Portal:History of science/Selected anniversaries/January 8
- 1587 - Birth of Johannes Fabricius, German astronomer (d. 1616)
- 1642 - Death of Galileo Galilei, Italian astronomer and scientist (b. 1564)
- 1823 - Birth of Alfred Russel Wallace, British naturalist and biologist (d. 1913)
- 1838 - Alfred Vail demonstrates a telegraph using dots and dashes (this is the forerunner of Morse code)
- 1888 - Birth of Richard Courant, German-American mathematician (d. 1972)
- 1891 - Birth of Walther Bothe, German physicist, Nobel Prize in Physics laureate (d. 1957)
- 1903 - Birth of Igor Kurchatov, Russian physicist (d. 1960)
- 1945 - Death of Karl Krafft, Swiss astrologer (b. 1900)
- 1980 - Death of John Mauchly, American physicist (b. 1907)