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.
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- The mechanical semaphore line in France is superseded by the electric telegraph.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
Births
- April 10 – Arthur Vierendeel (died 1940), Belgian civil engineer.
- May 1 – Santiago Ramón y Cajal (died 1934), Spanish winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
- 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.
References
- ^ Template:IUCN2006
- ^ "Lambert-Beer Law". Sigrist-Photometer AG. 2007-03-07. Retrieved 2007-03-12.
- ^ Wilson, Robin (2002). Four Colors Suffice. London: Penguin Books. p. 18. ISBN 0-691-11533-8.
- ^ Cayley, Arthur (1879). "On the colourings of maps". Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society. 1 (4). Blackwell: 259–261. doi:10.2307/1799998. JSTOR 1799998.
- ^ Penguin Pocket On This Day. Penguin Reference Library. 2006. ISBN 0-14-102715-0.
- ^ King, William T. (1896). History of the American Steam Fire-Engine.
- ^ Marshall, A. (1920). "The Invention and Development of the Shrapnel Shell" (PDF). The Field Artillery Journal: 12–18. Retrieved 2012-03-08.