9 October – first shipment of tea direct from India arrives at the Broomielaw quay in Glasgow.[4]
26 December – Ursulines of Jesus take up residence at St Margaret’s Convent in the Whitehouse in Edinburgh, the first Roman Catholicconvent established in Scotland since the Reformation;[5] it will be another 5 years before the first such modern establishment in England.
Naval architectJohn Scott Russell first observes a nondecaying solitary wave (a soliton, which he calls "the Wave of Translation") while watching a boat hauled through the water of the Union Canal near Edinburgh, subsequently using a tank to study the dependence of solitary wave velocities on amplitude and liquid depth.[6]