Napoleon III

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. 

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 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). 

Aldiough the first experiments weie made at the Ecole Normale Superieure, the generosity of Napoleon III made it possible for him to continue them on a larger scale at the Javel works. Since Sainte-Claire... 

In the nineteenth century Napoleon III owned a very precious dinner service. It was said to be made of a metal more precious than gold. That metal was aluminium. The reason it was precious was that it was very rarely found as the pure metal. Aluminium is a reactive metal and as such was very difficult to extract from its ore. Reactive metals hold on tightly to the element(s) they have combined with and many are extracted from their ores by electrolysis. 

Although aluminum is now widely used as a structural material, this was not always the case. Common in Earth s crust, aluminum is difficult to win from its ore because it is such a reactive metal. In the 1850s French chemists interested Napoleon III in this rare and costly metal he considered using it for soldiers helmets, and even reserved a set of aluminum tableware for his most honored guests. By the 1880s chemical reduction techniques had been discovered, and the price per pound dropped from over 100,000 to near 100. 

Vulcanization The treatment of natural rubber with sulfur to reduce its tackiness and improve its strength and elasticity. Invented independently by C. Goodyear and N. Hayward in the United States in 1839, and by T. Hancock in London in 1842 to 1843. Goodyear was honored for his invention by Napoleon III, but he died in a debtors prison in Paris. Various chemicals other than elemental sulfur are effective, for example, sulfur monochloride, selenium, and /v-quinonc dioxime. The chemical mechanism of this process is still not fully understood some believe that traces of zinc, derived from the zinc oxide used in compounding, are essential. 

The Red Cross idea was born in 1859 when Henry Dunant—a Swiss businessman traveling to Solferino (modern-day Italy) to petition Napoleon III on a matter of land rights—came upon the aftermath of a bloody... 

Mumford writes, "Were not the ancient medieval streets of Paris one of the last refuges of urban liberties No wonder that Napoleon III sanctioned the breaking through of narrow streets and culs-de-sac and the razing of whole quarters to provide wide boulevards. It was the best possible protection against assault from within (The City in History, pp. 369-70). 

Since the planners lacked a reliable map of the city, the first step was to build temporary wooden towers in order to achieve the triangulation necessary for an accurate map. See David H. Pinkney, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris (Princeton Princeton University Press, 1958), p. 5. 

Pinkney, Napoleon III, p. 23. A commonplace of demographic history has been that urban populations in Western Europe, beset with epidemics and generally high mortality, did not successfully reproduce themselves until well into the... 

Twenty years later the point is reiterated, following an accusation against members of the Parisian federation of the International for having prepared the assassination of Napoleon III ... 

The alteraction ended when Wohler received an aluminum medal as a gift from Deville. On the from ol the medal there was a portrait of the I Vench limperor Napoleon III, and the reverse side was engraved with the inscription Wohler 1827 . This is reported in two letters from Wohler to Liebig ... 

By 1852 the metal sold commercially for about 545 per pound. An elaborately enameled fan (now housed at the Smithsonian, Washington, DC) was made from aluminum for the Paris Exposition of 1867 while it was still classed as a precious metal, and it is said that Napoleon III had a tea service made from it. Process improvements, such as cryolite fluxing of the melt and lower sodium costs, brought the price of the metal down to U.S.S8 per pound by 1886, which removed its status appeal. 

The blood agent cyanide (CN) had been proposed by Napoleon III to be placed on the tips of bayonets during the Franco-Prussian War and by Lord Playfair during the Crimean War. World War I (WWI) experiences taught that CN could produce rapid death in the field, but the WWI delivery systems did not allow for dependable application of the product (Macy, 1937). More efficient delivery systems and improved methods of synthesis and storage would later overcome problems encountered in WWI. 

Leblanc personally benefited little from his innovation. The National Assembly granted him a fifteen-year patent in September 1791, but three years later the revolutionary government sequestered his factory and made his patents public, giving Leblanc only meager compensation for his assets. Napoleon Bonaparte returned the plant to him in 1802, but by then Leblanc was too poor to resume production and, in 1806 he took his own life. (In 1855 Napoleon III gave Leblanc s heirs a paymentin lieu of the 1775 prize.)... 

Centre d lmmunologie Pierre Fabre, 5 Avenue Napoleon III, 74160 Saint-Julien en Genevois, France (www.cipf.com)... 

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