11 March 1818, St. Thomas (Virgin Islands), 1 July 1881, Boulogne (France)
He was born on the island of St Thomas, where his father was a French consul. Together with his brother Charles, he was educated in Paris at Collège Rollin.
In 1844, after graduating as a doctor of medicine and doctor of science, he was appointed to organise the new Faculty of Science in Besançon (France), where he was a professor of chemistry and dean from 1845 to 1851.
His research focused on the study of turpentine oil and Tolu balsam. From the latter, he obtained toluene by dry distillation (1844). However, his most important works were perhaps in inorganic and thermal chemistry.
In 1849, he discovered anhydrous nitric acid (nitrogen pentoxide), an interesting substance as the first of the so-called "anhydrous" monobasic acids.
In 1851, he returned to Paris to succeed Antoine-Jérôme Balard (discoverer of bromine) as maître des conférences at the Ecole Normale Supérieure.
In 1854, he succeeded in obtaining metallic aluminium and eventually devised a method by which the metal could be prepared on a large scale with the aid of sodium, the manufacture of which he also developed.
He made fruitful contributions:
- Together with Friedrich Wöhler, he discovered silicon nitride (1857) and investigated the allotropic forms of silicon and boron.
- With Jules Henri Debray, he worked on platinum metals, the aim being, on the one hand, to prepare them pure and, on the other, to find a suitable metal for the standard metre of the International Metric Commission in Paris.
- With Louis Joseph Troost, they worked out a method for determining vapour densities at temperatures up to 1,400 degrees Celsius.
In 1859 he became a professor at the Sorbonne, replacing Jean-Baptiste-André Dumas.
In 1860 he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society and, a year later, he was appointed a member of the Academy of Sciences.
His work in general chemistry entitles him to be considered one of the great chemists of the second half of the 19th century. Not only because of the above, but also because he discovered the phenomenon of dissociation and his research on this subject, for which he used the "Deville hot and cold tube" instrument, worked on the metallurgy of aluminium (discovered by Wöhler in 1827) to prepare it by the decomposition of sodium chloride of aluminium with metallic sodium and the artificial preparation of minerals, especially apatite, isohorphic minerals and crystalline oxides.
In the technical field he worked on the use of petroleum and heavy oils as fuels, where he conceived the use of crude oil as a fuel for steam production.
Many of his works were published in Comptes rendues and Annales, including: De l'aluminium, ses propiétés, sa fabrication (Paris, 1859), Métallurgie du platine et des métaux qui l'accompagnement (Paris, 1863).
In 1885, a street in the 12th arrondissement of Paris was named after him.
