Portal:History of science/Selected anniversaries/August 12
- 1851 - Isaac Singer is granted a patent for his sewing machine
- 1865 - Death of William Jackson Hooker, English botanist (b. 1785)
- 1877 - Asaph Hall discovers Deimos
- 1883 - The last quagga dies at the Artis Magistra zoo in Amsterdam
- 1885 - Birth of Jean Cabannes, French physicist (d. 1959)
- 1887 - Birth of Erwin Schrödinger, Austrian physicist, Nobel laureate (d. 1961)
- 1919 - Birth of Vikram Sarabhai, Indian physicist (d. 1971)
- 1925 - Birth of George Wetherill, American scientist (d. 2006)
- 1930 - Birth of Jacques Tits, Belgian mathematician
- 1935 - Death of Friedrich Schottky, German mathematician (b. 1851)
- 1953 - Nuclear testing: the Soviet atomic bomb project continues with the detonation of Joe 4, the first Soviet thermonuclear weapon
- 1955 - Death of James B. Sumner, American chemist, Nobel laureate (b. 1887)
- 1973 - Death of Karl Ziegler, German chemist, Nobel Prize Laureate (b. 1898)
- 1979 - Death of Ernst Boris Chain, German-born biochemist, Nobel laureate (b. 1906)
- 1981 - The IBM Personal Computer is released
- 1989 - Death of William Shockley, American physicist, Nobel laureate (b. 1910)