Joseph Louis Proust

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Joseph Louis Proust drawn by Ambroise Tardieu (1788–1841) around 1795

Joseph Louis Proust (born September 26, 1754 in Angers , † July 5, 1826 there ) was a French chemist .

Live and act

As the third son of the pharmacist Joseph Proust and his wife Marie Rosalie, née Sartre, Proust initially trained as a pharmacist with his father. His parents had been married since April 30, 1748. He attended a local college of the oratorians , Collège des Oratoriens . Afterwards he studied a. a. in Paris with Hilaire Marin Rouelle (1718–1779) in the Jardin des Plantes chemistry and became his student. After completing his studies, he first worked as a teacher at the Lycée du Palais Royal and later in the role of senior pharmacist at the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière .

At the end of 1778 Proust first started his professional activity in Spain, the country in which he would spend most of his professional life. From 1778 to 1780 he was a professor of chemistry in the Real Seminario de Vergara . Proust stayed in Vergara only for a short time and returned to France in June 1780.

Academia de Artillería de Segovia

On December 11, 1781, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier founded the first museum of technology ( musée technique ), in which he organized physical experiments and lectures on natural science, especially for the aristocratic public. Until 1784 Proust taught chemistry at the musée technique . During this time in Paris, Proust was closely associated with Pilâtre and gained aerostatic experience ( hot air balloon ). Both performed a balloon flight on June 23, 1784 in Versailles .

At the request of the Spanish government in 1785 and on the basis of an agreement between the Spanish King Charles III. and France's Louis XVI. as well as a recommendation from Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier , Proust began teaching chemistry again in Spain . The offer consisted of a financially lucrative position for him and so he went back to Spain in 1786. He first taught in Madrid , but in 1788 he moved to Segovia as a professor of chemistry at the Real Colegio de Artillería de Segovia , where chemistry had been made a compulsory subject. Proust taught and experimented there and also carried out geological and mineralogical studies and analyzes for the government.

From 1791 he worked in the same position in Salamanca and subsequently, from April 1799, again in the Spanish capital. On a Saturday, June 30, 1798, Proust married the French woman Rose Anne Chêtelain Daubigné († 1817), who lived in Segovia. Both had no children.

In Madrid he had a newly organized chemical laboratory , which was one of the best existing facilities. This laboratory was destroyed during the occupation by Napoleonic troops. Proust returned to France towards the end of 1806 for unclear reasons. At first he lived in modest circumstances in Craon (Mayenne) and spent a lot of time in his family business, which he had taken over in the Loire Valley, Val de Loire . Proust and his wife fell ill around 1810. She died in 1817 and Proust moved his center of life again to Angers , where he took over the pharmacy in 1820 from his brother François Jacques Proust (1756-1808), who was in poor health.

Monument at the entrance of the Real Colegio de Artillería de Segovia

Scientific achievements

He formulated the law of constant proportions, one of the basic chemical principles. The formulation of the law, in its various versions between the years 1794 and 1799, brought him into a public dispute with another French chemist Claude Louis Berthollet , who defended the variability in the composition of the compounds.

«Lorsque deux ou plusieurs corps simples s'unissent pour former un composé défini, leur combinaison s'effectue toujours selon un même rapport pondéral. »

"If two or more simple substances form a certain chemical compound or combine, the combination is always to be understood along a constant weight ratio or characteristic mass ratio."

- Joseph Louis Proust (1794)

He dealt with the chemistry of tannin (1798) and citric acid (1801). He took up other food chemistry problems: in 1802 he succeeded in detecting glucose in must . Carbohydrate chemistry, and especially sugar, was deepened between 1806 and 1809. In 1818 cheese production found his interest. In doing so he discovered the amino acid leucine .

Proust was one of the leading analysts of his time and, after extensive investigations into copper carbonate , tin oxides and iron sulfides, established the law of constant proportions (see also chemical reaction ).

He also developed hydrogen sulfide precipitation as an analytical method.

Honors

Works (selection)

Joseph Louis Proust, David d'Angers (1831).
  • Annales de Historia Natural , together with Christian Herrgen , Domingo García Fernández and Antonio José Cavanilles , 1799
  • Différentes observations de chimie (1805)
  • Mémoire sur le sucre de raisin (1808)
  • Recherches sur le meilleur emploi des patates, ou pommes de terre , Paris: Mme Huzard, juin 1818, in-8 ° (uncertain)
  • Sur une analogie remarquable entre les eaux de quelques parties du golfe de Californie et celles des lacs de Sodome et d'Urmia en Perse (1821)
  • Sur l'existence vraisemblable du mercure dans les eaux de l'Océan (1821)
  • Essai sur une des causes qui peuvent amener la formation du calcul (1824)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Seymour Mauskopf in Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. ↑ Genealogy
  3. ^ List of members since 1666: Letter P. Académie des sciences, accessed on February 7, 2020 (French).
  4. ↑ Member entry of Joseph Louis Proust (with picture) at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences , accessed on February 10, 2016.
  5. ^ FS Beudant : Proustite, argent antimonié sulfuré en partie . In: Traité Élémentaire de Minéralogie . 2nd Edition. Chez Verdière Libraire-Éditeur, Paris 1832, p.  445–447 ( rruff.info [PDF; 122 kB ; accessed on April 19, 2018]).
  6. ↑ Alexander von Humboldt : Essay on Cuba. Irene Prüfer Leske, 2002, p. 318 , accessed on April 19, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Proust, Joseph Louis
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French chemist
DATE OF BIRTH September 26, 1754
PLACE OF BIRTH Angers
DATE OF DEATH July 5, 1826
Place of death Angers