1852 in science

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The year 1852 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Aeronautics

Giffard airship

• September 24 – French engineer Henri Giffard makes the first airship trip, from Paris to Trappes.

Biology

• 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 is tested.
• The mechanical semaphore line in France is superseded by the electric telegraph.
• Captain E. M. Boxer of the Royal Arsenal devizes an improvement to the shrapnel shell by insertion of an iron diaphragm, preventing premature ignition.

Awards

• Copley Medal: Alexander von Humboldt
• Wollaston Medal for Geology: William Henry Fitton

Births

Ada Lovelace shortly before her death in 1852

• April 10 – Arthur Vierendeel (died 1940), Belgian civil engineer.
• May 1 – Santiago Ramón y Cajal (died 1934), Spanish neuroscientist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
• August 4 – Catharine van Tussenbroek (died 1925), Dutch physician.
• August 30 – Jacobus van 't Hoff (died 1911), Dutch chemist.
• September 9 – John Henry Poynting (died 1914), English physicist, discoverer of the Poynting–Robertson effect and the Poynting vector.
• September 28 – Isis Pogson (died 1945), English astronomer and meteorologist.
• October 2 – William Ramsay (died 1916), Scottish winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
• October 9 – Hermann Emil Fischer (died 1919), German winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
• December 15 – Henri Becquerel (died 1908), French physicist.

Deaths

• January 6 – Louis Braille (born 1809), French inventor.
• August 15 – Johan Gadolin (born 1760), Finnish chemist.
• November 10 – Gideon Mantell (born 1790), English paleontologist.
• November 27 – Augusta Ada King (née Byron), Countess of Lovelace (born 1815), English computing pioneer.
• Sarah Guppy (born 1770), English inventor.