Hyppolyte-Victor Collet-Descotils

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Hippolyte-Victor Collet-Descotils

Hyppolyte-Victor Collet-Descotils (born November 21, 1773 in Caen , † December 6, 1815 in Paris ) was a French naturalist, chemist and mineralogist .

Life

Collet-Descotils was the son of a lawyer and attended the College du Bois in Caen. He came to Paris in 1790 and successfully completed various courses in various scientific disciplines. In 1793 he was forced to enlist in the navy as a freshman to escape revolutionary fury ( French Revolution from 1789 to 1799) and was stationed in Cherbourg . When the École polytechnique was founded and the École des Mines was reorganized , he was given permission to return to Paris, and he studied at the École des Mines in Paris in 1794. Ambroise Fourcy (1778–1842) lists in his Histoire de l ' École Polytechnique from 1828, a. a. Collet-Descotils worked as a mining engineer at the École polytechnique in the training year 1794 to 1795.

Collet-Descotils was a student and friend of Louis-Nicolas Vauquelin (1763-1829). For a long time it was primarily focused on studying inorganic chemistry and its applications, such as metallurgy. Collet-Descotils was appointed engineer in 1798 and chief engineer, Ingénieur en chef , in 1809 . In this role he visited numerous mines in France and Italy.

He took part in Napoleon Bonaparte's Egyptian expedition from 1798 to 1801. He was also a member of the Institut d'Egypte in Cairo and, on his return to France, worked on the results of the expedition as a member of the commission. In 1815, a few months before his death, he was transferred to the position of director of the École des Mines de Paris .

In the collection of the Mémoires de Physique et de Chimie de la Société d'Arcueil , first published in 1807 , a scientific society around the chemists and scientists Claude Louis Berthollet (1748–1822) and Pierre Simon Laplace (1749–1827), who u . a. and Alexander von Humboldt belonged (1769-1859), Collet-Descotils is named as one of the nine founding members. From 1808 he was a corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences .

Scientific achievements

He confirmed u. a. the discovery of the element chromium by Vauquelin. The discovery of iridium is closely intertwined with that of platinum and other metals of the platinum group. Chemists working with Vauquelin and Collet-Descotils dissolved minerals in aqua regia (a mixture of hydrochloric acid HCl and nitric acid HNO 3 ) to create soluble salts. In 1803, however, they were unable to identify a black, insoluble residue, and so the discovery of iridium was reserved for Smithson Tennant (1761–1815) in 1804. With regard to vanadium , Collet-Descotils made an erroneous assumption. He believed the new element was just impure chrome. Vanadium was discovered in 1801 by Andrés Manuel del Río (1764–1849), a Spanish mineralogist and chemist, near Mexico City .

Works

  • Collet-Descotils, HV: Analysis de la mine brune de plomb de Zimapan . (1805) Ann. Chim., 53, 268-271

literature

  • Hunt, LB (1987): A History of Iridium . Platinum Metals Review 31 (1): 32-41. Retrieved September 15, 2008
  • Gay-Lussac, JL: Notice on HV Colle-Descotils, ingénieur en chef et professeur de chimie au corps royal des mines . Feugueray, Paris 1816.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biography in French
  2. ^ Fourcy, Ambroise: Histoire de l'École polytechnique . Chez l'Auteur, 1828
  3. ↑ Member entry of Hippolyte Victor de Collet-Descostils at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences , accessed on January 18, 2017.
  4. ↑ History of the discovery of vanadium PDF ( Memento from February 10, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
personal data
SURNAME Collet-Descotils, Hyppolyte-Victor
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Collet-Descotils, Hippolyte-Victor
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French naturalist, chemist and mineralogist
DATE OF BIRTH November 21, 1773
PLACE OF BIRTH Caen
DATE OF DEATH December 6, 1815
Place of death Paris