Sainte-Claire Deville

Superieure rather than the Ecole Polytechnique. 15 His interests lay in the physical sciences, especially chemistry, but he found uninspiring the chemistry taught by the proteges of Henri Sainte-Claire Deville. (Deville, who had been in charge of the laboratory from 1851 to 1881, was succeeded, in turn, by his pupils Henri Jules Debray [18811888], Alphonse Alexandre Joly [18881897], and Desire J. B. Gemez [18971904]). 

Silicon - the atomic number is 14 and the chemical symbol is Si. The name was originally silicium because it was thought to be a metal. When this was shown to be incorrect, the name was changed to silicon, which derives from the Latin silex and silicis for flint . Amorphous silicon was discovered by the Swedish chemist Jons Jacob Berzelius in 1824. CiystalUne silicon was first prepared by the French chemist Henri Sainte-Claire Deville in 1854. 

J. Henri Debray, 1827-1888. French chemist who collaborated with Henn Sainte-Claire Deville at the ficole Nor-male Sup rieure in researches on gaseous dissociation. He also investigated beryllium, molybdenum, tungsten, and the metals of the platinum group, and made contributions to synthetic mineralogy, It was In Debray s laboratory that Moissan liberated fluorine. 

In 1849 Wohler and H. Sainte-Claire Deville attempted to prepare pure titanium by Berzelius method, but used a closed crucible in order to exclude air. When they found that the product thus obtained still contained titanium nitride, they heated boats containing potassium and potassium fluotitanate in an atmosphere of hydrogen and obtained a gray powder which showed a metallic luster when examined with a microscope (7,10,18). Wohler and Deville thought they had the metal, but, in the opinion of W. M. Thornton, Jr. (23), they were still dealing with the nitride. 

The first crystalline silicon was prepared by Henri Sainte-Claire Deville in 1854 ( 9,31). In the course of his researches on aluminum, he decomposed an impure sodium aluminum chloride with the voltaic pile, and obtained a gray, brittle, granular melt containing 10.3 per cent of silicon. When he dissolved away the aluminum, some shining platelets remained. 

Sainte-Claire Deville explained his results by saying that an alloy often behaves like a true solution of one metal in another. Thus it is, said he, that carbon, boron, and silicon, dissolving like metals in iron and in aluminum, separate from them in cooling, and can be obtained in the crystalline state by the use of reagents which act on the... 

Charles Sainte-Claire Deville, 1814 -1876. French geologist who explored the Antilles, the Azores, and the Canary Islands and studied the allotropic forms of sulfur... 

Henri Sainte-Claire Deville, 1818-1881. Professor of chemistry and dean at tire University of Besangon, afterward professor of chemistry at the Scale Normale Supeneure. He discovered toluene in balsam of Tolu, prepared anhydrous nitrogen pentoxide, and made sodium and P" aluminum on a commercial scale. 

The first pure aluminum was prepared by the great French chemist Henri Sainte-Claire Deville, who was bom on the Island of St. Thomas in the Antilles on March 11, 1818. Both Henri and his elder brother Charles were educated at the Institution Sainte-Barbe in Paris, where Charles studied geology under Elie de Beaumont at die School of Mines, while Henri took the medical course and studied chemistry under Thenard. Both brothers were crowned by the Institute, and both were in the same section. Throughout their lives they had the deepest affection for one... 

Henri s first paper, published in 1S39, was a research on turpentine, and two years later he discovered toluene in balsam of Tolu. His most important work, however, was m inorganic and physical chemistry. In 1844 conservative university officials were horrified to learn of the appointment by Thenard of the twenty-six-year-old Henri Sainte-Claire Deville as dean to reorganize the faculty at Besaneon. Nevertheless, Thenard s... 

When A.-J. Balard, the discoverer of bromine, went to the College de France, Deville was called to fill the vacancy at the Ecole Normale Sup ieure, and it was there that the first beautiful aluminum ingots were made. Sainte-Claire Deville was attempting in 1854 to prepare a proto-chloride of aluminum by allowing aluminum to react with the chloride, AICI3, and in preparing his aluminum he used Wohler s method, but... 

After perfecting a process for the manufacture of sodium which caused a rapid fall m its price, Deville attempted the large-scale production of aluminum. There is found in southern France and elsewhere an ore, bauxite, named for the village of Baux, near Arles in Provence. In the Sainte-Claire Deville process, alumina obtained from this ore was intimately mixed with charcoal, heated, and treated with chlorine to form the chloride. An excess of aluminum chloride vapor was then passed over molten sodium in an iron tube, after which the reaction mass was... 

In 1854 R. W. Bunsen in Heidelberg and H. Sainte-Claire Deville in Paris, working independently of each other, obtained metallic aluminum by electrolysis of fused sodium aluminum chloride (54, 80, 81). 

The next scene of the aluminum drama is laid in the United States. Henri Sainte-Claire Deville s process had made the metal a commercial product, but it was still expensive. Charles Martin Hall, a student at Oberlin College, inspired by the accounts which Professor F. F. Jewett had given of his studies under Wohler, decided that his supreme aim in life would be to devise a cheap method for making aluminum. In an improvised laboratory in the woodshed, and with homemade batteries, he struggled with this problem. On February 23,1886, this boy of twenty-one years rushed into his professors office and held out to him a handful of aluminum buttons. Since these buttons led to a highly successful electrolytic process for manufacturing aluminum, it is small wonder that the Aluminum Company of America now treasures them and refers to them affectionately as the crown jewels A beautiful statue of the youthful Charles M. Hall, cast in aluminum, may now he seen at Oberlin College (11, 55). 

At the Institution Sainte-Barbe he learned of Sainte-Claire Deville s researches on aluminum, and at the age of fifteen years he read the latter s famous treatise. Using the steam engine and dynamo of a small tannery which he had inherited in 1885, Heroult attempted to electrolyze various aluminum compounds. In the following year, when he was attempting to electrolyze cryolite, his iron cathode melted. Since the temperature was not high enough to account for this, Heroult realized that... 

M. Heroult also made many important contributions to the electrometallurgy of iron and steel. He made frequent trips to the United States, and when the Perkin Medal was awarded to Charles M. Hall in 1911, M Heroult crossed the ocean in order to be present at the ceremony and congratulate him. By this gracious act, he proved himself to be a worthy successor of his great, generous countryman, Henri Sainte-Claire Deville (II, 52). Dr. Heroult and C. M. Hall both died in 1914. 

Gay, Jules, Henri Sainte-Claire Deville, Sa Vie et ses Travaux, Gauthier-... 

Sainte-Claire Deville, H. and Caron, Du silicium et des sihciures metal-... 

Sainte-Claire Deville, H, Recherches sur les metaux. et en particular sur... 

Although Lamy claimed that Sir William Crookes s thallium was really a sulfide, the latter replied that he had prepared metallic thallium as early as May 1, 1862, but that because of its volatility he had not dared to melt the black powder to form an ingot (18). However, a committee from the French Academy, including Henri Sainte-Claire Deville, Theophile-Jules Pelouze, and J.-B.-A. Dumas, credited Lamy, rather than Crookes, with the isolation of thallium metal (17, 40). 

Pelouze, T.-J., H. Sainte-Claire Deville, and J -B.-A. Dumas, "Rapport... 

Mar. 11, 1818 Birth of Henri Sainte-Claire Deville on the island of St. Thomas in the Antilles. 

Henri Sainte-Claire Deville perfects an industrial process for aluminum and prepares the first crystalline silicon. 

Death of Henri Sainte-Claire Deville at Boulogne-sur-Seine. 

Toluene is a clear, flammable, aromatic hydrocarbon liquid with a smell similar to benzene. It is also called methylbenzene, indicating that a methyl group has been added to one of benzenes carbon atoms. Toluene was first isolated by Pierre-Joseph Pelletier (1788—1842) and Philippe Walter (1810—1847) in 1837. The name toluene comes from the South American tree Toluifera balsamum. Henri-Etienne Sainte-Claire Deville (1818—1881) isolated toluene from the tree s gum, Tolu balsam, in 1841. 

All silicon nitride ceramics are derived from synthetic materials, exclusively. The first report on the synthesis of Si3N4 was in 1859 by Sainte-Claire Deville and Wohler [3]. Among the problems of greatest concern to chemists in those days was the utilisation of atmospheric nitrogen for agricultural and industrial purposes. In particular, there was a need for a highly effective... 

Sainte-Claire Deville H, Wohler F (1859) Ann Chem Pharm 34 248... 

Apr. 10,1863, Thoury-Harcourt, France - May 9,1914, near Antibes, on the sea) Already as a high-school student he started to be interested in discoveries. He was fascinated by the book of Henri Etienne Sainte-Claire Deville (1818-1881) about aluminum, and decided that he would produce aluminum by electrical means at a reasonable price. He entered the Ecole des Mines, Paris in 1882 where he began working on the electrolysis of aluminum compounds. In 1886 - simultaneously with... 

The concept of porous solids originates from the discovery by Cronstedt [1], during the XVIIIth century, of the zeolitic properties of the mineral stilbite. Many natural zeolites were discovered later, but the importance of this family increased when chemists were able to synthesize them. The first success was due to Sainte Claire Deville as soon as 1862 [2] and most of the syntheses required organic molecules as templates. 

---