Essay: Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac

Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac was born on December 6th, 1778 in Saint-Leonard-de-Noblat. He was the eldest of five children born to a well respected lawyer, Antoine Gay, and his wife Leonarde Bourigner. Antoine Gay, who began the habit of calling his family the “Gay-Lussac’s” to attract care to their family estate neighboring St. Leonard.
Since a young boy, he was tutored at home and had a very comfortable upper-middle class life until the event known as the “French Revolution” broke out and took the world as he knew it to a close. Fearing for his life, Gay-Lussac’s tutor fled, and his father was imprisoned parting the family with no option but to send their 14-year-old son to Paris to take a set of private lessons and then attend boarding school.
During his studies in Paris he surely stunned someone in the new order, because young Joseph was ultimately elected to become a member of the Ecole Polytechnique, a brand new, revolutionary organization devoted to sweeping away the old Royal ideas and replacing them with those based on reason, order and discovery. Here he encountered and was mentored by Pierre Simon Laplace and Claude Louis Berthollet, both of whom had been understudies and supporters of the famous Antonine-Laurent Lavoisier. So they of course were all fascinated in oxygen and the chemistry of other gasses. The new, junior assistant, got a chance to see understand all about these breakthroughs, probably at Berthollet’s house near Arcueil, where a group of chemists met frequently to talk over current occurrences. He became the protégé of Claude Louis Berthollet and graduated in 1800. Following his graduation, he entered the civil engineering school, Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chausses. Eventually, he dropped out to pursue his interest in Chemistry. Then in 1801, he became a research assistant to Claude who was rather much impressed with the young Joseph’s ability. Claude was a main advancement in Joseph’s life and had even set up a laboratory in his family home in Arcueil.
Lussac’s early work was a wide-ranging examination on how the volume of many gases varies with temperature. English scientist, John Dalton, was individually considering the similar experience. They had both found, the volume “V” of all gases studied increased similarly with the higher temperature “T” when pressure “P” was held continuous. Each published his results around 1802, with Gay-Lussac’s experimental work being both more thorough and more specific than that of Dalton. However, the acclaim for this discovery predictably goes to neither Dalton nor Gay Lussac, but instead to Jacques Charles. Charles had done some initial work on the thermal expansion of gases in 1787. Although Charles never issued the results of his experiments, in his own logical autobiographies Gay-Lussac recognized hearing of Charles’s work. Thus, the law governing the thermal development of gases, while sometimes called Gay-Lussac’s law, has come to be known mainly as Charles’s law.
Gay-Lussac’s studies were not limited to the physical properties of gases. In 1804 Gay-Lussac took advantage of the world’s growing interest in ballooning and went on to take multiple flights to study both Earth’s magnetic field and to see how the temperature and composition of the atmosphere changed with increasing altitude. On his second flight, he then took samples of air while reaching a high altitude of 23,018 feet in a hydrogen balloon, which was a record that lasted for almost fifty years. Upon his return to Earth, he went forth to compare the gas samples to those taken at ground level and came to the conclusion that they were basically equal, this despite making note of a headache during the flight that very possibly resulted from the decreased oxygen levels at high altitude.
In 1808 Gay-Lussac published his “Law of Combining Volumes of Gases.” He determined that when different gases reacted, they would always do so in small whole number ratios. This was one of the greatest advancements of its time and helped form the basis for later atomic theory and how chemical reactions occur.
With his colleague Louis-Jacques Thénard (1777–1857), Gay-Lussac did considerable work with electrochemistry to produce significant amounts of elemental sodium and potassium, highly reactive and useful substances that were used to isolate and discover the element boron. Gay-Lussac also completed extensive studies of acids and bases and was the first to deduce that there were binary (two element) acids such as hydrochloric acid in addition to the known oxygen-containing acids like sulfuric acid. Additionally, he was able to determine the chemical composition of prussic acid to be hydrocyanic acid (HCN) and was considered the foremost practitioner of organic analysis.
Gay-Lussac’s analytical work with gases and articulation of two key laws on the combination and expansion of gases provided scientists with insights into matter and its characteristics.
During his lifetime, Gay-Lussac mentored many students. These young scientists such as the German chemist Justus von Liebig, went on to disseminate his techniques throughout Europe and made their own discoveries. Gay-Lussac’s first gas law provided the groundwork for Amedeo Avogadro to determine that all gases contain the same number of molecules at the same temperature and pressure, a principle now known as Avogadro’s Law. It also helped Lord Kelvin develop the temperature scale that starts at absolute zero (the theoretically lowest possible temperature), which is now called the “Kelvin scale”. Gay-Lussac’s finding of cyanogen opened a new field of study; the cyanides.
Gay-Lussac’s work directly persuaded the practical world. In 1832, Lussac’s research on silver had contributed to standardization of silver purity used by the French Mint over the next 50 years. His new candle aided the general population on a regular basis by offering further light and stability in warm weather.
In later years, Gay-Lussac continued to advance science. He developed a precise method for analyzing the alcoholic content of liquors and patented a method for the manufacture of sulfuric acid. His last publication on aqua regia which is a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acids that dissolves gold or platinum came out the year before his death in 1850. Gay-Lussac was a topnotch experimentalist and theoretician. More than twenty-five years after Gay-Lussac died, the prominent chemist Marcellin Bertholet once said, “We all teach…the chemistry of Lavoisier and Gay-Lussac”, a great tribute to two outstanding, and very well rounded scientists of the era.