Berthollet, Claude-Louis

▪ French chemist

Introduction

born Dec. 9, 1748, Talloires, Savoy, France

died Nov. 6, 1822, Arcueil

      central French figure in the emergence of chemistry as a modern discipline in the late 18th century. He combined acute experimental skills with fundamental theoretical proposals about the nature of chemical reactions, eventually leading to the law of mass action (mass action, law of).

From Savoy to Paris

      Berthollet, born into a family of notaries of the Duchy of Savoy, was educated in Annecy and in 1770 took a medical degree from the University of Turin, the Savoyard capital. With the patronage of a famed Genevan physician, Theodore Tronchin, he established himself that year in Paris as physician to the wife of the duc d'Orléans. In 1778 Berthollet became a French citizen and began the process of obtaining a medical license from the Paris Faculty of Medicine. In 1779 he married Marguerite-Marie Baur, who bore him their only son, Amédée, in 1780. Berthollet continued his medical practice for several years while embarking upon a scientific career. His scientific research eventually turned him into one of the leading French chemists, second only to Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (Lavoisier, Antoine-Laurent).

      The submission of more than a dozen detailed research papers to the French Academy of Sciences (Sciences, Academy of) led to his election as a member in 1780. Berthollet initially favoured the phlogiston theory promoted by the German chemist Georg Ernst Stahl (Stahl, Georg Ernst), but his experiments in pneumatic chemistry persuaded him to abandon it in favour of Lavoisier's explanations, which centred on the role of oxygen. In 1785 he sided with Lavoisier and his colleagues in shaping a chemical revolution that centrally involved the reorganization of chemical nomenclature. Nonetheless, his isolation of ammonia and experiments with chlorine and its compounds led him to disagree with the assertion that oxygen was always the essential ingredient responsible for acidity. He completed important studies on various acids and the pigment Prussian blue, decomposed ammonia into its components, and developed a mistaken explanation for the composition of hydrochloric acid, which he assumed contained oxygen combined with a hypothetical “muriatic radical.”

Applied chemistry

      In 1784 Berthollet was named chief administrator of the Manufacture des Gobelins, a tapestry manufacturer. This position launched him into extensive research on applied chemistry, first on dyes and later on bleaching agents, steel, and gunpowder. In 1791 Berthollet published the Élements de l'art de la teinture (Elements of the Art of Dyeing, 1891); at the same time, his procedures for using chlorine compounds for bleaching were already known and being exploited commercially in England. Publication in France came later, with his Description de l'art du blanchiment par l'acide muriatique oxygéné (1795; published in English together with his earlier book as Elements of the Art of Dyeing with a Description of the Art of Bleaching by Oxymuriatic Acid, 1824). A second edition on dyeing and bleaching appeared in 1804, written with the collaboration of his son, who later launched a business venture in the chemical industry. Along with chemist Jean-Antoine Chaptal, Berthollet was an early champion in France of the value of chemical theory in the enhancement of industrial processes. The Berthollet and Chaptal sons later joined forces to establish a factory in southern France to manufacture soda ash (sodium carbonate), using the Leblanc process (chemical industry).

      Berthollet's discovery of a method for the preparation of gunpowder from “superoxygenated potassium muriate” (potassium chlorate, a substitute for saltpetre) was implemented throughout France during the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars in response to a shortage of saltpetre. In 1786 Berthollet teamed up with mathematicians Gaspard Monge (Monge, Gaspard, comte de Péluse) and Alexandre Vandermonde to perfect methods for improving the quality of steel making.

Serving the French nation

      Devoted above all to science and its uses, Berthollet lamented the unrest caused by the French Revolution, withdrawing from Paris to a suburb in Aulnay, where he pursued his studies in a private laboratory. Gradually, he was drawn into assisting the various governments of the Revolution, first as a consultant on technical issues and then as an agent for the central authority. He served successively as a member of the Bureau of Arts and Crafts, on the commission in charge of the mint, and on the legislative committee concerned with the arts. He also helped to supervise the collection of saltpetre from cellars and the production of gunpowder, and he worked for the establishment of the metric system.

      Berthollet was assigned as an instructor of procedures for manufacturing armaments and gunpowder and as a lecturer on chemistry at the short-lived École Normale de l'an III. He also assisted Monge in organizing what became the École Polytechnique, where he taught chemistry and set up a teaching laboratory for its students. Though he was not an especially exciting pedagogue, he encouraged a generation of young men to turn to chemistry.

      In these various assignments, he was often paired with politically more radical scientists, such as Monge, while he tried to remain apolitical. After the Reign of Terror (Terror, Reign of), he was deputized with Monge and others to sort and select cultural objects for confiscation by France during the Italian theatre of operations. His work impressed Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon I), who recruited him in 1798 for his campaign in Egypt, where he created the Institut d'Egypte.

      After his return to Paris, he became the leading chemist at the Institut de France and outfitted a private laboratory in the Parisian outskirts at his country home in Arcueil. There he invited young scientists to meet periodically with him and his neighbour, the mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace (Laplace, Pierre-Simon, marquis de), in an informal Société d'Arcueil, which became the most important creative centre for physical and chemical research for a decade during the Napoleonic period.

Chemical theory

      It was at Arcueil that he wrote the controversial "Essai de statique chimique" (1803; “Chemical Equilibria”), aimed at establishing the general laws of chemical reactions (chemical reaction) and a systematic approach to physical chemistry (chemistry). The idea for this sprang from notions discussed with Lavoisier about the role of chemical affinities and Berthollet's decade-long set of experiments with double decomposition. In particular, he was puzzled over the natural formation of natron (a hydrated sodium carbonate) from a mixture of limestone (calcium carbonate) and seawater (containing sodium chloride) in a valley near Cairo. In the laboratory, reactions with the same components yielded an inverse product. This suggested to him that the concentration of chemicals was a key factor in determining how a reaction would end, an idea that was at odds with the prevailing views on elective affinities. In a paper presented to the Institut on his return from Egypt that was recognized as fundamental, and was quickly translated into English and German, he set forth the principle that affinities did not have absolute values but were modified by physical conditions of the reaction, especially the concentration of reagents. It was this assertion that eventually led to the more precise formulation of the law of mass action (mass action, law of) in the mid-19th century, and it embroiled him in a major controversy with the French chemist Joseph-Louis Proust (Proust, Joseph-Louis) starting in 1804. In turn, the Berthollet-Proust debates were central to the establishment of the atomic theory by the English chemist John Dalton (Dalton, John).

      According to Berthollet's theory, physical conditions surrounding reagents, including temperature and solubility, often offset the effect of affinities, thereby determining the direction of the reaction. Employing an analogy current in physics, he asserted that chemical reactions seek a static equilibrium, hence the title of his essay. Because it was thought that the molecules in a gaseous reaction were separated by caloric (a hypothetical weightless substance thought to account for combustion and the flow of heat), Berthollet insisted they had to be carried out at certain temperatures in order to be successful. For this research, Berthollet was assisted by his student Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac (Gay-Lussac, Joseph-Louis), with whom he engaged in experiments in the laboratory as well as in a balloon. Gay-Lussac and others, including Louis-Jacques Thenard (Thenard, Louis-Jacques), Jean-Baptiste Biot (Biot, Jean-Baptiste), Pierre-Louis Dulong (Dulong, Pierre-Louis), and ultimately Jacques-Étienne Bérard, constituted the active chemical group of the Société d'Arcueil, all inspired by the older academicians Berthollet and Laplace. The proceedings of the society were published in three volumes between 1807 and 1817 as Mémoires de la société d'Arcueil. Except for a short period of depression after his son's suicide in 1810 following a mental illness, Berthollet remained devoted to his laboratory, anchoring and testing his theories in experimental work. All the visitors to Arcueil, including the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (Humboldt, Alexander von), the Swiss botanist Augustin de Candolle (Candolle, Augustin Pyrame de), and the British physician Charles Blagden, testified to the critical value Berthollet assigned to these intimate gatherings around his laboratory.

Berthollet and chemical atomism

      In his essay Berthollet also challenged the idea that compounds unite in definite proportions (definite proportions, law of), claiming instead that they could combine in variable proportions between certain limits, depending on physical circumstances. His theories were based on assumptions about the “atomic” character of elements that were subjected to various forces in chemical reactions, not merely those of attraction by affinity, and he attempted to account for these other forces by focusing on the mass of reactants and on cohesion and elasticity in different states of matter. These complex (and ultimately successful) ideas were challenged by Proust, whose views about definite proportions prevailed in the immediate aftermath of their debate. Berthollet was impressed by the newly proposed atomic theory, and he accepted that some reactions constantly combine in definite proportions. Nonetheless, in the long preface to the French translation of British chemist Thomas Thomson's System of Chemistry (1809), which explained atomic theory, he continued to object to generalizing this fact into a law applying to all reactions.

Napoleon (Napoleon I)'s patronage

      Napoleon showered Berthollet with honours, including a senatorial appointment, medals, and the title of count. In 1806 Napoleon also bailed him out with a considerable loan to settle debts Berthollet had incurred after turning over his financial affairs to his wife. Thanks to income from his position as a senator, he soon recovered his fortune and used some of it to outfit his Arcueil laboratory. In his declining years, Berthollet was accused unjustly of having abandoned his benefactor in 1814, when he signed the Senate's bill deposing Napoleon after his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo (Waterloo, Battle of). Berthollet's final years were plagued by financial and health problems.

Roger Hahn

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