The year 1848 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

• September 20 – The American Association for the Advancement of Science is set up in Pennsylvania by re-formation of the Association of American Geologists and Naturalists, with William Charles Redfield as its first president.

• September 16 – William Cranch Bond and William Lassell discover Hyperion, Saturn's moon.
• Lord Rosse studies M1 and names it the Crab Nebula.
• Édouard Roche calculates the Roche limit.^[1]
• Rudolf Wolf (in Zürich) devises a way of quantifying sunspot activity, the Wolf number.^[2]

• April 16 – Joseph Dalton Hooker arrives at Darjeeling to begin the first European plant collecting expedition in the Himalayas.

• Edward Frankland, working in Germany, discovers the organometallic compound diethylzinc.

• Admiral Nevelskoi demonstrates that the Strait of Tartary is a strait.

• September 13 – Vermont railroad worker Phineas Gage survives a 3-foot-plus (1 m) iron rod being driven through his head, providing a demonstration of the effects of damage to the brain's frontal lobe.
• November 1 – The first medical school for women, The Boston Female Medical School, opens in Boston, Massachusetts.
• Alfred Baring Garrod recognises that excess uric acid in the blood is the cause of gout.^[3]
• Rudolf Virchow produces a Report on the Typhus Epidemic in Upper Silesia advocating broad social as well as public health measures to counter such outbreaks.^[4]

• Lord Kelvin establishes concept of absolute zero, the temperature at which all molecular motion ceases.^[5]
• Nicholas Callan of Maynooth College invents an improved form of battery.^[6]
• Hippolyte Fizeau and John Scott Russell present studies of the Doppler effect in electromagnetic and sound waves respectively.^[7]

• August 15 – James Warren submits a U.K. patent application for the Warren truss.
• James Bogardus erects the first free-standing cast-iron architectural façade, the Milhau Pharmacy Building in New York City.
• French civil engineer A. Boucher promotes the ribbed ("false") skew arch.^[8]
• Completion of palm houses at Kew Gardens, London, and the National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin, by Richard Turner of Dublin.
• Joseph-Louis Lambot constructs the first ferrocement boat, in France.
• Linus Yale Sr., invents the modern pin tumbler lock.^[9]
• John Stringfellow flies a steam-powered monoplane model for a short distance in a powered glide in England.^[10]

• Copley Medal: John Couch Adams^[11]
• Wollaston Medal for Geology: William Buckland

• March 8 – LaMarcus Adna Thompson (died 1919), American inventor.
• April 9 – Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti (died 1930), British-born electrical engineer and inventor
• May 23 – Otto Lilienthal (died 1896), German aviation pioneer.
• June 12 – Albertina Carlsson (died 1930) Swedish zoologist.
• June 22 – William Macewen (died 1924), Scottish surgeon.
• July 7 – Cuthbert Hilton Golding-Bird (died 1939), English surgeon.
• July 27 – Loránd Eötvös (died 1919), Hungarian physicist.
• August 14 – Margaret Lindsay (died 1915), Irish astronomer.
• November 1 – Caroline Still Anderson (died 1919), African American physician, educator and activist.
• November 8 – Gottlob Frege (died 1925), German mathematician.
• November 27 – Henry A. Rowland (died 1901), American physicist.

• January 9 – Caroline Herschel (born 1750), German astronomer.
• January 12 – Christophe-Paulin de La Poix de Fréminville (born 1787), French explorer and naturalist.
• January 24 – Horace Wells, American dentist, pioneer of the use of anesthesia, suicide (born 1815).
• August 7 – Jöns Jakob Berzelius (born 1779), Swedish chemist.
• August 12 – George Stephenson (born 1781), English locomotive engineer.
• December 18 – Bernard Bolzano (born 1781), Bohemian mathematician.