The year 1738 in science and technology involved some significant events.
Astronomy Pierre Louis Maupertuis publishes Sur la figure de la terre, which confirms Newton's view that the Earth is an oblate spheroid slightly flattened at the poles.
Botany Publication of Hortus Cliffortianus, a detailed description by Linnaeus of George Clifford's gardens at Hartekamp, Netherlands, including the raising of exotic plants such as bananas in a greenhouse. Publication of Rariorum Africanarum plantarum, a flora of Cape Colony by Johannes Burman, begins publication in Amsterdam.
Fluid dynamics Daniel Bernoulli publishes Hydrodynamica, which eventually christened the field of fluid mechanics and fluid dynamics (hydrodynamics).
Mathematics Abraham de Moivre publishes the second English edition of his The Doctrine of Chances containing a study of the coefficients in the binomial expansion of .
Medicine February – Great Plague of 1738, an outbreak of bubonic plague, begins to spread from Banat across central Europe. Establishment of The Mineral Water Hospital in Bath, England.
Metallurgy July 1 – William Champion of Bristol patents a process to distill zinc from calamine using charcoal in a smelter.
Technology June 24 – Lewis Paul and John Wyatt obtain an English patent for roller cotton-spinning machinery, leading to the establishment of mechanised Paul-Wyatt cotton mills. Jacques de Vaucanson presents the world's first automaton, The Flute Player (1737) to the French Academy of Sciences. Black Forest clockmaker Franz Ketterer produces one of the earliest cuckoo clocks.
Awards Copley Medal: James Valoue
Births November 15 – William Herschel, German-born astronomer (died 1822)
Deaths June 21 – Charles Townshend, 2nd Viscount Townshend, English agriculturalist (born 1674) September 23 – Herman Boerhaave, Dutch physician (born 1668)
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