Berthollet, who served as scientific adviser to Napoleon's Egypt expedition in 1798, received the title of "count" and the Legion d'honneur in 1804 due to his closeness to Napoleon.
(1748-1822) French chemist. He obtained hypochlorites and chlorate explosives and conducted studies that would form the basis of the "mass interaction" law. He was born on December 7, 1748, in Talloires. He died in Arcueil on November 6, 1822. After graduating from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Turin in 1768, he went to Paris in 1772 and started his chemistry education and medical doctorate. He completed his doctorate at the University of Paris in 1778 and was accepted to the Academy of Sciences in 1780. Berthollet, who developed new painting techniques by undertaking the directorship of the Manufacture National des Gobelins in 1784, was appointed professor to the Ecole Normale in 1794; The following year, he was commissioned, together with Monge and De Morreau, to organize the Ecole Polytechnique.
Claude Louis Berthollet (9 December 1748 – 6 November 1822) was a Savoyard-French chemist who became vice president of the French Senate in 1804. He is known for his scientific contributions to theory of chemical equilibria via the mechanism of reverse chemical reactions, and for his contribution to modern chemical nomenclature. On a practical basis, Berthollet was the first to demonstrate the bleaching action of chlorine gas, and was first to develop a solution of sodium hypochlorite as a modern bleaching agent.
Berthollet, who served as scientific adviser to Napoleon's Egypt expedition in 1798, received the title of "count" and the Legion d'honneur in 1804 due to his closeness to Napoleon. However, he did not approve of the emperor's expansionist policy and voted to overthrow Napoleon (1814). After withdrawing to his home in Arcueil, near Paris, Berthollet founded the "Arcueil Society" with Laplace in 1807. This association, which gathered the most distinguished physicists and chemists of France at that time, became one of the focal points of scientific discussions despite its short publication life of about ten years.
Although Berthollet initially opposed Stahl's "phlogiston" theory, which was developed by Lavoisier between 1775-1787 and explained the combustion phenomenon with oxygen rather than the combustible essence in the matter, he later became one of the biggest advocates of this theory. Along with Lavoisier and Fourcroy, he was involved in the construction of a coherent system of chemical nomenclature; In 1785, benefiting from Priestley's work, he determined the structure of ammonia and the approximate ratios of nitrogen and hydrogen in the compound. Two years later, as a result of his studies on hydrocyanic acid and hydrogen sulfide, he showed that the basic substance of acids was hydrogen, not oxygen, as Lavoisier had argued. However, Berthollet's invention, which is the subject of the most common application in the industry, is "Javel" water. Berthollet, who discovered the bleaching property of chlorine in 1789 by evaluating Scheele's research, suggested using this substance in the form of a potassium hypochlorite solution (Javel water) for bleaching fabrics, and this solution took a long time until it was replaced by sodium hypochlorite (bleach) prepared by Labarraque. time has been used.
One of Berthollet's most important contributions to theoretical chemistry is Bergman's thesis against the "selective interest" theory. Berthollet, who showed that a substance "A", which tends to form compounds with substance "B" rather than substance "C", chooses "C" over "B" when the amount of substance "C" is more than "B", thus, in a reaction He explained that the masses of the elements would affect the result of the reaction and would determine the whole compound to be formed. This view was heavily criticized by Proust, who argued that a compound has a definite structure regardless of the number of reactants. Many of the great chemists of the time thought like Proust. Thus pushed aside, Berthollet's thesis was reconsidered by Waage and Guldberg nearly fifty years later, and in 1864 the law of "mass interaction" emerged. This law, which explains that the rate of a reaction at a constant temperature is proportional to the masses of the reactants, provided a more accurate context for the concept of mass, on which Berthollet emphasized.
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200th Anniversary: Death of Claude Louis Berthollet
https://www.chemistryviews.org/200th-anniversary-death-of-claude-louis-berthollet/