1952

1845–1958	Germany [earth sciences]	German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt lays the basis of modern geography with the publication of Kosmos/Cosmos, in which he arranges geographic knowledge in a systematic fashion.
1950–1959	USA [everyday life]	The number of people in the USA who live in the suburbs increases by 44% in the 1950s.
1950–1980	UK [television]	Watch With Mother, a series for young children featuring favourite characters such as Andy Pandy, the Flowerpot Men, Rag, Tag, and Bobtail, and the Woodentops, is shown on British television.
15 October 1951 - 24 June 1957	USA [television]	I Love Lucy, US television's first smash hit situation comedy, is shown, starring Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, Vivian Vance, and William Frawley.
1952	USA [television]	There are 17 million television sets in US homes, up from around 7 million in 1950.
1952	UK [television]	The British children's television programme Watch With Mother introduces Bill and Ben, twin puppets made from flowerpots, in The Flowerpot Men.
1952	England [thought and scholarship]	The English philosopher R M Hare publishes The Language of Morals.
1952	USA [solo and chamber music]	The US composer John Cage creates 4' 33", a piece for piano that consist of a pianist sitting silently at a piano for 4 minutes and 33 seconds.
1952	Russia [songs]	The Russian composer Igor Stravinsky completes his Cantata for voices and chorus, settings of anonymous English poems.
1952	Denmark [surgery]	Danish surgeon Christian Hamburger performs the first successful sex-change operation. George Jorgensen becomes Christine Jorgensen.
1952	USA, world [swimming and diving]	The butterfly stroke, developed by US swimmers in the 1930s and used in breaststroke races, is recognized and regulated as a separate stroke by the Fédération Internationale de Natation Amateur (International Swimming Federation or FINA).
1952	UK [popular music]	Hit Parade is the first television pop music show on British television.
1952	UK [public health]	British doctor Douglas Bevis develops amniocentesis, a diagnostic test on the fetus.
1952	Germany [opera]	The opera Boulevard Solitude by the German composer Hans Werner Henze is first performed, in Hannover, West Germany.
1952	England [orchestral music]	The English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams completes his orchestral work Sinfonia Antarctica/Antarctic Symphony.
1952	USA [painting]	The Dutch-born US artist Willem de Kooning paints Woman with Lipstick.
1952	France [photography]	The French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson publishes Images à la sauvette/The Decisive Moment, an influential album of photographs that contains his ideas on photography.
1952	USA [physics]	US nuclear physicist Donald Glaser develops the bubble chamber to observe the behaviour of subatomic particles. It uses a superheated liquid instead of a vapour to track particles.
1952	UK [plays]	The play The Mousetrap, by the English writer Agatha Christie, is first performed, in London, England.
1952	USA [fiction]	The US writer Ernest Hemingway publishes his novella The Old Man and the Sea.
1952	England [fiction]	The English writer Doris Lessing publishes her novel Martha Quest.
1952	USA [fiction]	The US writer John Steinbeck publishes his novel East of Eden.
1952	USA [fiction]	The US writer Bernard Malamud publishes his allegorical novel about baseball The Natural.
1952	USA [biology]	US biologists Alfred Day Hershey and Martha Chase use radioactive tracers to show that bacteriophages infect bacteria with DNA and not protein.
1952	UK [biology]	English biophysicist Rosalind Franklin uses X-ray diffraction to study the structure of DNA. She suggests that its sugar-phosphate backbone is on the outside – an important clue that leads to the elucidation of the structure of DNA the following year.
1952	UK [chemistry]	British biochemists Archer Martin and Anthony T James develop gas chromatography, a technique for separating the elements of a gaseous compound.
1952	USA [cinema and film]	The film musical Singin' in the Rain, directed by Gene Kelly, is released in the USA. Kelley also stars in it with Donald O'Connor and Debbie Reynolds.
6 February 1952	UK [political events]	Following the death of King George VI of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, he is succeeded by his daughter Queen Elizabeth II, who is on a visit to Kenya at the time (proclaimed on 8 February).
26 February 1952	UK [political events]	The British prime minister Winston Churchill announces that Britain has produced its own atomic bomb. The first successful test of the new weapon takes place on 2 October over the Monte Bello Islands in the Pacific Ocean.
8 March 1952	USA [surgery]	An artificial heart keeps a patient alive for 80 minutes at the Pennsylvania Hospital, Philadelphia, USA.
2 May 1952	UK, South Africa [aircraft]	BOAC's De Havilland Comet inaugurates jet-powered passenger aircraft service with the first scheduled commercial flight, from London, England, to Johannesburg, South Africa.
27 May - 31 May 1952	Europe [treaties]	The foreign ministers of France, Italy, Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands, and West Germany sign a series of agreements in Paris, France, establishing a European Defence Community (EDC), with reciprocal guarantees between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the EDC.
1 July 1952	Europe [international organizations]	The Schuman Plan, which creates a European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), comes into force.
26 July 1952	Argentina [births and deaths]	Eva Perón, unofficial Argentine political leader and wife of Juan Perón, dies in Buenos Aires, Argentina (33).
11 September 1952	Eritrea, Ethiopia [political events]	The United Nations (UN) settlement devised for the former Italian colony of Eritrea (that is, a federation with Ethiopia) is ratified by Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia. Eritrea is to have autonomy in domestic affairs.
20 October 1952	British East Africa, UK [political events]	Britain proclaims a state of emergency in its colony of Kenya because of Mau Mau nationalist disturbances, and about 200 leading members of the Kenya African Union (the political party led by future president Jomo Kenyatta, the alleged leader of the Mau Mau movement) are arrested.
November 1952	USA [elections]	Americans elect Dwight D Eisenhower as president in a landslide victory. In the Congressional elections, the Republican party regains control of the House (221–211) and Senate (48–47).
1 November 1952	Pacific, USA [weapons]	The USA explodes the first thermonuclear fusion device, or hydrogen bomb, at Eniwetok island in the Marshall Islands, although this is not revealed until February 1954.
14 November 1952	UK [popular music]	The popular music magazine New Musical Express publishes Britain's first pop singles chart.
17 December 1952	USA [musical performers]	The US soprano Dorothy Maynor sings at the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR)'s Constitution Hall in Washington, DC, making her the first black person to sing there since 1939, breaking a formal ban that went into effect when the DAR refused to let Marian Anderson sing at their headquarters.