Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac

PHYSICIST NAME: Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac
STUDENT NAME: Angela Mari Peralta

BIOGRAPHY

Name: Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac
Birth Date: 1778
Death Date: May 9, 1850
Place of Birth: Saint-Léonard, France
Nationality: French
Gender: Male
Occupations: chemist, scientist, physicist

CONTRIBUTIONS

•In 1802 Gay-Lussac’s started his career in physics

•He was only 24 years old. And published a new fundamental Law of Physics that explain the behavior of gases.

•Gay-Lussac's careful experiments proved that different gases would all expand by the same amount with the same rise in temperature. Now known as Gay-Lussac's law (sometimes called Charles's law)

•Not content to remain in the laboratory, Gay-Lussac took to the sky in a balloon, armed with various instruments to test Earth's magnetic field, the atmosphere's electricity, and the composition of high-altitude gases.

•Not content to remain in the laboratory, Gay-Lussac took to the sky in a balloon, armed with various instruments to test Earth's magnetic field, the atmosphere's electricity, and the composition of high-altitude gases. The balloon tests showed that the composition of the air and the magnetic force of Earth were the same at high altitudes as they were on the ground. After these flights.

•He spent two years studying Earth's magnetic intensity at ground level with his collaborator Alexander von Humboldt.

•In the name of French nationalism, Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) funded construction of a bigger, more powerful battery for Gay-Lussac and a coworker, Louis Thénard, to perform similar experiments. But after all, the battery wasn't needed; the two scientists were able to make potassium and sodium by purely chemical means, without electricity.

•He also discovered chemical element boron; he collaborates with Thenard in 1808.

•Around the same time, Gay-Lussac was also trying to determine the proportions in which various gases combined with each other. Collaborating with Humboldt, Gay-Lussac found that when gases form compounds, they always combine in simple proportions.

Example:
Two parts of hydrogen by volume would react with one part oxygen to form water, or two parts carbon monoxide with one part oxygen to form carbon dioxide.

And because of that Some scientists believe that this discovery, called the law of combining volumes, was even more important than Gay-Lussac's earlier gas law.

•Some dispute with Davy over who had discovered chlorine, Gay-Lussac went on to study iodine, which had first been isolated by Bernard Courtois (1777-1838). Again, Gay-Lussac's research overlapped Davy's, but it was Gay-Lussac who gave the element its name, after the Greek word for "violet-colored.”

•Gay-Lussac then performed a series of experiments on cyanides, proving conclusively that prussic acid contains no oxygen. At the time, chemists supposed that oxygen was present in all acids (in fact, hydrogen is). During these analyses, Gay-Lussac produced a carbon-nitrogen gas that he named cyanogen, from the Greek for "dark blue." He carefully examined several cyanide compounds, as well as a popular dye called Prussian blue.

•Although Gay-Lussac is better known for his achievements in inorganic chemistry, he and Thenard also studied organic compounds. They divided vegetable substances into three classes, one of which is now called carbohydrates, and they were the first to determine the elementary composition of sugar.

•Gay-Lussac also developed a new type of candle that greatly improved on the candles of his day.

•Gay-Lussac may also have been one of the first environmental scientists. At the time, noxious gases (nitrogen oxides) were released into the atmosphere during the manufacture of sulfuric acid. Gay-Lussac devised a way to capture these polluting gases in an absorption tower. His method was later adopted in a process to recover gases.

OBJECT OF INTEREST

I choose Joseph Louise Gay Lussac as excellent physicist. Because he has the passion discovering new elements and he has the eager to prove what he wanted to prove and collaborate with other Physicist. His important work was done while he was young. At the young age of 24 he discovers a lot of things. Poverty is not a barrier to success, Joseph Louise Gay even though he live in a large family and support them he didn’t discontinue his dream to be a chemist, scientist, and physicist.