The year 1882 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

• September – Great Comet of 1882 sighted.^[1]
• December 6 – Transit of Venus, 1882.

• March 24 – Robert Koch announces his discovery of the bacterium responsible for tuberculosis, Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
• Élie Metchnikoff discovers phagocytosis.^[2]

• Italian physicist Luigi Palmieri detects helium on Earth for the first time through its D₃ spectral line when he analyzes the lava of Mount Vesuvius.^[3]

• Clarence Dutton's Tertiary History of the Grand Cañon District is published by the United States Geological Survey.

• June – German mathematician Ferdinand von Lindemann publishes proof that π is a transcendental number and that squaring the circle is consequently impossible.^[4][5]
• December – Swedish mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler establishes the journal Acta Mathematica.
• Felix Klein first describes the Klein bottle.

• March 28 – Paul Beiersdorf patents an adhesive bandage in Germany, the foundation of the Beiersdorf company.
• Vladimir Bekhterev publishes Provodiashchie puti mozga ("The Conduction Paths in the Brain and Spinal Cord"), beginning to note the role of the hippocampus in memory.

• January 12 – Holborn Viaduct power station in the City of London, the world's first coal-fired public electricity generating station, begins operation.^[6]
• By March – Étienne-Jules Marey invents a chronophotographic gun capable of photographing 12 consecutive frames per second on the same plate.
• April 29 – Werner von Siemens demonstrates his Electromote, the first form of trolleybus, in Berlin.
• June 6 – Henry W. Seeley patents the electric clothes iron in the United States.^[7]
• September 4 – Thomas Edison starts the United States' first commercial electrical power plant, lighting one square mile of lower Manhattan.
• English mechanical engineer James Atkinson invents his "Differential Engine".
• American electrical engineer Schuyler Wheeler produces an electric fan.
• Alfred P. Southwick publishes his proposals for use of the electric chair as an execution method in the United States.

• First International Polar Year, an international scientific program, begins.
• The Chartered Institute of Patent Agents, the modern-day Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys, is founded in the United Kingdom.

• Copley Medal: Arthur Cayley^[8]
• Wollaston Medal for Geology: Franz Ritter von Hauer

• March 14 – Wacław Sierpiński (died 1969), Polish mathematician.
• March 23 – Emmy Noether (died 1935), German mathematician.
• March 30 – Melanie Klein (died 1960), Viennese-born psychoanalyst.
• April 27 – Harry Allan (died 1957), New Zealand botanist.
• June 17 – Harold Gillies (died 1960), New Zealand-born plastic surgeon.
• July 12 – Traian Lalescu (died 1929), Romanian mathematician.
• July 21 – Herbert E. Ives (died 1953), American optical engineer.
• September 30 – Hans Geiger (died 1945), German inventor of the Geiger counter.
• October 5 – Robert Goddard (died 1945), American rocket scientist.
• October 26 – Marietta Pallis (died 1963), Indian-born Graeco-British ecologist.
• November 18 – Frances Gertrude McGill (died 1959), pioneering Canadian forensic pathologist.
• December 11 – Max Born (died 1970), German physicist and recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1954.
• December 28 – Arthur Eddington (died 1944), English astrophysicist.
• Israel Aharoni (died 1946), Belarusian-born Jewish zoologist.

• January 11 – Theodor Schwann (born 1810), German physiologist.
• April 19 – Charles Darwin (born 1809), English naturalist and geologist.
• August 24 – John Dillwyn Llewelyn (born 1810), Welsh botanist and photographer.
• September 23 – Friedrich Wöhler (born 1800), German chemist.
• October 27 – Christian Heinrich von Nagel (born 1803), German geometer.
• November 20 – Henry Draper (born 1837), doctor, American astronomer.
• December 24
  • Johann Benedict Listing (born 1808), German mathematician.
  • Charles Vincent Walker (born 1812), English telegraph engineer.