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.^[1]

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.^[2]

Mathematics

• October 23 – Francis Guthrie poses the four colour problem to Augustus De Morgan.^[3][4]

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.^[5]

Technology

• March 2 – The first American experimental steam fire engine is tested.^[6]
• The mechanical semaphore line in France is superseded by the electric telegraph.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.^[7]

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.
• September 8 – Anna Maria Walker (born 1778), Scottish botanist.
• 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.

References

1. BirdLife International (2004). "Pinguinus impennis". IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Version 2006. International Union for Conservation of Nature. Retrieved 11 May 2006.
2. "Lambert-Beer Law". Sigrist-Photometer AG. 2007-03-07. Retrieved 2007-03-12.
3. Wilson, Robin (2002). Four Colors Suffice. London: Penguin Books. p. 18. ISBN 0-691-11533-8.
4. Cayley, Arthur (1879). "On the colourings of maps". Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society. Blackwell. 1 (4): 259–261. doi:10.2307/1799998. JSTOR 1799998.
5. Penguin Pocket On This Day. Penguin Reference Library. 2006. ISBN 0-14-102715-0.
6. King, William T. (1896). History of the American Steam Fire-Engine.
7. Marshall, A. (1920). "The Invention and Development of the Shrapnel Shell" (PDF). The Field Artillery Journal: 12–18. Retrieved 2012-03-08.