Taking Science to the Limit of Human Endurance — Gay-Lussac
Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac took the science of chemistry to new heights. Gay-Lussac attended the new Ecole Polytechnique, in Paris, followed by studies at the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, where he received a broad training in mathematics, physics and chemistry. This training allowed him to bring mathematical rigor to the search for laws governing the physical and chemical behavior of gases. Today, Gay-Lussac is remembered best for his law of combining volumes for gases, which provided insight into the molecular and atomic structure of matter. Gay-Lussac also enjoyed a long and productive collaboration with Louis Jacques Thénard, his contemporary, investigating the properties of potassium, boron, and iodine and the composition of acids.
On finishing his studies in 1801, Gay-Lussac was recruited by Claude Berthollet to be his assistant in at a private research enterprise that Berthollet and Simon Laplace were setting up in Arcueil, a small town south of Paris. Gay-Lussac had been their student at the Ecole Polytechnique. Berthollet and Laplace continued the work of their deceased colleague Antoine Lavoisier, whose revolutionary studies launched chemistry across the threshold of quantification and experiment into a realm of science already occupied by astronomy and physics. This work attracted the participation of a generation of young scientists, including Francois Arago, Alexander Humboldt, Pierre Dulong, along with Gay-Lussac, Thénard, and others, who organized themselves as the Society of Arcueil.
And, so it happened that on the 12th of September 1804 Gay-Lussac ascended above Paris to a record height of 7000 metres (23,000 feet) to obtain an air sample for analysis in Berthollet’s laboratory. This was the first use of a balloon for scientific exploration. Gay-Lussac was carried aloft in a wicker basket suspended below a bubble of hydrogen gas enclosed by a fragile envelope of rubberized silk. He reached the upper limit of human endurance. The thin, still air was dry and cold, a wintry 14 degrees Fahrenheit. His heart raced, and it was difficult to breathe. Above, the sun shone uncommonly bright from an azure sky that stretched to the infinity of space.
Gay-Lussac ascended over a city poised at the threshold of modernity, a medieval city of wood, brick, and stone, without electricity, railroads, or even bicycles. The atmosphere he sampled was untainted by the burning of fossil fuels. All of this was changing by the time that balloonists next attained this height nearly 50 years later — two scientists also from Paris, Jean Augustin Barral and Jacques Alexandre Bixio. It was the year of Gay-Lussac’s death.
Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac is one of the 72 scientists and engineers named on the Eiffel Tower.
