French chemist and physicist · 1778–1850
Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac
Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac co-discovered boron in 1808 with Louis Jacques Thénard, beating Humphry Davy by days. He is better known for the gas laws that carry his name.
How Boron was found
Davy’s isolation of potassium in 1807 gave chemists a powerful new reducing agent. Napoleon funded a giant battery for Gay-Lussac and Thénard, but they found they could make potassium more efficiently by heating potash with iron.
They then heated boric acid with potassium in an iron tube and obtained a dark, impure powder: boron. They announced it on 21 June 1808. Davy reported his own result nine days later, and the credit is shared.
Shared the credit
The discovery is credited jointly to these scientists.
Life and career
Born 1778 · Died 1850
Gay-Lussac was born in Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat and studied at the École Polytechnique under Berthollet. In 1804 he rose in a hydrogen balloon to about 7,000 metres to sample the air and measure the Earth’s magnetism, an altitude record that stood for decades.
In 1808 he showed that gases combine in simple whole-number volume ratios. He also named iodine, showed it was an element, and improved industrial sulfuric acid production with the Gay-Lussac tower.
Also known for
- Gay-Lussac’s law of combining volumes
- The pressure–temperature law of gases
- Record balloon ascent of 1804
Discovered in the same era
Other elements identified within ten years of 1808.