Alexandre-Emile Béguyer de Chancourtois (1820-1886) was a French geologist and mineralogist who stood out for being the first person to classify or order chemical elements according to their atomic weight in 1862. However, his great passion was always geology.
Despite his great contribution to the scientific world, he made the mistake of not appending the graphic that explained his study and the publication did not have the importance it deserved. It was even a study that went unnoticed by many chemists because it used many terms that were specific to geology.
Portrait of Alexandre-Emile Béguyer de Chancourtois. Source: Kerstin Ellen Hantschel, via Wikimedia Commons.
He was a man of many and varied interests, as evidenced by the fact that he tried to develop an alphabet that was universal. He also studied human geography, with the aim of seeing if there was some kind of relationship between the geology of a country and the lifestyle of the people who inhabited it.
He dedicated a large part of his time and effort to improving the geological collection present at the École Supérieure de Mines, in Paris. He also came to experiment with the use of imaginary numbers in physics.
Biography
Alexandre-Emile Béguyer de Chancourtois was born on January 20, 1820 in Paris, France. He was the youngest son of the architect Louis Aimé César Béguyer de Chancourtois and Amlie Louise Clerget, who had already had a girl six years earlier. In addition, he was the grandson of René-Louis-Maurice Béguyer de Chancourtois, a well-known artist and architect of his time.
His professional life
Béguyer de Chancourtois attended the famous Polytechnic school in Paris when he was only 18 years old. There he met Jean-Baptiste Élie de Beaumont, of whom he was a student and later an assistant. He was also a pupil of Pierre Guillaume Frédéric le Play and the metallurgist Ours-Pierre-Armand Petit-Dufrénoy.
After completing his studies, Béguyer de Chancourtois went on an expedition to the islands of Luzon and Visayas in the Philippines. In these places he explored mineral deposits and geology on behalf of his teachers. He also traveled to places like Hungary, Armenia and Turkey to continue his field studies.
He returned to Paris in 1848 and worked with Le Play building a mineral collection for the French government. For two years he was even Napoleon's chief of staff in his colonies and in Algeria, who knew and admired the work of Béguyer de Chancourtois.
He gave some courses at the school of mines in Paris. He was first a professor of descriptive geometry and topography. Later he became the substitute professor for Élie de Beaumont, who had a great influence on Béguyer de Chancourtois for his geological theories.
It was not until 1875 when Béguyer de Chancourtois was appointed as professor of the area of geology, this following the death of his mentor, Élie de Beaumont. This position he held until his death. Napoleon III decorated him, appointing Béguyer de Chancourtois commander of the Legion of Honor in 1867.
He died on November 14, 1886, in Paris.
Contributions to science
Béguyer de Chancourtois was the first scientist to order chemical elements according to their atomic weights. He designed a first attempt at a periodic table, which he named telluric helix, because the element tellurium was in the middle of the instrument.
His system for organizing the chemical elements was completely functional and unique. His proposal for the classification of the elements was based on the new values of atomic weights obtained by Stanislao Cannizzaro in 1858.
The methodology used by Béguyer de Chancourtois was to arrange the elements in increasing order according to their atomic weights and aligned vertically with similar elements. He plotted the atomic weights on a cylinder, with a circumference of 16 units, which was the approximate weight of oxygen.
The resulting shape of this organization caused similar elements to be located one above the other or one below the other in the cylinder. So he became the first scientist to see the periodicity of elements when arranged in the order of their atomic weights.
Despite the novelty of the system, its publication attracted little attention from chemists of the time. He presented his discovery at the French Academy of Science, but the diagram was left out, thus complicating the understanding of his ideas.
Béguyer de Chancourtois republished his work in 1863, but this time it was even less notorious than the first.
A few years later, in 1869, the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleyev published his periodic table, which did attract a lot of attention and was quickly accepted by the scientific community. Mendeleyev even criticized the work done by Béguyer de Chancourtois.
His lack of chemical knowledge and his emphasis on geological elements could play against the scientist.
Contribution in geology
The true passion he always had was geology. In his work he dominated the design of the pentagonal network. As an inspector at the Béguyer de Chancourtois school of mines he introduced many safety measures for miners and engineers. Including some standards that serve to prevent a methane explosion.
During the latter part of his scientific career he focused on his work as a teacher and on his works to unify the geographical and geological sciences. In 1884 he was commissioned to study the international meridian and universal time.
He formulated some conventions that established that the longitudes would be counted from 0 to 400, that the correction of the date would be in the meridian, and that the time would be the one that marks the meridian.
In addition, he advocated the use of stereographic projections and fought for a uniform system of cartographic graduation that was based on the metric system to be implemented.
He was also one of the people in charge of the geological map of France at the scale 1: 80000, thanks to his work in the Geological Maps of France service.
Plays
Chancourtois had more ideas than he actually posted. Among his original works there are more than 75 memoirs and notes. Most of his work can be found in Comptes rendus de l'Academie des Sciencies, which is a scientific publication that has been published since 1666.
There are also publications of his in Anales de Minas and in the Boletín de la Sociedad Geológica.
His works include publications on the distribution of iron minerals, stratigraphic studies, information on the telluric screw and maps.
References
- Alexandre-Emile Beguyer de Chancourtois - organized elements by atomic weights. Recovered from worldofchemicals.com
- Alexandre-Émile Béguyer de Chancourtois (1820-1886). Recovered from data.bnf.fr
- Béguyer De Chancourtois, Alexandre. Recovered from encyclopedia.com
- Helmenstine, T. (2019). Alexandre-Emile Béguyer de Chancourtois. Recovered from sciencenotes.org
- Yann Picand, D. (2019). Alexandre-Émile Béguyer de Chancourtois. Recovered from dictionnaire.sensagent.leparisien.fr