Everything about Henri Victor Regnault totally explained
Henri Victor Regnault (b.
July 21,
1810 – d.
January 19,
1878) was a
French chemist and physicist best known for his careful measurements of the thermal properties of gases. He was an early
thermodynamicist and was mentor to
William Thomson in the late 1840s.
Biography
Born in
Aachen in 1810, he moved to
Paris following the death of his parents at the age of eight. There, he worked for an upholstery firm until he was eighteen. In
1830, he was admitted to the
École Polytechnique, and in
1832 he graduated from the
École des mines.
Working under
Justus von Liebig at
Gießen, Regnault distinguished himself in the nascent field of
organic chemistry by synthesizing several
chlorinated hydrocarbons (for example
vinyl chloride,
polyvinyl chloride,
dichloromethane), and he was appointed professor of chemistry at the University of
Lyon. In
1840, he was appointed the chair of chemistry of the Ecole Polytechnique, and in
1841, he became a professor of Physics in the
College de France.
Beginning in 1843, he began compiling extensive numerical tables on the properties of steam. These were published in
1847, and led to his receiving the
Rumford Medal of the
Royal Society of London and appointment as
Chief Engineer of Mines. In
1854 he was appointed director of the
porcelain works at
Sèvres.
At Sèvres, he continued work on the thermal properties of matter. He designed sensitive
thermometers,
hygrometers,
hypsometers and
calorimeters, and measured the
specific heats of many substances and the
coefficient of thermal expansion of gases. In the course of this work, he discovered that not all gases expand equally when heated and that
Boyle's Law is only an approximation, especially at temperatures near a substance's boiling point.
Regnault was also an avid amateur
photographer. He introduced the use of
pyrogallic acid as a developing agent, and was one of the first photographers to use paper negatives. In 1854, he became the founding president of the Société Française de Photographie.
In
1871, his laboratory at Sèvres was destroyed and his son
Alex-Georges-Henri Regnault killed, both as a result of the
Franco-Prussian War. He retired from science the next year, never recovering from these losses.
Regnault crater, on the
Moon, is named after him. Some have suggested that the
ideal gas constant (
R = 8.31441 J/(mol·K)) is also named after him.
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