Regnault, HENRI VICTOR

Regnault, HENRI VICTOR, chemist and physicist, was born at Aix-la-Chapelle, 21st July 1810. A shopman in a Paris bazaar, he made such good use of his scanty leisure as to qualify himself for admission (in 1830) to the École Polytechnique, and, after the two years' course, came out as a mining engineer. He became a professor in Lyons, whence, in 1840, he was recalled to Paris as a member of the Academy of Sciences, in consequence of some important discoveries in organic chemistry. Having filled chairs in the École Polytechnique and the Collège de France, he became in 1854 director of the imperial porcelain-manufacture of Sèvres. He devoted himself to the determination of important physical data, such as the laws of expansion of gases, the measure- ment of temperature, latent and specific heats, and especially the numerical data bearing on the working of steam-engines, for which the Royal Society of London awarded him their Rumford medal. He also received the Copley medal (1869) of the Royal Society, and was one of its foreign members. In addition to numerous papers in the Annales de Chimie, &c., he published a Cours Élémentaire de Chimie (4 vols. 14th ed. 1871). He died 20th January 1878. See the Éloge Historique by Dumas (1881).