Napoleon

One thinks of aluminium as a cheap material - aluminium spoons are so cheap that they are thrown away. It was not always so. Napoleon had a set of cutlery specially made from the then-new material. It cost him more than a set of solid silver. 

Cast-iron pipes were used for the mains in the early stages of town gas supply, their sockets being sealed with tarred rope, oakum, or lead. Originally the connection pipes were lead and later of galvanized or coal-tarred forged iron. After the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, there was a surplus of cheap musket barrels, and these... 

The functions of the Academie Royal des Sciences were assumed in 1795 by a branch of the newly formed National Institute. Laplace was elected vice president of this reincarnated Academy and then elected president a few months later, in 1796. The duties of this position put him in contact with Napoleon Bonaparte. Three weeks after Napoleon seized power m 1799, Laplace presented him with copies of his work on celestial mechanics. Bonaparte quipped that he would read it in the first six weeks I have free and invited Laplace and his wife to dinner. Three weeks later, Napoleon named Laplace his minister of the interior. After six weeks, however, he was replaced Napoleon thought him a complete failure as an administrator. However, Napoleon continued to heap honors and rewards upon him, regarding him as a decoration of the state. lie made Laplace a chancellor of the Senate with a salai y that made him wealthy, named him to the Legion of Honor, and raised him to the rank of count of the empire. Laplace s wife was appointed a lady-in-waitmg to the Italian court of Napoleon s sister. Laplace responded with adulatory dedications of his works to Napoleon. 

When Napoleon fell from power, however, Laplace carefully dissociated himself from the emperor. In the Senate, Laplace voted for the return of the Bourbon monarchy and absented himself from Paris in 1815 during Napoleon s brief hundred-day return from Elba. In 1817 Louis XVIII raised Laplace to the rank of marquis. Laplace remained loyal to the Bourbons for the rest of his life, and his 1826 refusal to sign a petition supporting freedom of the press condemned him as far as the liberals in the Academy were concerned. 

This technique was applied in the early 1960s to a lock of hair taken from Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) on St Helena. Arsenic levels of up to 50 times normal suggested he may have been a victim of poisoning, perhaps on orders from the French royal family. 

Bonaparte, Napoleon, 574 Bond A linkage between atoms, 34-37 covalent, 34,165-160 hydrogen, 238-240 in reactants, 212-214 ionic, 37... 

Napoleon reserved his aluminum plates for his special guests the rest had to make do with gold. 

LeCouteur, Penny and Jay Burreson. Napoleons Buttons How 17 Molecules Changed History. New York Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2003. 

In France, local municipalities with one foul-smelling factory had the power to ban the construction of additional chemical plants. Napoleon also decreed that all factories emitting unpleasant odors should be rated according to the seriousness of the problem. When Leblanc factories got some of the worst scores, they were banned near human habitation. Later, however, both Leblanc and Lavoisier became French national heroes, martyrs of progress. Factory towns named streets after Leblanc, and industrialists commissioned his statue. In 1856—at the peak of the Leblanc pollution in... 

Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, mauve mania was over and the elegant world whirled on to a new color. A magnificent red never seen before in dyes, the French hue was variously named fuchsia for the flower blossom and magenta for a northern Italian town where the Emperor Napoleon III had defeated Austria that summer. Like Perkin s mauve, magenta was a wildly popular synthetic dye with humble origins in coal tar, that is, in aniline and other similar compounds. 

Maurice Crosland. The Society of Arcueil A View of French Science at the Time of Napoleon I. Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press, 1967. A full-length biography of Berthollet. 

Maurice Crosland. Napoleonic Chemist. Chemistry in Britain. 9 (1973) 360-361. A brief biography. 

Harry Wain. A History of Preventive Medicine. Springfield IL Charles C Thomas, 1970. Source of Napoleon and typhus, and typhus description. 

In the mid-18th century, Napoleon III ate off "precious" aluminum plates, while his guests had to be content with normal gold. The price of the element today is just a question of availability, demand, and speculation In the case of elements for the semiconductor industry, the purity is an added factor in determining the price. 

The traditional system of medicine of the Pacific Rim uses approx 80 species of Apiaceae, for instance, Centella asiatica (L.) Urban (Hydrocotyle asiatica L. centella, Indian Pharmaceutical Codex, 1955). The plant has been used in India since early times for skin diseases and as a diuretic. It has long been a popular remedy in India for leprosy and syphilis. However, large doses are said to have narcotic action. The plant was used also by the surgeons of Napoleon s army. 

Dr. Karch is the author of nearly 100 papers and book chapters, most of which are concerned with the effects of drug abuse on the heart. He has published seven books. He is currently completing the fourth edition of Pathology of Drug Abuse, a widely used textbook. He is also working on a popular history of Napoleon and his doctors. 

A similar effect was observed in other fruits and vegetables, where UV-C treated strawberries showed a higher increment of phenols and PAL activity 12 hours after treatment than unirradiated (control)(Pan and others 2004), which could be the reason for the increment in total phenol constituents (Lancaster and others 2000). UV-C and UV-B caused a two- and threefold increase in content of resveratrol (a grape phenol constituent). Thus, mature Napoleon grapes that had been irradiated with UV-C light can provide up to 3 mg of resveratrol per serving (Cantos and others 2001). Therefore, UV-C treatments clearly cause a benefit effect, increasing total phenol content, which can be mainly attributed to the increment of PAL activity. 

The military uses of HCN were first realized by Napoleon III, but it was not until World War I (WW I) that this application received widespread consideration. About 3.6 million kg of hydrogen cyanide were manufactured by France as a chemical weapon and used in WW I in various mixtures called Manganite and Bincennite, although its use was not highly successful because of limitations in projectile size and other factors. During WW II, the Japanese were armed with 50-kg HCN bombs, and the United States had 500-kg bombs. More than 500,000 kg of HCN chemical weapons were produced during WW II by Japan, the United States, and the Soviet Union, but it is not known to what extent these weapons were used in that conflict (Way 1981). 

A large number of French soldiers froze to death in the winter of 1812 within a matter of weeks of their emperor Napoleon Bonaparte leading them into Russia. The loss of manpower was one of the principal reasons why Napoleon withdrew from the outskirts of Moscow, and hence lost his Russian campaign. 

But why was so ruthless a general and so obsessively careful a tactician as Napoleon foolhardy enough to lead an unprepared army into the frozen wastes of Russia In fact, he thought he was prepared, and his troops were originally well clothed with thick winter coats. The only problem was that, so the story goes, he chose at the last moment to replace the brass of the soldiers buttons with tin, to save money. 

The air temperature when Napoleon entered Russia was apparently as low as —35 °C, so the soldiers tin buttons converted from white to grey tin and, concurrently, disintegrated into powder. So, if this story is true, then Napoleon s troops froze to death because they lacked effective coat fastenings. Other common metals, such... 

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