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During the 1800s, major advances in biology, medicine, and technology

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paved the way for psychology to emerge as an academic discipline.

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Two scientific giants, Hermann von Helmholtz and Charles Darwin

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were especially important to the development of psychology.

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In the 1840s, German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz demonstrated and measured

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the transmission of an electrical impulse within neurons, what we now call the action potential.

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He also made major contributions to our understanding of color vision

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and many other areas of science as well.

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By the mid-1800s, the discoveries of many fossils of extinct species led several people

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including an English naturalist named Charles Darwin, to believe that animals evolve over time.

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While on a 5-year voyage on a ship called the Beagle

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Darwin made his own discoveries about animal variation around the world

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and these observations led him to propose that evolution occurs through a process he called natural selection

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As he described in his 1859 book <i>On the Origin of Species</i>

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genetic traits that help an organism survive and reproduce

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are more likely to be passed on to the next generation.

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Darwin’s work showed us the essential continuity between human beings and animals

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which is crucial for modern research in psychology.

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Psychology as a unique discipline arose late in the 19th Century as a synthesis of philosophy and physiology

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It is generally considered to begin with the work of Wilhelm Wundt

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who founded the first psychological laboratory at the University of Leipzig in 1879

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the same year that Thomas Edison applied for a patent for the incandescent light bulb

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Wundt also taught the first course in scientific psychology.

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One of Wundt’s students was G. Stanley Hall, who established what many consider

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the first formal psychology laboratory in the United States at Johns Hopkins University in 1883.

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Hall went on to found the American Psychological Association in 1892.