Joseph Louis Proust Biography

Joseph Louis Proust

(Angers, 1754- id ., 1826) French chemist.Emigrated to Spain, he was a professor in Segovia and Salamanca and directed a laboratory in Madrid that Carlos IV had him build.Member of the French Academy of Sciences, he carried out numerous works on the analysis of compound bodies and established the law of definite proportions.

Joseph Louis Proust

Joseph Louis Proust began to study in the laboratory of his father, then a pharmacist, and at the same time in the college of the oratorians of his native city.He continued his studies in Paris, where he befriended Lavoisier and won in 1776, after a brilliant competition, the post of chief pharmacist at the Salpêtrière hospital.At that time he published his first works and began his teaching work in the museum of his friend Pilâire de Rozier, in whose aerostatic experiences he participated.This vocation for teaching would make him leave Paris at the end of 1778 and settle in Vergara (Guipúzcoa) to carry out the chair of chemistry at the Royal Patriotic Seminary, founded shortly before by the Royal Basque Economic Society of Friends of the Country.

The influence of Proust on Spanish chemistry did not translate into the formation of authentic disciples if we except Juan Manuel Munárriz, Lavoisier's translator.This is largely due to the fact that his listeners in Spain were not true professionals, but the same exquisite and enlightened social class that he himself frequented.This circumstance did not prevent him from publishing numerous works in Spain, such as the three notes inserted in the Excerpts of the General Meetings of the Basque Society of Friends of the Country (on heavy spar, cobalt and the composition of bile) and the books Investigations on Prussian blue (1794-1798), On metallic sulfates (1801), Investigations on copper tinning, tin ware and glaze (1803) and Compendium of different Chemistry observations (1806).

He also published the two volumes of the Annals of the Royal Laboratory of Chemistry of Segovia during his stay in this city, and years later, in 1799, he participated in the drafting from the Annals of Natural Sciences with Cristiano Herrgen, Domingo García Fernández and Antonio José Cavanilles.For his part, the research that Proust carried out in France appeared not only in specialized journals, such as Journal de Physique, Annales de Chimie et de Physique or Memoirs du Musée d'Histoire Naturelle, but also in volumes entitled Mémoire sur le sucre de raisin (1808), Recueil des memoires relatifs à la poudre à canou (1815), Sur l'existence vraisemblable du mercure dans les eaux de l ' Océan (1821) and Essai sur une des causes que peuvent en la formation du calcul (1824).

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