1852 in science
The year 1852 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.
Aeronautics
- September 24 – French engineer Henri Giffard makes the first airship trip, from Paris to Trappes.
Astronomy
- September 19 – Annibale de Gasparis discovers the asteroid 20 Massalia from the north dome of the Astronomical Observatory of Capodimonte in Naples.
Biology
- October 5 – American apiarist L. L. Langstroth patents the Langstroth hive for the cultivation of honey bees.
- Last recognised sighting of a great auk, on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland.
Chemistry
- August Beer proposes Beer's law, which explains the relationship between the composition of a mixture and the amount of light it will absorb. Based partly on earlier work by Pierre Bouguer and Johann Heinrich Lambert, it establishes the analytical technique known as spectrophotometry.
Mathematics
- October 23 – Francis Guthrie poses the four colour problem to Augustus De Morgan.
Medicine
- January 15 – Nine representatives of Hebrew charitable organizations come together to form what will become the Mount Sinai Hospital, New York.
- February 15 – The Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, London, admits its first patient.
Technology
- March 2 – The first American experimental steam fire engine, designed by Alexander Bonner Latta, is tested.
- August 23 – George Jennings receives a U.K. patent for improvements to the flush toilet.
- The mechanical semaphore line in France is superseded by the electric telegraph.
- Captain E. M. Boxer of the Royal Arsenal devises an improvement to the shrapnel shell by insertion of an iron diaphragm, preventing premature ignition.
- French physicist Léon Foucault makes the first gyroscope for scientific use
Awards
Births
- March 25 – Charles Loomis Dana, American neurologist.
- April 10 – Arthur Vierendeel, Belgian civil engineer.
- May 1 – Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Spanish neuroscientist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
- August 4 – Catharine van Tussenbroek, Dutch physician.
- August 30 – Jacobus van 't Hoff, Dutch chemist.
- September 9 – John Henry Poynting, English physicist, discoverer of the Poynting–Robertson effect and the Poynting vector.
- September 15 – Edward Bouchet, African American physicist.
- September 23 – William Stewart Halsted, American surgeon.
- September 28 – Isis Pogson, English astronomer and meteorologist.
- October 2 – William Ramsay, Scottish winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
- October 6 – Bruno Abakanowicz, Polish mathematician, inventor and electrical engineer.
- October 9 – Hermann Emil Fischer, German winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
- November 12 - Xavier Arnozan, French physician.
- December 13 – Charles E. de M. Sajous, American endocrinologist.
- December 15 – Henri Becquerel, French physicist.
Deaths
- January 1 – John George Children, English chemist, mineralogist and entomologist.
- January 6 – Louis Braille, French inventor.
- January 13 - Jean-Nicolas Gannal, French pharmacist, chemist, and inventor.
- August 15 – Johan Gadolin, Finnish chemist.
- August 24 – Sarah Guppy, English inventor.
- September 4 – William MacGillivray, Scottish naturalist and ornithologist.
- September 8 – Anna Maria Walker, Scottish botanist.
- October 9 – Thomas Frederick Colby, English cartographer.
- November 10 – Gideon Mantell, English paleontologist.
- November 27 – Augusta Ada King (née Byron), Countess of Lovelace, English computing pioneer.