Germain Henri Hess - Contributions To Chemistry

Contributions To Chemistry

In 1830, Hess took up chemistry full time, researching and teaching, and later became a professor at the Saint Petersburg Technological Institute. His most famous paper, outlining his law on thermochemistry, was published there in 1840. His principle, a progenitor for the first law of thermodynamics, came to be called Hess's Law. It states that in a series of chemical reactions, the total energy gained or lost depends only on the initial and final states, regardless of the number or path of the steps. This is also known as the law of constant heat summation.

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