Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac - Achievements

Achievements

• 1802 – Gay-Lussac first formulated the law, Gay-Lussac's Law, stating that if the mass and pressure of a gas are held constant then gas volume increases linearly as the temperature rises. This is sometimes written as V = k T, where k is a constant dependent on the type, mass, and pressure of the gas and T is temperature on an absolute scale (in terms of the ideal gas law, k = n·R/P).
• 1804 – He and Jean-Baptiste Biot made a hot-air balloon ascent to a height of 7016 metres (23,000 feet) in an early investigation of the Earth's atmosphere. He wanted to collect samples of the air at different heights to record differences in temperature and moisture.
• 1805 – Together with his friend and scientific collaborator Alexander von Humboldt, he discovered that the composition of the atmosphere does not change with decreasing pressure (increasing altitude). They also discovered that water is formed by two parts of hydrogen and one part of oxygen (by volume).
• 1808 – He was the co-discoverer of boron.
• 1810 – In collaboration with Louis Thenard, he developed a method for quantitative elemental analysis by measuring the CO₂ and O₂ evolved by reaction with potassium chlorate.
• 1811 – He recognized iodine as a new element, described its properties, and suggested the name iode.
• 1824 – He developed an improved version of the burette that included a side arm, and coined the terms "pipette" and "burette" in an 1824 paper about the standardization of indigo solutions.
• In Paris, a street and a hotel near the Sorbonne are named after him as are a square and a street in his birthplace, Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat.