Alexandre-Emile Béguyer de Chancourtois

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Alexandre-Emile Béguyer de Chancourtois.

Alexandre-Emile Béguyer de Chancourtois (born January 20, 1819 in Paris , † November 14, 1886 ibid) was a French chemist and geologist .

Life

Béguyer de Chancourtois was the son of an architect and studied from 1838 at the École polytechnique and then from 1840 at the École des Mines de Paris , where his teachers Élie de Beaumont , Ours-Pierre-Armand Petit-Dufrénoy and the metallurgist Frédéric Le Play ( 1806–1882) were and he was the remainder of his career as an assistant to the leading French geologist Élie de Beaumont. After graduating, he went on a research trip to Hungary, Romania, Armenia and Turkey (where he explored ore deposits and geology on behalf of his teachers). From 1848 he taught at the Ecole des Mines, (whom he but really replaced until 1862 in the lectures) in 1856 as an assistant professor at De Beamont and from 1875 as his successor as professor of geology (and Mine Surveying ), which he held until his Death remained (though supported by Marcel Alexandre Bertrand from 1885 ). He oversaw the collections of the École des Mines, was involved in geological maps also from overseas and was sub-director of the service of the geological map of France and was also associated with Frédéric Le Play, whom he supported in organizing the first world exhibition in 1855 and for whom he produced industrial statistics. He proposed the establishment of seismographic stations, improved safety in mines (ventilation and protection from explosions).

In order to find a field of activity independent of his teachers, he turned to geography and for a long time tried to establish a geographical system independent of British dominance (with a zero meridian in the Atlantic (meridian of Saint-Michel) and a metric system). to introduce. Since the zero meridian required an observatory, however, Greenwich prevailed in the end. Another equally unsuccessful project was the introduction of an international phonetic transcription system in geography.

After De Beaumont's death in 1874, the influence of his school in France quickly waned in favor of his British opponent Charles Lyell in particular . This also had an impact on De Chancourtois, although he was officially in high regard until the end. He became commander of the Legion of Honor (1867, he was its officer as early as 1856), was titular professor and Ingénieur général des mines. The post of sub-director of the service of the geological map of France was withdrawn from him in 1875.

Preliminary stage to the periodic table of the elements

In 1862 he was one of the first to recognize a periodicity in the chemical elements and devised a classification system ( telluric helix or telluric screw ), according to which the chemical elements known up to then were entered in a helical manner on a cylinder according to their atomic mass, so that elements with similar properties were created appeared vertically one above the other. The English chemist John AR Newlands (1837–1898) described a figure-eight periodicity of similar elements as the octave rule .

literature

Fonts

  • Etudes stratigraphiques sur le départ de la Haute-Marne . Paris, 1862.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Life data according to Pötsch et al., Lexicon of important chemists 1989, p. 36
personal data
SURNAME Béguyer de Chancourtois, Alexandre-Emile
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French chemist and geologist
DATE OF BIRTH January 20, 1819
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH November 14, 1886
Place of death Paris