Pierre-Auguste Adet

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Pierre Auguste Adet

Pierre-Auguste Adet (born May 17, 1763 in Nevers , † March 19, 1834 in Paris ) was a French doctor and chemist .

Live and act

He studied medicine and received his doctoral thesis Quaestio medico-chirurgica… An vulneribus & ulceribus succus gastricus? PhD in 1786 . Adet then initially worked as a doctor, and he was awarded the title of docteur-régent at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, Faculté de médecine de Paris .

With Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier and others, he began to work on the creation of a chemical nomenclature and became secretary of the scientific journal Annales de Chimie, founded in 1789 . In 1787, together with Jean-Henri Hassenfratz, he worked out a system of chemical sign language that, among other things, clarified the physical state of a substance. Compared to the system of the French chemist Étienne François Geoffroy (1672–1731), who constructed a separate symbol for each chemical substance, the system of Adet and Hassenfratz represented a great step forward. After all, they represented a chemical body as a combination of symbols in which each element was assigned a character, similar to the letter writing compared to the Geoffroy word writing system .

For example, the symbol for oxygen was “-” and that for carbon “(”. Thus, carbonic acid was represented with the symbol “(-”. For some elements, the respective first letter was used for the element in question, a development that has evolved Jöns Jakob Berzelius stands for this (see section Chemical Sign Language ).

Pierre-Auguste Adet was used as the successor for the agency of the mines (agence des mines) of the 1794 executed René Toussaint Daubancourt (1756-1794). He was also secretary to the Minister of the Navy and the Colonies, ministres français de la Marine et des Colonies , and at times commissioner for Saint-Domingue . Later, in 1795, he became the French ambassador to the United States of America . In this position he sent Georges-Henri-Victor Collot (1750-1805) to his explorations of the Ohio River and Mississippi River . During the American presidential campaign in 1796 he took an active part in Thomas Jefferson's side and was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society that same year . The diplomatic activities ended Adet in the year 1797. From 1803 he was prefect of the Nièvre department . In 1809 he was a member of the legislative body, Corps législatif . He was made Knight of the Legion of Honor , Légion d'honneur , promoted to officer in 1814 and knighted by the Napoleonic institution Noblesse d'Empire (see also endowment ) to Knight of the Empire, chevalier de l'Empire in 1808 .

He was an opponent of the phlogiston theory proposed by Georg Ernst Stahl .

Works (selection)

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jean-Henri Hassenfratz, Pierre-Auguste Adet: Treatise on the new characters to be used in chemistry. Paris 1787. ( digitized version )
  2. ↑ Ferenc Szabadváry: Antoine Laurent Lavoisier. The researcher and his time 1743–1794. Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest (1973), pp. 107-108.
  3. ↑ Winfried R. Pötsch, Annelore Fischer and Wolfgang Müller with the assistance of Heinz Cassebaum : Lexicon of important chemists , Bibliographisches Institut Leipzig, 1988, p. 9, ISBN 3-323-00185-0 .
  4. ^ Member History: Pierre A. Adet. American Philosophical Society, accessed April 6, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Adet, Pierre-Auguste
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Adet, Pierre Auguste
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French chemist
DATE OF BIRTH May 17, 1763
PLACE OF BIRTH Nevers
DATE OF DEATH March 19, 1834
Place of death Paris