Joseph François Malherbe

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Joseph François Marie Malherbe (born October 31, 1733 in Rennes , † February 17, 1827 in Paris ) was a French chemist, clergyman and scholar.

Malherbe was a Benedictine monk and in the 1770s a teacher of philosophy at the Saint-Germain-des-Prés Abbey . After losing his post due to the French Revolution , he was a librarian at the Court of Cassation and then at the Tribunate . After all, he was censor of the libraries in 1812 and during the Restoration he had the title of royal honorary censor.

In 1777 he developed a process for producing soda , which was implemented in the PL Athénas factory in Javel near Paris from 1779 and by Jean-Antoine Chaptal in Montpellier after 1790 . The starting point was sodium sulfate (Glauber's salt, obtained from table salt and sulfuric acid), which was reduced to sodium sulfide with carbon in a flame furnace, which was then converted into soda with iron. It was a forerunner of Nicolas Leblanc's later Leblanc process for extracting soda (1789, factory 1791). Henri Louis Duhamel du Monceau had already shown in 1730 that it was possible in principle to use Glauber's salt for the production of soda . In 1772 Malherbe received a prize from the Bureau de consultation des arts for his method of making soda. In the 1790s he worked on improvements to soap.

He was involved in the edition of Ambrose the Benedictines and after the death of François Nicolas Bourotte entrusted with the Histoire de Languedoc and dealt with the history of the USA.

He translated the Physica subterranea by the alchemist Johann Joachim Becher into French.

literature

  • Entry in: Biographie Universelle ou Dictionnaire Historique, Paris, Volume 4, 1838, google books

Web links

  • Winfried R. Pötsch (lead), Annelore Fischer, Wolfgang Müller: Lexicon of important chemists , Harri Deutsch 1989, p. 234 (incorrectly with the addition of de la Metherie)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Entry in the biography Universelle
  2. ↑ Probably a confusion with Jean-Claude Delamétherie , who in 1789 made further suggestions based on Malherbe, which then directly inspired Leblanc
personal data
SURNAME Malherbe, Joseph François
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Malherbe, Joseph François Marie
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French chemist and historian
DATE OF BIRTH October 31, 1733
PLACE OF BIRTH Rennes
DATE OF DEATH February 17, 1827
Place of death Paris