César-Mansuète Despretz

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César-Mansuète Despretz (* 1789/92 in Lessines , Belgium, † March 15, 1863 in Paris ) was a Belgian-French physicist.

life and work

Despretz studied chemistry and physics in Paris. He was first a teacher in Bruges , after the Restoration in France (1814/15) professor of physics at the École polytechnique and in 1824 at the Collège Henri IV in Paris. In 1822 he was the first to produce mustard gas . In 1827 he recognized the inaccuracy of Mariott's law for real gases. He developed his own apparatus for measuring pressure. In 1837 he was given the chair of physics at the Sorbonne and the following year French citizenship. From 1841 he was a member of the Academy of Sciences in Paris . In 1859 he was accepted as a foreign member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences . He worked on batteries and in 1849 came up with the idea of ​​using the temperature of the electric arc . He built a coal retort. A carbon rod formed the negative pole of the arc, and the retort formed the positive pole.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Biography in English of T. O'CONOR SLOANE
  2. ↑ member entry of César-Mansuète Despretz (with link to an obituary of Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius ) in the Bavarian Academy of Sciences , accessed on 25 January 2017th
  3. ↑ Ludwig Darmstaedter: Handbook on the history of natural sciences and technology 1866 (PDF; 2.2 MB), p. 510
personal data
SURNAME Despretz, César-Mansuète
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Belgian-French physicist
DATE OF BIRTH between 1789 and 1792
PLACE OF BIRTH Lessines , Belgium
DATE OF DEATH March 15, 1863
Place of death Paris