Claude-Louis Berthollet

Claude-Louis Berthollet (born Dec. 9, 1748, Talloires, Savoy, France—died Nov. 6, 1822, Arcueil) was a central French figure in the emergence of chemistry as a modern discipline in the late 18th century. He combined acute experimental skills with fundamental theoretical proposals about the nature of chemical reactions, eventually leading to the law of mass action.

From Savoy to Paris

Berthollet, born into a family of notaries of the Duchy of Savoy, was educated in Annecy and in 1770 took a medical degree from the University of Turin, the Savoyard capital. With the patronage of a famed Genevan physician, Theodore Tronchin, he established himself that year in Paris as physician to the wife of the duc d’Orléans. In 1778 Berthollet became a French citizen and began the process of obtaining a medical license from the Paris Faculty of Medicine. In 1779 he married Marguerite-Marie Baur, who bore him their only son, Amédée, in 1780. Berthollet continued his medical practice for several years while embarking upon a scientific career. His scientific research eventually turned him into one of the leading French chemists, second only to Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier.

The submission of more than a dozen detailed research papers to the French Academy of Sciences led to his election as a member in 1780. Berthollet initially favoured the phlogiston theory promoted by the German chemist Georg Ernst Stahl, but his experiments in pneumatic chemistry persuaded him to abandon it in favour of Lavoisier’s explanations, which centred on the role of oxygen. In 1785 he sided with Lavoisier and his colleagues in shaping a chemical revolution that centrally involved the reorganization of chemical nomenclature. Nonetheless, his isolation of ammonia and experiments with chlorine and its compounds led him to disagree with the assertion that oxygen was always the essential ingredient responsible for acidity. He completed important studies on various acids and the pigment Prussian blue, decomposed ammonia into its components, and developed a mistaken explanation for the composition of hydrochloric acid, which he assumed contained oxygen combined with a hypothetical “muriatic radical.”

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Applied chemistry

In 1784 Berthollet was named chief administrator of the Manufacture des Gobelins, a tapestry manufacturer. This position launched him into extensive research on applied chemistry, first on dyes and later on bleaching agents, steel, and gunpowder. In 1791 Berthollet published the Élements de l’art de la teinture (Elements of the Art of Dyeing, 1891); at the same time, his procedures for using chlorine compounds for bleaching were already known and being exploited commercially in England. Publication in France came later, with his Description de l’art du blanchiment par l’acide muriatique oxygéné (1795; published in English together with his earlier book as Elements of the Art of Dyeing with a Description of the Art of Bleaching by Oxymuriatic Acid, 1824). A second edition on dyeing and bleaching appeared in 1804, written with the collaboration of his son, who later launched a business venture in the chemical industry. Along with chemist Jean-Antoine Chaptal, Berthollet was an early champion in France of the value of chemical theory in the enhancement of industrial processes. The Berthollet and Chaptal sons later joined forces to establish a factory in southern France to manufacture soda ash (sodium carbonate), using the Leblanc process.

Berthollet’s discovery of a method for the preparation of gunpowder from “superoxygenated potassium muriate” (potassium chlorate, a substitute for saltpetre) was implemented throughout France during the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars in response to a shortage of saltpetre. In 1786 Berthollet teamed up with mathematicians Gaspard Monge and Alexandre Vandermonde to perfect methods for improving the quality of steel making.

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Serving the French nation

Devoted above all to science and its uses, Berthollet lamented the unrest caused by the French Revolution, withdrawing from Paris to a suburb in Aulnay, where he pursued his studies in a private laboratory. Gradually, he was drawn into assisting the various governments of the Revolution, first as a consultant on technical issues and then as an agent for the central authority. He served successively as a member of the Bureau of Arts and Crafts, on the commission in charge of the mint, and on the legislative committee concerned with the arts. He also helped to supervise the collection of saltpetre from cellars and the production of gunpowder, and he worked for the establishment of the metric system.

Berthollet was assigned as an instructor of procedures for manufacturing armaments and gunpowder and as a lecturer on chemistry at the short-lived École Normale de l’an III. He also assisted Monge in organizing what became the École Polytechnique, where he taught chemistry and set up a teaching laboratory for its students. Though he was not an especially exciting pedagogue, he encouraged a generation of young men to turn to chemistry.

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In these various assignments, he was often paired with politically more radical scientists, such as Monge, while he tried to remain apolitical. After the Reign of Terror, he was deputized with Monge and others to sort and select cultural objects for confiscation by France during the Italian theatre of operations. His work impressed Napoleon Bonaparte, who recruited him in 1798 for his campaign in Egypt, where he created the Institut d’Egypte.

After his return to Paris, he became the leading chemist at the Institut de France and outfitted a private laboratory in the Parisian outskirts at his country home in Arcueil. There he invited young scientists to meet periodically with him and his neighbour, the mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace, in an informal Société d’Arcueil, which became the most important creative centre for physical and chemical research for a decade during the Napoleonic period.