Bernard Courtois

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Bernard Courtois (born February 8, 1777 in Dijon , † September 27, 1838 in Paris ) was a French saltpetre boiler (according to other sources, soap boiler ) and the discoverer of the chemical element iodine .

Live and act

Bernard Courtois father Jean-Baptiste Courtois (1748–1807?) Came from a shoemaker family and then worked in a saltpeter factory before he started working as a wine merchant in Dijon. His father married Marie Blé in 1771. After their first son died in 1772, they had a total of six children: Catherine, Pierre, Bernard, Jean-Baptiste and finally the twins Anne-Marie and Pierre in 1780.

Louis Bernard Guyton de Morveau opened a chemical laboratory in a former hotel across from the Courtois residence in Dijon, in which Jean-Baptiste Courtois was employed as a demonstrator from 1775 and then to a certain extent as an assistant for the chemistry academy. From January 1776 he worked there full-time as a demonstrator. The Courtois family soon found a new home in the building of the old hotel or laboratory. He later became manager of the Saint-Médard Nitrary , a saltpeter factory. It was there that Bernard and his brother Pierre acquired a thorough knowledge of nitric boiling .

Bernard Courtois lived in Saint-Médard Nitrary until he was eighteen , then went to Auxerre to train as a pharmacist with M. Frémy for the next three years. In 1798 he got a job in the chemistry laboratory of Antoine François de Fourcroy . There in Paris he continued his studies of chemistry and pharmacology at the Polytechnic Academy . Here he also met the chemist Louis Jacques Thénard .

Pharmacy jar for storing opium as a medicine from the 18th or 19th century

At the turn of the century, Bernard Courtois worked at the École polytechnique. Armand Séguin entrusted him with his research on opium in 1802 . In the course of this, the two succeeded in discovering morphine . Séguin presented the results to the institute in 1804, but they were not published until 1816. He never mentioned Courtois' name. The discovery was officially attributed to Friedrich Wilhelm Adam Sertürner by the Academie des Sciences.

In 1808 Courtois married Madeleine Motrand, the daughter of a Parisian hairdresser.

1811 he discovered during the investigation and ashing of brown algae of the genus Laminaria from the North Sea , the element iodine. He actually wanted to make a lye from seaweed . At that time, algae ash was often used to obtain the potash or potassium carbonate (K 2 CO 3 ) required for soap production . When he added sulfuric acid (H 2 SO 4 ) to this lye and then heated the mixture, violet iodine vapors rose, which resublimed on cool walls in the form of shiny iodine crystals.

It was only Sir Humphry Davy and Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac who recognized that the violet vapor was an element. They named it after the Greek word ioeides ("violet") because of its characteristic purple vapors. In 1814, Jöns Jakob Berzelius suggested the chemical symbol "I".

Double-sublimed iodine

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Patricia A. Swain: Bernard Courtois (1777-1838), Famed for discovering Iodine (1811), and his life in Paris from 1798 . (PDF; 174 kB) Bull. Hist. Chem., Vol. 30, Number 2, 2005
  2. ↑ James L. Marshall et al .: Extensive biography with illustrations ( Memento from February 25, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF) 2009 (English).
  3. ↑ Patricia A. Swain: Bernard Courtois (1777-1838), Famed for discovering Iodine (1811), and his life in Paris from 1798 . (PDF; 174 kB) Bull. Hist. Chem., Vol. 30, Number 2, 2005, p. 104
  4. ↑ Patricia A. Swain: Bernard Courtois (1777-1838), Famed for discovering Iodine (1811), and his life in Paris from 1798 . (PDF; 174 kB) Bull. Hist. Chem., Vol. 30, Number 2, 2005. 2007 Outstanding Paper Award. ( Memento of the original from June 27, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. American Chemical Society, Division of the History of Chemistry, accessed Nov. 12, 2008. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.scs.uiuc.edu
  5. ↑ Patricia A. Swain: Bernard Courtois (1777-1838), Famed for discovering Iodine (1811), and his life in Paris from 1798 . (PDF; 174 kB) Bull. Hist. Chem., Vol. 30, Number 2, 2005, p. 107
  6. ↑ Sabine Fechner: Exercises in the experimental lecture winter semester 2001/02. (PDF; 13.7 MB) p. 1
personal data
SURNAME Courtois, Bernard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French chemist, nitric boiler, discoverer of iodine
DATE OF BIRTH February 8, 1777
PLACE OF BIRTH Dijon
DATE OF DEATH September 27, 1838
Place of death Paris