---
title: "Timeline of women in science"
chunk: 4/16
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_women_in_science"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:04:23.558030+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

1808: Anna Sundström began assisting Jacob Berzelius in his laboratory, becoming one of the first Swedish women chemists.
1809: Sabina Baldoncelli earned her university degree in pharmacy but was allowed to work only in the Italian orphanage where she resided.
1815: English archaeologist Lady Hester Stanhope used a medieval Italian manuscript to locate a promising archaeological site in Ashkelon, becoming the first archaeologist to begin an excavation in the Palestinian region. It was one of the earliest examples of the use of textual sources in field archaeology.
1816: French mathematician and physicist Sophie Germain became the first woman to win a prize from the Paris Academy of Sciences for her work on elasticity theory.
1823: English palaeontologist and fossil collector Mary Anning discovered the first complete Plesiosaurus.
1831: Italian botanist Elisabetta Fiorini Mazzanti published her best-known work Specimen Bryologiae Romanae.
1830–1837: Belgian botanist Marie-Anne Libert published her four-volume Plantae cryptogamicae des Ardennes, a collection of 400 species of mosses, ferns, lichen, algae and fungi from the Ardennes region. Her contributions to systemic cryptogamic studies were formally recognized by Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm III, and Libert received a gold medal of merit.
1832: French marine biologist Jeanne Villepreux-Power invented the first glass aquarium, using it to assist in her scientific observations of Argonauta argo.
1833: English phycologists Amelia Griffiths and Mary Wyatt published two books on local British seaweeds. Griffiths had an internationally respected reputation as a skilled seaweed collector and scholar, and Swedish botanist Carl Agardh had earlier named the seaweed genus Griffithsia in her honour.
1833: Orra White Hitchcock (March 8, 1796 – May 26, 1863) was one of America's earliest women botanical and scientific illustrators and artists, best known for illustrating the scientific works of her husband, geologist Edward Hitchcock (1793–1864), but also notable for her own artistic and scientific work. The most well known appear in her husband's seminal works, the 1833 Report on the Geology, Mineralogy, Botany, and Zoology of Massachusetts and its successor, the 1841 Final Report produced when he was State Geologist. For the 1833 edition, Pendleton's Lithography (Boston) lithographed nine of Hitchcock's Connecticut River Valley drawings and printed them as plates for the work. In 1841, B. W. Thayer and Co., Lithographers (Boston) printed revised lithographs and an additional plate. The hand-colored plate "Autumnal Scenery. View in Amherst" is Hitchcock's most frequently seen work.
1835: Scottish polymath Mary Somerville and German astronomer Caroline Herschel were elected the first female members of the Royal Astronomical Society.
1836: Early English geologist and paleontologist Etheldred Benett, known for her extensive collection of several thousand fossils, was appointed a member of the Imperial Natural History Society of Moscow. The society – which only admitted men at the time – initially mistook Benett for a man due to her reputation as a scientist and her unusual first name, addressing her diploma of admission to "Dominum" (Master) Benett.
1840: Scottish fossil collector and illustrator Lady Eliza Maria Gordon-Cumming invited geologists Louis Agassiz, William Buckland and Roderick Murchison to examine her collection of fish fossils. Agassiz confirmed several of Gordon-Cumming's discoveries as new species.
1843: During a nine-month period in 1842–43, English mathematician Ada Lovelace translated Luigi Menabrea's article on Charles Babbage's newest proposed machine, the Analytical Engine. With the article, she appended a set of notes. Her notes were labelled alphabetically from A to G. In note G, she describes an algorithm for the Analytical Engine to compute Bernoulli numbers. It is considered the first published algorithm ever specifically tailored for implementation on a computer, and Ada Lovelace has often been cited as the first computer programmer for this reason. The engine was never completed, so her program was never tested.
1843: British botanist and pioneering photographer Anna Atkins self-published her book Photographs of British Algae, illustrating the work with cyanotypes. Her book was the first book on any subject to be illustrated by photographs.
1846: British zoologist Anna Thynne built the first stable, self-sustaining marine aquarium.
1848: American astronomer Maria Mitchell became the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; she had discovered a new comet the year before.
1848–1849: English scientist Mary Anne Whitby, a pioneer in western silkworm cultivation, collaborated with Charles Darwin in researching the hereditary qualities of silkworms.
1850: The American Association for the Advancement of Sciences accepted its first women members: astronomer Maria Mitchell, entomologist Margaretta Morris, and science educator Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps.

== Late 19th century ==