Gay-Lussac (1778-1850): A view of
chemistry, industry and society in post-
revolutionary France
Maurice Crosland
This year marks the bicentenary of the births of two distinguished chemists, Joseph Gay-Lussac and Humphry
Davy. This study of the life of Gay-Lussac shows how his work was related to that of Davy as well as to that of his
French contemporaries. His keen interest in the application of chemistry earned him some criticism in his lifetime,
but in retrospect can be seen to have contributed to his professional stature.
On the occasion of a centenary of a famous scientist it might not
be too difficult for a working scientist to reach for a standard
biography and pen another appreciation of the Great Man. Such
an appreciation has a certain value, in reminding us that Science
is the work of man rather than a disembodied and impersonal
authority. The danger is that, if deprived of original information
about the scientist in question, the author uses his imagination to
embellish the standard account. Historians of science have to
return to the sources as far as is possible, distinguishing the
primary sources comprising the great man’s publications and
speeches from secondary accounts published by friends,
relatives, and followers. During a man’s life there is a certain
sensitivity about his private affairs and correspondence and the
author of an obituary is rarely given unrestricted access to all the
documentary evidence. With the passage of time such sensitivity
is lessened, so that if documents have not been thrown away, it is
sometimes possible to get a fuller picture in a later generation.
Certainly one can get a better perspective.
In the case of Gay-Lussac we are lucky. If one has the patience
to correspond with and visit all the institutions with which the
scientist was connected during his lifetime, if one is prepared to
track down the descendants, then with their kind co-operation
and some free time one can put together a story possibly more
complete than was available to many of his contemporaries.
None of them, of course, would have known what part of the
scientist’s work would be considered significant by the 200th
anniversary of his birth, on 6th December 1778. Indeed, even
today there is a considerable choice and in a short article one
must be selective.
The work of Gay-Lussac covered a wide area of pure and
applied chemistry and physics. His life, too, embraced the full
range of the professional chemist from the academic to the
industrial. He was a schoolboy at the time of the French
Revolution and he benefited by the new scientific education which
was made available when the Revolutionary movement had
reached its most constructive phase. Without the Revolution he
might have followed his father’s footsteps and taken up law as a
career, but new evidence which has recently come to light in
family letters show that the creation of the Ecole PoIytechnique in
1795 made possible for him what was probably the best scientific
education anywhere in the world at the time.
Under the patronage of C. L. Berthollet, Gay-Lussac became
one of the first members of the circle which met at Arcueil a few
miles outside of Paris and which developed in the famous Society
of Arcueil 111. In this circle he developed the law of combining
volumes of gases which has since borne his name. He
collaborated with Thenard in work on the newly discovered
potassium and prepared the first sample of boron. Much of his
Maurice Crosland. M.Sc., Ph.D.
Was born in London in 193 1. A graduate of the University
taught at the University of Leeds. He is now Professor
Science at the Universitv of Kent at Canterburv. where
Philosophy and Social delations of Science v&s established
the author of several books on the history of science
history of chemistry. His latest book is a detailed study of Gay-Lussac.
on manuscript sources: it will be published in 1978
unwersity Press.
52
work in these years was carried out in conscious rivalry with
Humphry Davy. Neither was the discoverer of iodine but both
worked on this element simultaneously, giving rise to priority
claims on both sides. Gay-Lussac did pioneering work on the new
compound hydriodic acid and introduced the concept of a
hydracid in contradiction to Lavoisier’s theory that all acids
contained oxygen. Gay-Lussac’s discovery and analysis of
cyanogen in 1815 is reckoned .by J. R. Partington to be
‘outstanding’. His interest in vapour density gave a new and
fruitful approach to the qaulitative analysis of compounds. In
organic chemistry he pioneered the method of analysis using
copper oxide 121,a method later perfected by J. J. Berzelius and
Justus von Liebig. Liebig was probably Gay-Lussac’s most
famous student and co-worker and when he returned to Germany
it was, he said, to be to his students what Gay-Lussac had been to
him.
Higher education
Gay-Lussac took the competitive examination for entrance to the
Ecole Polytechnique 131in 1797 and passed. This entitled him to
an excellent university type education in mathematics, physics
and chemistry and at no cost to himself. The fact that fees and
maintenance grants were paid by the state was of great
importance to the young student, since family fortunes had
declined in the revolution. Gay-Lussac, as one of the better
students, was allowed to stay a third year at the Polytechnique
and during this time he carried out some research on bleaching
with Berthollet, one of France’s leading chemists and a friend of
the new head of state Napoleon Bonaparte. Berthollet invited him
to be his assistant at his new country house and private
laboratory at Arcueil. What Berthollet could not do at this time
was to find an official position for his protege. When Gay-Lussac
graduated from the Polytechnique he therefore opted for further
training at the Ecole des Ponts et Chauskes,a school opened in
1747 which had acquired a good academic reputation and could
provide him with a further grant. Some light on the possibility of
Gay-Lussac taking up an alternative career in civil engineering
rather than science is provided in a letter written by the student to
his mother on 11 February 180 1:
‘You were very happy to learn that I was staying in Berthollet’s
house and that I enjoy some great advantages there . . . I am
going to spend some time in the country [at Arcueill with
Citizen and Madame Berthollet. It is quite close to Paris . . .
You will say what about your school [School of Bridges and
Highways], will you just leave it? No dear mother I will not
leave it because it provides me with my bread and butter. As,
however, we can do the work we are given at home, I work in
my room but still go quite frequently to my school. I have made
myself useful to the director [Pronyl who is a great friend of
Citizen Berthollet, so that I have nothing to worry about. So
of London, he later you can be quite reassured on that point and you may believe
of the History of
a unit for the Historv.
that I will not in any way neglect my school-because it is a
in 1974. He is great source of support to me. My work in this area [i.e. civil
in France, and on the engineering] should lead me to a situation which will be my
based refuge if fortune goes against me.’ 141
by the Cambridge
This is a reminder that the most obvious career for a student at
the school was engineering whereas one could only become a
scientist after pursuing successfulresearch and perhaps finding a
post in higher education.
Gas laws
Gay-Lussac’s first research memoir came in the following year
when he was still officially an engineering student. Not many
scientists have published such an important first paper, since
Gay-Lussac was concerned with no lessa question than the basic
law of the thermal expansion of gases 151.He carried out a
series of carefully executed experiments on air, hydrogen,
Figure 1 Gay-Lussac (British Museum).
oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, hydrogen chloride, sulphur
dioxide, nitrous oxide, and ammonia over the temperature range
O”-100° C. He concluded that all gasesexpand equally and gave
a coefficient of thermal expansion as 0.00375 per o C. At the
sametime, and quite independently, John Dalton was doing some
similar work but with cruder apparatus and less accuracy [61.
Another worker in the same field was J. A. C. Charles who
anticipated some of Gay-Lussac’s research but had obtained
discordant results and had not published his work. The law,
which is generally referred to as ‘Charles’ law’, would more
properly be called ‘Gay-Lussac’s law’, although this name is now
usually applied to another relationship, that between the
combining volumes of gases.
Gay-Lussac was particularly concerned to find regularities in
nature. In 1804 he had made a balloon ascent, rising to a record
height of 7000 m and had not only collected meteorological data
but had looked for some regularity connecting, for example,
altitude and temperature [71. His most successful correlation
came in 1808 when he studied the combining volumes of various
acidic gases and ammonia and then looked carefully at the
combining volumes of several other gases. Gay-Lussac
concluded that ‘the compounds of gaseoussubstanceswith each
other are always formed in very simple ratios, so that
representing one of the terms by unity, the other is 1, or 2, or at
most 3.’ [81
Gay-Lussac came to consider the volumetric composition
rather than the gravimetric composition as representing its
natural composition. Thus he thought of water as a compound of
two parts of hydrogen to one of oxygen. This fitted in well with
Lavoisier’s theory of acidity, which considered oxygen as an
END. 2.2-e
Figure 2 Representation of Gay-Lussac’s balloon ascent, 1804.
(from Appleton’s “Beginners’ Hand-Book of Chemistqd.
acidifying principle 19). Water was neutral becauseits acidifying
property was marked by the excessof hydrogen. But there were
problems here and already Berthollet had suggestedthat prussic
acid might exhibit acidic properties in the total absenceof oxygen.
Gay-Lussac confirmed that prussic acid had no oxygen and
introduced a new category of ‘hydracids’ to classify such
apparent exceptions to the oxygen theory as hydrocyanic acid,
hydrochloric acid, and hydriodic acid [ 101.
Elements
Gay-Lussac made important contributions to the isolation and
study of new elements. Much of this work was done in
collaboration with L. J. Thenard. They contributed in different
ways to the study of the halogens, to sodium and potassium, and
they were the first to isolate boron. Gf course the early nineteenth
century was a particularly exciting time for the study of elements
since it was only in 1789 that Lavoisier had drawn up a list of
elements as the building block of the new chemistry and
ambitious scientists might hope to add to the list or modify it in
someway. It was Humphry Davy who in 1807 showed that soda
and potash, regarded by Lavoisier as simple substances,could be
decomposedby the new electric pile. Although he was the first to
isolate sodium and potassium, the quantities he obtained were so
tiny that he could not examine properly the properties of these
substances. This was done by Gay-Lussac and Thenard who
obtained these very reactive metals in reasonable quantities by
reduction of soda and potash with iron filings [ 111.The extreme
reactivity of potassium fascinated the French chemists, who tried
out a number of reactions including those with gases. Several
compound gasescontaining oxygen were decomposedand Gay-
Lussac made a careful note of the volumetric changes.
According to Lavoisier acids were compounds of different
radicals with excessof oxygen. If therefore the oxygen could be
removed with a powerful reducing agent, the radical would be
isolated. Gay-Lussac and Thenard accordingly heated boracic
acid with potassium in a copper tube. After an exothermic
reaction an olive grey mixture was produced from which they
were able to extract the comparatively inert radical an element
which they namedbore (boron) [ 121.
53
 In further experiments with potassium they prepared nearly
anhydrous hydrofluoric acid by distilling calcium chloride with
concentrated sulphuric acid in a lead retort [ 131.It was not until
1886 that F. F. H. Moissan overcame all the difficulties involved
in the isolation of fluorine. However on at least two occasions
Gay-Lussac was engaged in experiments with potassium, and
after an explosion in 1808it was fearedthat he might lose his sight
entirely. The French chemists then tried to decompose the
greenish-yellow gas then thought of as a compound and called
‘oxygenated muriatic acid’. Gay-Lussac and Thenard found that
even carbon at white heat would not decomposethe gas and they
suspected that it could not therefore contain oxygen 1141.
However, Berthollet persuaded them to present this as no more
than a hypothesis but when Davy read their work he jumped to
the obvious conclusion that this was after all a simple substance,
for which he proposed the name ‘chlorine’ [ 151.
Davy and Gay-Lussac were both involved in the study of
iodine. The saltpetre manufacturer Bernard Courtois had noticed
in 1811 that the mother liquor of varec (kelp) produced a violet
vapour when tested with sulphuric acid. He was, however, too
busy to study this further and passed on his results to a young
friend Nicolas Clement who wrote up some of this work and
presented it to the Academy in the hope of drawing favourable
attention to himself. Gay-Lussac and Thenard were membersof
the Academy and they were asked to examine Clement’s work.
This they did but, exceeding their brief, they carried out further
studies of this interesting new substance. The subsequent story
would be simpler if this work had not been carried out in
November 1813, when Davy was passing through Paris. Davy
hoped to solve the problem of the new substance independently
and if possible before the French chemists. There is conflicting
evidence of priority but the first detailed report was published in
the Moniteur on Sunday 12 December. Here Gay-Lussac and
Thenard announced a new element which they proposed to call
iode from the purple colour of its vapour (Greek ion = purple).
They also mentioned that it formed an acid analogous to
hydrochloric acid. Davy, too, published somenotes on iodine but
it was Gay-Lussac who, after further detailed research, wrote a
complete monograph on the new element and its more important
compounds 1161.
Gay-Lussac’s research on iodine led him to the isolation of
cyanogen (171. Reasoning that there was an analogy between
hydrogen iodide and hydrocynanic acid, and having examined
the element iodine, he successfully isolated the radical cyanogen.
This was ‘a body which, though compound, acts the part of a
simple substance’. He claimed that his discovery opened a new
field of research,which indeed it would have done if chemists had
regarded his discovery as belonging to the new scienceof organic
chemistry. His research was, however, looked upon as a
contribution to mineral chemistry and the important implications
which his work had for the radical theory in organic chemistry
were not worked out.
Professor and editor
Gay-Lussac was an important figure in French higher education
and in the scientific establishment. When Napoleon founded
Faculties of Science in 1808-the first faculties of science
anywhere in the world-Gay-Lussac was appointed professor of
physics. In 1810 he succeeded Fourcroy as professor of
chemistry at the Ecole Polytechnique. At the Polytechnique he
lectured to a carefully selectedaudience but the Faculty lectures
were open to the public and Gay-Lussac lectured regularly in a
large auditorium. The Scotsman, Sir Robert Christison, who
attended science lectures in Paris in 1820, provides us with the
following comment:
‘Gay-Lussac was perhaps the most persuasive lecturer I have
ever heard. His figure was slender and handsome, his
countenance comely, his expression winning, his voice gentle
but firm and clear, his articulation perfect, his diction terse and
choice, his manner most attractive, and his lecture was a
superlative specimen of continuous and unassailable
experimental reasoning’ [ 181.
54
The popularity of his lectures led certain commercial interests to
produce textbooks of physics and chemistry, sold as his lectures
but without his approval. He had hoped to write a book on the
principles of chemistry but he only got as far as a preliminary
draft which he askedhis family to bum at the time of his death.
Gay-Lussac was elected to the Academy of Sciencesin 1806
and sat on innumerable commissions on problems proposed by
the government and on research submitted by other scientists. He
was elected president of the Academy in 1822 and again in 1834.
He exerted another kind of authority through his editorship ofthe
Annales de chimie et de physique, founded in 1816, with Gay-
Lussac taking responsibility for the chemistry content and Arago
for the physics. There is no doubt that during his lifetime this was
the leading journal of physical science.He died on 9th May 1850.
Applied science
Gay-Lussac’s best known work was in pure sciencebut it would
be a mistake not to consider also his many contributions to
applied science. He had inherited from his mentor Berthollet the
view that one of the justifications of the pursuit of science was
that it could be useful. In an applied context it could also be
lucrative and Gay-Lussac was to derive the major part of his
income in the last twenty years of his life from his many
connections with commerce and industry. Many of his
contemporaries viewed such connections with some misgivings.
They thought that science should be pursued wholly within an
academic context. But with the perspective given by the passage
of time we can seethat Gay-Lussac had an important influence in
demonstrating the value of sciencein commerce and industry. In
his work on lightning conductors and on the density of
alcohol-water mixtures of different concentrations he also
demonstrated the value of scienceto governments whether their
concern might be the safety of public buildings or efficient
methodsof taxation.
Volumetric analysis
Gay-Lussac did some important work in volumetric analysis.
Most of the beginnings of this method had their origins in France
in connection with the new method of bleaching by chlorine
discovered by Berthollet. In 1789 the Rouen pharmacist F. A. H.
Descroizilles was using a solution of indigo as a measureof the
strength of chlorine water. The manufacture of soda by the new
Leblanc process provided another stimulus for quantitative
analysis and by 1804 J. J. Welter, an assistant of Berthollet, had
developeda method of estimating sodium carbonate by pouring a
solution of it from a graduated cylinder into a beakerand adding
dilute sulphuric acid from another beaker.It was the achievement
of Gay-Lussac to convert these small beginnings into a
recognised general method. It is in the work of Gay-Lussac that
we first find the verb ‘to titrate’ and also the terms ‘pipette’ and
‘burette’. We can trace the evolution of the modern pipette in
Gay-Lussac’s successivepublications. Gay-Lussac improved on
the graduated cylinder used hitherto by introducing a side arm
out of which the solution could be poured, a drop at a time if
necessary.Only in the second half of the century was the burette
with a tap introduced.
Gay-Lussac applied volumetric analysis to a number of
problems including the estimation of bleaching powder. This was
a convenient method of storing chlorine for bleaching, yet the
product was viewed with some suspicion in the early nineteenth
century because the importance of storing it in an airtight
container had not been appreciated in industry, with the result
that the chlorine content was extremely variable. Gay-Lussac
first recommendeda method of estimation using indigo but this
too presentedproblems of storage. He therefore introduced new
reagents: arsenious oxide and potassium ferrocyanide 1191.In
1818 Gay-Lussac was appointed a member of the consultative
committee to the gunpowder administration. This involved
examining the quality of saltpetre supplied, major impurities
being chlorides, particularly those of sodium and potassium.
Gay-Lussac suggesteda volumetric method of estimating these
chlorides, using silver nitrate solution. However it was the use of
this reaction the other way round, to estimate silver, which gained
Gay-Lussac greatestfame and fortune.
The practice of assaying has someclaim to be regarded as one
of the older branches of scientific technology. Agricola’s De re
A4efallicu (1556) describesthe different procedures, weights, and
balances used in assaying.Assaying was essentially a gravimetric
scienceand it was a considerable achievement for Gay-Lussac to
introduce not simply a new method but a new approach, a
volumetric one which was quite different from the traditional
approach. In fact, he showed tirst how the method could be used
gravimetrically but his use of solutions led to a method which was
completely volumetric.
L chemical manufacturers did not use the Gay-Lussac tower until
Figure 3 Some apparatus used by Gay-Lussac
analysis (from Anna/es de Chimie et de Physique, vol.
The traditonal method of assaying gold or silver was by
cupellation. The metal was strongly heated with lead in a bone
cupel, thus oxidising impurities which were carried off with the
bad oxide formed. However, by the early nineteenth century the
Paris Mint realised that this method gave results of 4 or 5 parts of
silver per thousand less than the known composition of test
alloys. Gay-Lussac was one of the members of a committee
appointed in 1829to examine the problem. The committee agreed
on the inaccuracy of cupellation and Gay-Lussac prepared an
alternative method, based on the precipitation of silver as silver
chloride 1201.The silver to be assayedwas dissolved in nitric acid
and the resulting solution of silver nitrate was titrated against a
standard solution of sodium chloride. It is an indication of Gay-
Lussac’s practical concern that he chose as his standard solution
of salt one of which 100 cm3would precipitate exactly 1 g of pure
silver. This meant that the number of cm3of salt solution required
to precipitate the silver contained in 1 g of alloy would give
directly the percentageof silver in the alloy.
Gay-Lussac recommendedhis method above all for the speed
with which it could be carried out. A standard history of
analytical chemistry summed up Gay-Lussac’s achievement as
follows:
‘As a result of the work of Gay-Lussac, titrimetry became a
convenient, rapid and reasonably accurate method which was
increasingly used in practical analysis. In its infancy the
method was confined to France, but foreign students and
scientists from other European countries working in France,
became acquainted with the new method and took it back to
their own countries’ [2 11.
Soda and sulphuric acid
Gay-Lussac’s main contribution to chemical industry came
through his association with the old established Saint Gobain
company. Founded originally as a state glass factory, it began in
the early nineteenth century to manufacture its own soda by the
newly developedLeblanc process.In 1830 it becameajoint stock
company and in 1832 Gay-Lussac became one of the board of
directors. Gay-Lussac travelled from time to time to Saint
Gobain, some eighty miles to the north east of Paris, to give
technical advice. By the 1840s Gay-Lussac had been elected as
president of the company although in practice he was not able to
attend meetingsregularly. He was finally given the title of ‘senior
consultant’ (conseil sup&-ieur). The company admitted that they
valued him not only for the technical advice he was able to offer
but for the prestige associatedwith his name.
The Saint Gobain company manufactured not only soda but
sulphuric acid and as early as 1834 Gay-Lussac commer.tedon
the waste of oxides of nitrogen in the lead chamber process. He
proposed that they should be absorbedin sulphuric acid itself and
then separated under controlled conditions using steam. He
worked for some time to solve various practical problems,
including the design of suitable towers for absorption and
retrieval of the oxides of nitrogen. In 1842 he patentedthe process
in France and in Britain. Tennants of Glasgow nearly bought the
British rights to the process but withdrew at the last moment on
the grounds of the complexity of the process. In fact British
the 187Os,when a steep rise in price of nitrates forced them to
reconsider the economicsof manufacture. The introduction of the
Glover tower (1859) for the recovery of the oxides of nitrogen
absorbed in the Gay-Lussac tower made the whole processmore
attractive. In particular, the use of the Glover tower avoided the
dilution of the acid so that the system produced an acid of 78 per
cent concentration which could be used directly in the expanding
\ dye-stuffs industry.
Conclusion
Gay-Lussac’s life and work provides an illustration of the
in volumetric interrelation of science and society. Apart from his basic ability,
26, 1824). Gay-Lussac was fortunate to be a young man at a time when
France offered an exceptionally good scientific education. The
new scientific institutions, the Polytechnique and the Faculty of
Science,were later to provide him with a livelihood. But it was not
only a case of the influence of society on the scientist. The
scientist can contribute to the society in which he lives and all the
more so if he is concerned with applied science. Gay-Lussac
madea contribution to the French economy by his new method of
assaying which resulted in a substantial saving of silver in the
coinage. We should also mention his painstaking work in relating
the concentration of alcohol-water mixtures to their densities at a
specified temperature. This becamethe basis of a rational system
of taxation of alcoholic beverages. He constructed
alcoholometers which gave a direct reading of the alcoholic
concentration as a percentage.Thus wines and spirits in France
today carry a figure known as ‘degrees Gay-Lussac’. In the
manufacture of sulphuric acid the ‘Gay-Lussac tower’ allowed
the precious (and noxious) oxides of nitrogen to he re-used. Thus
he not only helpedto reducethe price of sulphuric acid but he also
helpedto lessenatmospheric pollution.
55
References
[ 11 M. P. Crosland. ‘The Society of Arcueil. A view of French science
at the time of Napoleon I.’ Heinemann Educational Books,
London. 1967.
[2l ‘Sur I’analyse vigetale et animale’, Annales de chimie, 74,47-64,
1810.
[31 For recent research on the Ecole Polytechnique see Margaret
Bradley, ‘Scientific Education for a New Society. The Ecole
Polytechnique 1795-1830’, History of Education, 5, 1l-24,
1976, and ‘The facilities for practical instruction in science
during the early years of the Ecole Polytechnique’, Annals of
Science, J&425-446,1976.
141 Private archives, Roger Gay-Lussac, Paris.
I51 ‘Sur la dilatation des gaz et des vapeurs’, Annales de chimie, 43,
137-1751802.
161 ‘On the expansion of elastic fluids by heat’, Journal of Natural
Philosophy, 3,130-134,1802.
I71 ‘Relation d’un voyage atrostatique’, Journal de physique, 59,
454-461,1804.
181 ‘Memoire sur la combinaison des substances gazeuses, les unes
avec les autres’, Memoires de la Societe d’Arcueil,2,207-234,
1809. English translation in Alembic Club Reprints No. 4,
reissueedition, Edinburgh, pp. 8-24,195O.
191 M. P. Crosland, ‘Lavoisier’s theory of acidity’, Isis, 64, 306-325,
1973.
[lOI Annalesdechimie,91,147-148,1814.
I1 11 Metnoires de la SociPted’Arcueil, 2,299-301,1809.
I121 Zbid.,pp.311-316.
1131 Zbid.,pp.317-331.
[ 141 Ibid., pp. 339-358.
[151 Davy, Works,vol. 5,~. 345,183WO.
1161 ‘Memoire sur i’iode’,AnnaZes dechimie, 91,5-160,1814.
[171 ‘Recherches sur I’acide orussiaue’. Annales de chimie. 95.
136-231,1815. _ -
[ 181 The Life of Sir Robert Christison, Burt, edited by his sons, Vol. 1,
Autobiography, pp. 207,239. Edinburgh, 1885.
[ 191 ‘Instruction sur I’essai du chlorure de chaux’, Annales de chimie et
de physique, 26, 162-176, 1824; ‘Nouvelle instruction sur la
chlorometrie’, Annales de chimie et dephysique, 60,225-261,
1835.
[201 ‘Instruction sur I’essai des mat&es d’araent
- oar. la voie humide.’
Paris, 1832.
[211 F. Szabadvary, ‘History of Analytical Chemistry’, p, 227.
Pergamon Press,Oxford. 1966.
Bibliography
M. P. Crosland, ‘Gay-Lussac-Scientist and Bourgeois’, Cambridge
University Press,London. 1978.
J. R. Partington, ‘History of Chemistry’, vol. 4. Macmillan, London.
1964.

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