1894 in science

Biology

Patrick Manson develops the thesis that malaria is spread by mosquitoes.
Jean Pierre Mégnin publishes La faune des cadavres application de l'entomologie à la médecine légale in Paris, an important text in forensic entomology.^[1]
Alexandre Yersin and Kitasato Shibasaburō independently identify the bacterium later called Yersinia pestis in the 1894 Hong Kong plague.^[2]^[3]

August 13 – The first Allan truss bridge, designed by Percy Allan, is completed in New South Wales.^[6]
August 14 – Oliver Lodge demonstrates "Hertzian waves" i.e. radio transmission (of Morse code) in the University of Oxford from the Clarendon Laboratory to the University Museum (200 ft; 61 m) for the British Association for the Advancement of Science^[7] using a modified Branly coherer.
November 6 – William C. Hooker of Abingdon, Illinois is granted a United States patent for a spring-loaded mousetrap.^[8]
Construction of the first oil-engined rail locomotive, an experimental unit designed by William Dent Priestman and built by his company, Priestman Brothers of Hull, England.^[9]
John Joly of Dublin devises the Joly colour screen, an additive colour photographic process for producing images from a single photographic plate.^[10]
Astronomical photographer Julius Scheiner devises a film speed measurement system.

January 1 – S. N. Bose (died 1974), Indian physicist.
January 13 – Dorothée Pullinger (died 1986), French-born British production engineer.
February 11 – Izaak Kolthoff (died 1993), Dutch 'father of analytical chemistry'.
February 16 – Constance Tipper, née Elam (died 1995), English metallurgist.
April 29 – Marietta Blau (died 1970), Austrian physicist.^[12]
May 5 – August Dvorak (died 1975), American educational psychologist.
June 13 – Leo Kanner (died 1981), Austrian-born clinical child psychiatrist.
June 14 – W. W. E. Ross (died 1966), Canadian geophysicist and poet.
June 23 – Alfred Kinsey (died 1956), American biologist, professor of entomology and zoology, and sexologist, founder of the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University (Bloomington) in 1947.
July 8 – Pyotr Kapitsa (died 1984), Russian physicist, Nobel Prize laureate.
July 17 – Georges Lemaître (died 1966), Belgian physicist.
August 2 – Bertha Lutz (died 1976), Brazilian herpetologist and women's rights campaigner.
November 19 – Heinz Hopf (died 1971), German mathematician.

Astronomy