Nollet, Abbe Jean-Antoine

Fig. 19.12. Abbe Jean-Antoine Nollet s experiments with the electrostatic spraying of liquids.

The Abbe Jean-Antoine Nollet, in his Legons de physique experi-mentale, mentioned the cold fight of the Bologna stone and the sulphurous odor which the flame imparted to it. The odor that the Bologna stone acquires on passing through the flame, said he, gives sufficient evidence that these natural sulphurs have been liberated from the terres-... 

Osmosis, or the net transfer of solvent from a dilute to a more concentrated solution across a suitable membrane, had been known since 1748 when the Abbe Jean Antoine Nollet (1700-1770) noticed that a pig s bladder covering a container of alcoholic solution was ruptured when immersed in water. The phenomenon of osmosis could only be studied properly when sufficiently strong membranes could be produced to withstand the pressure generated. It was Moritz Traube (1826-1894) who discovered in 1867 that a strong membrane could be prepared by precipitating copper ferrocyanide in the walls of a porous pot. He was able to show that for a given solution osmosis occurred until a certain pressure was reached, which is called the osmotic pressure of the solution. In 1877 the German botanist... 

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