1852 in science

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.
• The mechanical semaphore line in France is superseded by the electric telegraph.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.

  Awards

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

  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.
• 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.
• 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.
• November 10 – Gideon Mantell, English paleontologist.
• November 27 – Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, English computing pioneer.