathology.
• Arnold Pick first uses the term dementia praecox in this form.
• The earliest recorded attempt at hip replacement is carried out by Themistocles Gluck in Berlin, using ivory to replace the femoral head.

Paleontology

• October – Eugène Dubois finds the first fragmentary bones of Pithecanthropus erectus (later redesignated Homo erectus), or 'Java Man', at Trinil on the Solo River.

Technology

• March 10 – Almon B. Strowger, an undertaker in Topeka, Kansas, is granted a patent in the United States for an automatic telephone exchange using the Strowger switch.
• March 15 – Jesse W. Reno patents the first escalator at Coney Beach in the United States.
• May 20 – First public demonstration of the Kinetograph moving picture system developed by W. K. L. Dickson under the direction of Thomas Alva Edison, a showing of the film known as Dickson Greeting. Edison files patents on the camera and peephole viewer on August 24.
• Michelin patent the removable pneumatic bicycle tire.
• Panhard et Levassor produce the first Système Panhard automobile layout, consisting of four wheels with front-engine, rear-wheel drive and a sliding-gear transmission, designed by Émile Levassor.
• William Le Baron Jenney develops the construction of steel frame skyscrapers in Chicago with the Ludington, Manhattan and Second Leiter Buildings.

Awards

• Copley Medal: Stanislao Cannizzaro
• Wollaston Medal for Geology: John Wesley Judd

Births

• July 5 – John Howard Northrop (suicide 1987), American biochemist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1946)
• September 14 – Ivan Matveyevich Vinogradov (died 1983), Russian mathematician.
• September 24 – W. F. Friedman (died 1969), Bessarabian-born cryptanalyst.
• October 24 – Ernest Melville DuPorte (died 1981), Caribbean-born Canadian insect morphologist.
• November 14 – Frederick Banting (died 1941), Canadian discoverer of insulin, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1923)

Deaths

• February 10 – Sofia Kovalevskaya (born 1850), mathematician.
• May 11 – Alexandre-Edmond Becquerel (born 1820), physicist.
• June 9 – Henry Edwards (born 1827), entomologist and actor.
• June 23
  • Sir Norman Pogson (born 1829), astronomer.
  • Wilhelm Eduard Weber (born 1804), physicist.
• November 18 – Joseph Wolstenholme (born 1829), mathematician.
• December 21 – William Cavendish, 7th Duke of Devonshire (born 1808), landowner and promoter of science.