Gay Lussac GAY-LUSSAC -- SCIENTIST With his skill in science, and with his work with the scientific method, Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac earns the title of a great scientist. He was born on December 6, 1778 and he was the oldest child. His father was Antoine Gay. He was a lawyer who called himself Gay-Lussac to be apart from all of the other people with the same last name as Gay there. He got that name from the name of some family property near St Leonard(4) . The French Revolution affected the French scientists then. Gay-Lussac was sent to Paris when he was fourteen when his father was arrested. After taking private lessons and going to boarding school, the Ecole Polytechnique, and the civil engineering school, Gay-Lussac became an assistant to Berthollet, a co-worker of Lavoisier. Gay-Lussac then got his chance to work with famous men. Here with these people he received his training in chemical research(4). Gay-Lussac did his first major research in the winter of 1801-1802 when he was 24. He found some different evidence about the expansion properties of different gases. He took out the water vapor from the equipment he used and made sure that the gases didn't have any moisture, he got results that were more accurate than the others before him. He concluded that equal volumes of all gases expand equally with the same increase in temperature. (16,19). Gay-Lussac and Thenard, a laboratory professor, isolated the element boron. Also, Gay-Lussac worked with isolation of plant alkaloids medical uses and was able to produce oxalic acid from the fusion of sawdust and alkali.(17) One of his most important industrial achievement was the production of sulfuric acid. He used tall absorption towers called the Gay-Lussac Towers. The reaction took place in chambers that were lead-lined where sulfuric acid was produced. Gay-Lussac found a way to recycle the substance that was left after the sulfuric acid was produced. Sulfuric acid was produced a lot this way back then. (13) Gay-Lussac made new types of equipment like the portable barometer, an improved pipette and burette, and a new type of equipment that accurately estimated the purity of silver. (5) His work with the expansion of gases was used by Lord Kelvin in the absolute temperature scale and Third Law of Thermodynamics and in the Second Law(9). He helped improve ways of studying elements and found ways to produce and measure acids and alkalis(16).
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Gustave Eiffels was born in France in the Côte-d’Or, in 1832. He attended the Collège Sainte-Barbe in Paris to prepare him for the very difficult standards set by engineering colleges in France. Due to his hard work and the mentorship received by his uncle, Jean-Baptiste Mollerat, he gained access to some of the most prestigious school. He entered Ècole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures where he specialized in chemistry and
Frederick Sanger, the biochemist who developed insulin, was born on August 18th, 1918 to a decently wealthy family in Rendcomb, a small village in Gloucestershire, England. Frederick had two siblings; Theodore, who was a year older, and May, who was five years younger. Frederick, along with his siblings, were brought up as Quakers by his father, Frederick Sanger, and his wife, Cicely.
and opened doors for later scientists that were in his field of organic synthesis. He was a
This was the beginning of many awards in his experiments to come. He was elected to the Royal Society on May 29, 1756. This is probably one of the most influential factors in his work and this is one way that his work was seen by people all over Europe and other parts of the world. Members of the Royal Society had their scientific works published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. (DOSB,129)
Background Knowledge -------------------- Pressure The three scientists Boyle, Amontons and Charles investigated the relationship between gas, volume and temperature. Boyle discovered that for a fixed mass of gas at constant temperature, the pressure is inversely proportional to its volume.
In 1801 he argued that the atmosphere was filled with mechanical gases and that the chemical reactions between the nitrogen and oxygen played no part in the atmosphere?s construction. To prove this he conducted a lot of experiments on the solubility of gases in water. This showed that dissolved gases were mechanically mixed with the water and weren?t mixed naturally. But in 1803 it was found that this depended on the weight of the individual particles of the gas or atoms. By assuming the particles were the same size Dalton was able to develop the idea of atomic weights.
When searching for lab space in 1894, Marie came across Pierre Curie. He was the laboratory chief at the Municipal School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry. The meeting of Pierre and Marie would not only change their individual lives, but also the course of Science.
In 1817, an aging Swedish chemist was pouring over his work on a late afternoon in Stockholm, Sweden. He was analyzing a strange ore named Petalite that had been procured from an island off the coast of Sweden called Utö. The ore Petalite (which is now recognized to be LiAl(Si2O5)2) had been discovered by a Brazilian scientist, José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva towards the end of the 18th century on a visit to Sweden. This Swedish scientist, Johann August Arfvedson, detected traces of an unknown substance in his sample of Petalite. This was the first discovery of Lithium.
Pasteur was born on December 27, 1822 in a little town called Dôle in the foothills of the Jura Mountains of eastern France. When he was five years old his family moved to Arbois where he grew up with his father, mother, and three sisters. While attending primary school Pasteur was only an average student. Some considered him to be slow because he worked so hard on an exercise problem to make sure that he had the right answer. While in high school Monsieur Romanet, Pasteur’s principal, became interested in Pasteur and began to help him with his studies. With this encouragement Pasteur became a very good student. The principal suggested that he aim to attend Ecole Normale in Paris where he could become a professor at one of the great universities, however his father felt that this was far-fetched and preferred that Pasteur attend a more local school (Burton, 5-7).
Sazlberg, Hugh W. From Caveman to Chemist: Circumstances and Achievements. Washington, D.C.: American Chemical Society, 1991.
Jean Baptiste Lamarck was born on August 1, 1744, in the village of Bazentin-le-Petit in France. He was the youngest of eleven children in a family with a tradition of military service; his father and several of his brothers were soldiers. He served in the military during the Seven Years War and, at the age of only 17, was awarded for bravery for his actions on the battlefield. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck became the Chevalier de Lamarck, or Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the name he was known by. Later, when Lamarck retired injured, he took natural history. He first studied botany under the naturalist Bernard de Jussieu. The product of this ten-year period of research was Lamarck's Flore françoise, a book on the plant life of France that brought its author into the front rank of French naturalists.
Bruce Mattson. “Henry Cavendish 1731-1810”. History of Gas Chemistry. Updated September 25, 2001. Retrieved December 1, 2011
Quantitative measurements on gases were first made in a rational manner by the English chemist Robert Boyle (1627 - 1691). The instruments used by Boyle to measure pressure were two: the manometer, which measures differences in pressure, and the barometer, which measures the total pressure of the atmosphere.
The Industrial Revolution sparked a new curiosity and need for chemical engineering. In order for certain industries to sustain growth, the production of chemicals became of great importance, especially sulfuric acid. In attempts to improve the process of making this chemical, much time, money and effort was put into it. By this, the slightest savings led to large profits because of the vast quantities of sulfuric acid consumed by industries (Pafko, "Setting Stage").