Louis Jacques Thénard

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Louis Jacques Thénard (4 May 1777 – 21 June 1857) was a French chemist.

Life

He was born in a farm cottage near Nogent-sur-Seine in the Champagne district^[1] the son of a farm worker. In the post-Revolution French educational system, most boys received scholarships for education up to age 14,

Above all things Thénard was a teacher; as he himself said, the professor, the assistants, the laboratory — everything must be sacrificed to the students. Like most great teachers he published a textbook, and his Traité de chimie élémentaire, théorique et pratique (4 vols., Paris, 1813–16), which served as a standard for a quarter of a century, perhaps did even more for the advance of chemistry than his numerous original discoveries.[4]

Research

Soon after his appointment as répétiteur at the École Polytechnique he began a lifelong friendship with Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, and the two carried out many research projects together. For their research, Gay-Lussac and Thénard would receive 30,000 francs from Napoleon in the third and last installment of the Galvanism Prize.

Careful analysis led him to dispute some of Claude Louis Berthollet's theoretical views regarding the composition of the metallic oxides, and he also showed Berthollet's "zoonic acid" to be impure acetic acid (1802). In response, Berthollet invited him to become a member of the Society of Arcueil.^[4]

In 1806 he analysed the chemical composition of the Alais meteorite, which fell in Alès on 15 March 1806.^[5] This was the first carbonaceous chondrite to be discovered.^[6] Thénard found a high carbon content of 2.5 per cent.

His first original paper (1799) was on the compounds of

His name is one of the 72 names inscribed on the Eiffel Tower.^{[citation needed]}

Works

• Traité de chimie élémentaire, théorique et pratique (in French). Vol. 1. Paris: Crochard. 1817.
  • Traité de chimie élémentaire, théorique et pratique (in French). Vol. 2. Paris: Crochard. 1817.
  • Traité de chimie élémentaire, théorique et pratique (in French). Vol. 4. Paris: Crochard. 1818.

See also

• Phosphorus trichloride
• Thénardite

References