1839 in science

Geology

Roderick Murchison publishes The Silurian System.
December 24 – An enormous landslide occurs at Axmouth in the English county of Devon, creating the Axmouth to Lyme Regis Undercliff. A report by geologists William Daniel Conybeare and William Buckland is one of the earliest scientific descriptions of such an event.^[3]

Technology

January 9 – The French Academy of Sciences announces the Daguerreotype photography process.
January 25 – H. Fox Talbot shows his "photogenic drawings" at the Royal Institution.
February 24 – William Otis receives a patent for the steam shovel.
April 9 – The world's first commercial electric telegraph line comes into operation alongside the Great Western Railway in England.
May 29 – Mungo Ponton presents his discovery of the light-sensitive quality of sodium dichromate as a method of permanent photography.^[4]
November 24 – James Nasmyth makes his first sketch of a steam hammer design.^[5]
Michael Faraday publishes Experimental Researches in Electricity^[6] clarifying the true nature of electricity.
Invention of the Grove fuel cell by William Grove.^[7]
Development of vulcanized rubber by Charles Goodyear.
Development of Babbitt metal by Isaac Babbitt.
Invention of the Polonceau truss for roof construction by Camille Polonceau.^[8]
Claimed invention of the rear-wheel driven bicycle by Kirkpatrick Macmillan in Scotland.^[9]

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January 26 – Rachel Lloyd (d. 1900), American chemist.
January 27 – Marie-Adolphe Carnot (died 1920), French chemist and mining engineer.
February 11
- Josiah Willard Gibbs (died 1903), American theoretical physicist and chemist.
- Almon Strowger (died 1902), American telecommunications engineer.
February 15 – Hieronymus Georg Zeuthen (died 1920), Danish mathematician.
March 8 – Josephine Cochrane (died 1913), American inventor of the first commercially successful dishwasher.
March 16 – Sully Prudhomme (died 1907), French engineer and poet, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
April 4 – James Blyth (died 1906), Scottish electrical engineer.
April 12 – Nikolai Przhevalsky (died 1888), Russian-born Polish explorer.
May 8 – George Miller Beard (died 1883), American neurologist.
July 17 – Ephraim Shay (died 1916), American steam locomotive engineer.
September 10 – Charles Sanders Peirce (died 1914), American philosopher, logician, mathematician and scientist.

Astronomy