James Chappuis

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Louis Philibert Claude James Chappuis (born November 10, 1854 in Besançon , † January 29, 1934 in Paris ) was a French chemist and physicist.

Life

He was the son of the philosophy teacher Charles Chappuis (1822-1897, from 1845-1869 in Besançon) and of Louise Lydie Berthot (-1909), a granddaughter of the mathematician Nicolas Berthot in Dijon . He went to school in Besançon, Caen and Grenoble . From 1874 he attended the École normal supérieure (ENS) in Paris, worked as a physics teacher in Montauban in 1877 and in Poitiers in 1878 . Back in Paris, he was appointed Maître de conférences at the ENS from 1878 to 1882 and from 1879 as Agrégé . In 1881 he became professor of physics at the École centrale des arts et manufactures , and in 1882 he received his doctorate with a spectroscopic study on ozone . Most recently he headed the research laboratory of the Societé du Gaz de Paris .

Marriage and children are unknown. Chappuis is buried in the family vault in Chailly-sur-Armançon . He was the uncle of the eponymous James Chappuis, director of the Citroën automobile factory , who died in 1926 and was also buried in the crypt in Chaily. He should not be confused with the Swiss physicist Pierre Chappuis (1855-1916), also professor of physics at the École Centrale.

research

After the Swiss chemist Jacques-Louis Soret had described the structure of ozone as a triatomic modification of oxygen (O 3 ) in 1863 , several researchers at the end of the 1870s used spectroscopic measurements to detect ozone in the air , including Chappuis in 1880. Furthermore, Chappuis was probably the first of the researchers working with ozone to recognize that this gas colors visible light blue. He attributed this to the fact that ozone absorbs yellow, orange and red light. Ozone in the higher layers of the atmosphere at low air pressure and temperatures is therefore an important element in the blue color of the sky. This effect is now known as Chappuis absorption . Furthermore, in 1882 Paul Hautefeuille and Chappuis published the results of their laboratory tests, in which they succeeded in isolating ozone and condensing it as a deep blue liquid at temperatures below -112 degrees Celsius.

However, Rayleigh scattering was already known in the 1880s and, from the point of view of contemporary scientists, was completely sufficient to explain the blue sky. Thus Chappuis' conjecture was forgotten. It was not until 1952 that the US geophysicist Edward Hulburt realized that the blue color of the sky after sunset during the so-called blue hour is not due to Rayleigh scattering, but can only be explained by taking into account the Chappuis absorption caused by the ozone layer . The French meteorologist Jean Dubois suspected in 1951 that the Earth's shadow arc on the horizon ("Earth's shadow") was also due to Chappuis absorption. The thesis is doubted.

In 1896, Chappuis was one of the first to use Crookes tubes .

In 2008 the physician Jean François Moreau described Chappuis as “one of the forgotten pioneers of clinical radiology”: In the 1890s, Chappuis had experimented with X-rays , for example for intrauterine photography.

Publications (selection)

  • with Alphonse Berget: Leçons de physique générale, 3 volumes, Paris 1891–1892, 2nd edition 1899–1911, 3rd edition 1923
  • with Alphonse Berget: Cours de physique, Paris 1898
  • with Alexis Jacquet: Éléments de physique industrial, Paris, 3rd edition 1914, 11th edition 1949

Obituaries, bibliography, illustration

  • Le Temps , January 31, 1934, p. 4
  • Bulletin , Swiss Electrotechnical Association, Volume 25 (1934), p. 393
  • Revue générale de l'électricité , issue 9 of March 3, 1934, p. 265
  • Bibliography: IdRef sv
  • Drawing in: Jean Francois Moreau: Un siècle de radiologie dans les hôpitaux de l'université paris v rené descartes 1896-1996 , La Lettre de l'adamap No. 8 of March 20, 2008, p. 5

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Françoise Huguet, Boris Noguès: Les professeurs des facultés des lettres et des sciences en France au XIXe siècle (1808-1880) , 2011, sv Chappuis, James; Berthot, Nicolas, online , accessed February 1, 2015
  2. ↑ Association amicale de secours des anciens élèves de l'Ecole Normale Supérieure: Supplément historique 2000. Paris: ENS, 2000, p 153
  3. ↑ André Chervel: Les lauréats the concours d'agrégation de l'enseignement secondaire 1821-1950. Paris: INRP, 1993, p. 45
  4. ↑ James Chappuis: Étude spectroscopique sur l'ozone, Paris 1882
  5. ↑ Le Figaro , January 20, 1926, online, accessed February 3, 2015
  6. ↑ Johann Christian Poggendorff : Biographical-literary concise dictionary for the history of exact science , Volume 4, Part 1, 1904, p. 239 sv
  7. ↑ The chemical reports summarized, "that in the highest air layers the ozone makes up a considerable part of the atmosphere and the blue color of the sky perhaps comes partly from the color of the ozone", reports of the German Chemical Society , Volume 14 (1881), P. 105 ( digitized version ). In the original, Chappuis announced, “que l'ozone possède, lorsqu'on l'examine sous une épaisseur suffisante, une très remarquable coloration bleu de ciel. [...] La comparaison des specters permettra d'apprécier la proportion d'ozone contenue dans les couches d'air traversées par les rayons lumineux, et par suite de reconnaître si ce gaz suffit à lui seul pour expliquer le bleu du ciel, ou s'il n'a qu'une part dans la production de ce phénomène. ”James Chappuis: Sur le specter d'absorption de l'ozone. In: Comptes rendus de l'Académie des sciences , Volume 91 (1880), p. 985 f. ( Digitized version )
  8. ↑ a b Götz Hoeppe: Why the Sky is Blue. Discovering the Color of Life Princeton University Press, 2007, ISBN 0-691-12453-1 , p. 241 ( Google books )
  9. ↑ Paul Hautefille, James Chappuis: Sur la liquéfaction de l'ozone et sur la couleur à l'état gaseux. In: Comptes rendus de l'Académie des sciences , Volume 91 (1880), pp. 552-525, German in the reports of the German Chemical Society , Volume 13 (1880), p. 2408. Summary: Joseph Stewart Fruton: Proteins, Enzymes, Genes. The interplay of Chemistry and Biology, 1972, p. 255. Götz Hoeppe, The blue hour of ozone, in: Sterne und Weltraum , Volume 40 (2001), pp. 632-639. Götz Hoeppe: sky light. Mirror image of the earth's climate, in: funded, 2003, online , accessed on February 2, 2015
  10. ^ Raymond L. Lee (Jr.): Measuring and modeling twilight's Belt of Venus. In: Applied Optics. Volume 54, pp. B194 – B203, 2015, doi : 10.1364 / AO.54.00B194 , online , accessed on February 2, 2015
  11. ↑ Jean Francois Moreau: Un siècle de radiologie dans les hôpitaux de l'université paris v rené descartes 1896-1996 , in: La Lettre de l'adamap No. 8, March 20, 2008, pp. 3–14, here p. 5, online, accessed February 2, 2015
  12. ↑ H. Varnier, James Chappuis: Un premier résultat encourageant de photographie intra-utérine par les rayon X. In: Annales de gynécologie et d'obstétrique , Volume 45 (1896), p. 185, online, accessed on February 3, 2015
  13. ^ Obituary, accessed February 2, 2015
  14. ↑ online , accessed February 2, 2015
  15. ↑ online, accessed February 2, 2015
personal data
SURNAME Chappuis, James
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Chappuis, Louis Philibert Claude James (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French chemist and physicist
DATE OF BIRTH November 10, 1854
PLACE OF BIRTH Besançon
DATE OF DEATH January 29, 1934
Place of death Paris