1877 in science

Events

June 19 – Eadweard Muybridge successfully produces a fast-motion sequence of photographs showing a horse in movement, Sallie Gardner at a Gallop, using multiple cameras at Palo Alto, California, demonstrating that a running horse has all four legs lifted off the ground at once. The sequence could be run on a Zoopraxiscope.^[1]

Medicine

October 2 – Berlin urologist Maximilian Nitze and Viennese instrument-maker Josef Leiter introduce the first practical cystourethroscope with an electric light source.^[5]
Adolph Kussmaul first describes dyslexia as "word-blindness".
William Macewen at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary develops the first bone grafts, and also performs knee surgery using a special instrument (Macewen's osteotome), for the treatment of rickets.
Patrick Manson studies animal carriers of infectious diseases.

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Technology

March 28 – Frederick Wolseley is granted his first patent for a sheep shearing machine.
April 30 – French poet Charles Cros describes a method of recording sound, the Paleophone.
June – Emile Berliner files a patent for a "combined telegraph and telephone" incorporating a microphone.^[6]
June 20 – Alexander Graham Bell installs the world's first commercial telephone service in Hamilton, Ontario.
September 4 – Louis Brennan patents the Brennan torpedo.
October – Emile Berliner files a patent for a telephone with induction coils.^[7]
November 4 – Opening of Gustave Eiffel's Maria Pia Bridge carrying the railway across the Douro into Porto, Portugal.
November 29 – Thomas Edison first demonstrates his phonograph sound recording machine.
December 13 – Thomas Edison files a patent for "telephones or speaking-telegraphs" incorporating a microphone.^[8]
Surveyor and inventor George R. Carey of Boston, Massachusetts, creates a selenium telectroscope — a camera that can project a moving image to a distant point, an ancestor of television. Constantin Senlecq of Ardres, France, develops the same idea independently at about the same time.^[9]

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February 2 – Margarete Zuelzer (died 1944), German microbiologist.
February 7 – G. H. Hardy (died 1947), English mathematician.
March 16 – Thomas Wyatt Turner (died 1978), American civil rights activist, biologist and educator; first black person ever to receive a doctorate from Cornell University.
April 5 – Walter Sutton (died 1916), American geneticist and surgeon.
April 24 – José Ingenieros (died 1925), Argentine polymath.
June 14 – Ida Maclean, born Ida Smedley (died 1944), English biochemist.
September 1 – Francis William Aston (died 1945), English chemist, Nobel Prize laureate.
September 2 – Frederick Soddy (died 1956), English physical chemist.
September 11 – James Hopwood Jeans (died 1946), English mathematician.
September 13 – Wilhelm Filchner (died 1957), German explorer.
October 21 – Oswald Avery (died 1955), Canadian American bacteriologist.
October 25 – Henry Norris Russell (died 1957), American astronomer.
November 3 – Rosalie Edge (died 1962), American conservationist.

Events