French Scientist

France lost many of its teachers during the first years of the Revolution. One of the solutions to the shortage of teachers was the establishment of the Ecole Normale in Paris. Fourier, as a teacher and an active member of the Popular Society in Auxerre, was invited to attend in 1795. His attendance at the shortlived Ecole gave him the opportunity to meet and study with the brightest French scientists. Fourier s own talent gained him a position as assistant to the lecturers at the Ecole Normale. 

The photoelectric effect (the creation of an electrical current when light shines on a photosensitive material connected m an electrical circuit) was first obseiwed in 1839 by the French scientist Edward Becqiierel. More than one hundred years went by before researchers in the United States Bell Laboratories developed the first modern PV cell in 1954. Four years later, PV was used to power a satellite in space and has provided reliable electric power for space exploration ever since. 

Scientists in the 1920s, speculating on this problem, became convinced that an entirely new approach was required to treat electrons in atoms and molecules. In 1924 a young French scientist, Louis de Broglie (1892-1987), in his doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne made a revolutionary suggestion. He reasoned that if light could show the behavior of particles (photons) as well as waves, then perhaps an electron, which Bohr had treated as a particle, could behave like a wave. In a few years, de Broglie s postulate was confirmed experimentally. This led to the development of a whole new discipline, first called wave mechanics, more commonly known today as quantum mechanics. 

Summaries of the properties of gases, particularly the variation of pressure with volume and temperature, are known as the gas laws. The first reliable measurements of the properties of gases were made by the Anglo-Irish scientist Robert Boyle in 1662 when he examined the effect of pressure on volume. A century and a half later, a new pastime, hot-air ballooning, motivated two French scientists, Jacques Charles and Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac, to formulate additional gas laws. Charles and... 

The French scientist Franqois-Marie Raoult, who spent much of his life measuring vapor pressures, discovered that the vapor pressure of a solvent is proportional to its mole fraction in a solution. This statement, which is called Raoult s law, is normally written... 

In 1896, the French scientist Fienri Becquerel happened to store a sample of uranium oxide in a drawer that contained some photographic plates (Fig. 17.2). He was astonished to find that the uranium compound darkened the plates even though they were covered with an opaque material. Becquerel realized that the uranium compound must give off some kind of radiation. Marie Sklodowska Curie (Fig. 17.3), a young Polish doctoral student, showed that the radiation, which she called radioactivity, was emitted by uranium regardless of the compound in which it was found. She concluded that the source must be the uranium atoms themselves. Together with her husband, Pierre, she went on to show that thorium, radium, and polonium are also radioactive. 

B. Veyssiere appreciates the contribution made by French scientists and is grateful for the encouragements received from the French combustion community. 

The hrst working lead cell, manufactured in 1859 by a French scientist, Gaston Plante, consisted of two lead plates separated by a strip of cloth, coiled, and inserted into a jar with sulfuric acid. A surface layer of lead dioxide was produced by electrochemical reactions in the first charge cycle. Later developments led to electrodes made by pasting a mass of lead oxides and sulfuric oxide into grids of lead-antimony alloy. 

Sir Gavin de Beer. The Sciences Were Never at War. London Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., 1960. Source for British and French scientists cooperation during wartime. 

Louis Pasteur (1822-1895). Pasteur, one of the most famous French scientists, was bom in Dole, December 27, 1822. Son of a moderately prosperous tanner who had fought for and been decorated... 

Two types of theory have been put forward to explain the formation and development of our solar system catastrophe and evolution. The former assumes a collision or coming together of two stars. As early as 1745, the French scientist Count Buf-fon postulated that the Earth had been torn out of the sun by a passing comet. He estimated the age of the Earth to be 70,000 years, while theology proclaimed that the Earth was less than 6,000 years old. 

H. van t Hoff (Dutch scientist) proposed a tetrahedral structure for carbon atom in September of 1874. J. A. Le Bel (French scientist) published the same idea independently in November of 1874. 

French scientists (270) suggested that the configurations of stereoisomeric acyclic alkyl nitronates can be determined from the relative dipole moments which for trans- isomers of nitronates containing EWG at the a-C atom are substantially larger than those of the cis isomers (Chart 3.5). 

French scientists at the Pasteur Institute, however, promptly dispelled some of Prontosil s mystery, splitting the molecule into a red dye component and an old chemical, sulfanilamide, its 1909 patent long since lapsed (2 ). The suspicion arose that Domagk, an I. G. Farbenindustrie researcher, had rediscovered sulfanilamide, and that the manufacturer had held it off the market until it could be presented in a new, complex, disguised, and patentable form (2, 3 ) Whether or not the suspicion was true, the French scientists, by showing that sulfanilamide was the therapeutically active fraction of Prontosil, shattered the gigantic Germany company s profitable plans. 

Ostwald, and Arrhenius on the new Zeitschrift fur physikalische Chemie. Raoult s name was one of only three French scientists listed among twenty-one on the title page of the first issue. Thus, Raoult, who had no advanced pupils in the Sciences Faculty at Grenoble, counted Lespieau as his student. Lespieau, in turn, introduced the methods of "cryoscopy" and "ebullioscopy" into Parisian laboratories. At Raoult s request, he also wrote an article on Raoult s apparatus for the Paris Chemical Society. 22 And through Raoult, Lespieau became thoroughly familiar with the latest developments in physical chemistry in the 1880s and 1890s. 

The other French scientists listed as members of the editorial board were Duhem and Berthelot. Robert Lespieau, Notice sur les travaux scientifiques (Paris Gauthier-Villars, 1925) 12. 

Hardly any French scientists studied abroad. Kirrmann was unusual in his decision to spend a year in Munich in 1930, but he had, after all, been born in German Alsace. John C. Smith notes in his history of Oxford s Dyson Perrins Laboratory, directed by Robert Robinson in the 1920s and 1930s, that there was a great mixture there of ages and nationalities among the twenty or so research students each year but never, until 1947, a French person. 91 This insularity contributed to the closure of the boundaries of the research school associated with Lespieau s laboratory at the Ecole Normale Superieure and to its exclusion from the wider disciplinary history of physical organic chemistry and theoretical chemistry. 

At a given temperature, a reaction will reach equilibrium with the production of a certain amount of product. If the equilibrium constant is small, that means that not much product will be formed. But is there anything that can be done to produce more Yes, there is— through the application of Le Chatelier s principle. Le Chatelier, a French scientist, discovered that if a chemical system at equilibrium is stressed (disturbed) it will reestablish equilibrium by shifting the reactions involved. This means that the amounts of the reactants and products will change, but the final ratio will remain the same. The equilibrium may be stressed in a number of ways changes in concentration, pressure, and temperature. Many times the use of a catalyst is mentioned. However, a catalyst will have no effect on the equilibrium amounts, because it affects both the forward and reverse reactions equally. It will, however, cause the reaction to reach equilibrium faster. 

A drawback for stem cell therapy is the problem of cell rejection due to the host s immune system recognizing the cells as foreign. This rejection issue has to be overcome to ensure stem cell therapy is a viable treatment. Recently, French scientists reported on research progress in stem cell transplants for curing children with sickle cell anemia. A mix of antirejection drugs was used to suppress rejection of the new stem cells. 

The famous French scientist Antoine Laviosier (1743-1794) is considered by many to be the first modern chemist. Lavoisier created a calorimeter to study the energy that is released by the metabolism of a guinea pig. To learn about Lavoisier s experiment, go to the web site above and click on Web Links. What do you think about using animals in experiments Write an essay to explain why you agree or disagree with this practice. 

In 1913, Knudson (17) reported that tannic acid (the commercial name of the Chinese gall tannin) could be degraded by a strain of Aspergillus niger previously the French scientist Pottevin (in 1900) had named this enzyme tannase (10). Since then, most of the progress on elucidating the mechanisms of hydrolysable tannin biodegradation has occurred since 1960. 

Austrian mineralogist Carl Auer von Welsbach and French scientist Georges Urbain Expensive and rare with few commercial applications name derives from the ancient Roman name for Paris. 

French scientist Andre Debierne Produced by decaying uranium and thorium 26 known isotopes lends its name to the 14 elements that follow it, which are called the Actinides. 

In 1783, Jacques Alexander Chales, a French Scientist, launched the first hydrogen balloon flight. Known as Charliere the unmanned balloon flew to an altitude of 3 km. Three months later. 

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