Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Chronological table
- List of abbreviations
- 1 A young provincial in Paris
- 2 The apprentice of Arcueil
- 3 Personal influences and the search for laws
- 4 Collaboration and rivalry
- 5 The volumetric approach
- 6 Scientific research
- 7 Professor, Academician and editor
- 8 A scientist in the service of government and industry
- 9 A new technique and the dissemination of technical information
- 10 Scientist and bourgeois in the political arena
- 11 The legacy
- Appendix: select correspondence
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Name index
- Subject index
11 - The legacy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Chronological table
- List of abbreviations
- 1 A young provincial in Paris
- 2 The apprentice of Arcueil
- 3 Personal influences and the search for laws
- 4 Collaboration and rivalry
- 5 The volumetric approach
- 6 Scientific research
- 7 Professor, Academician and editor
- 8 A scientist in the service of government and industry
- 9 A new technique and the dissemination of technical information
- 10 Scientist and bourgeois in the political arena
- 11 The legacy
- Appendix: select correspondence
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Name index
- Subject index
Summary
‘We all teach…the chemistry of Lavoisier and Gay-Lussac’
Marcellin Berthelot (1877)A scientist's reputation long after his death depends not only on his achievement but also on a number of other factors. The relation of his work to later research obviously affects his posthumous influence. Gay-Lussac's law of combining volumes of gases was of great importance to nineteenth-century chemistry, although in the twentieth century it is likely to be mentioned only in an elementary exposition of the subject. The law of thermal expansion of gases is today more commonly associated with the name of Charles than that of Gay-Lussac. Posthumous fame so often depends on the practice of eponymy, misleading though it may be. A teacher's name tends to be kept alive by his students and we shall have to consider to what extent Gay-Lussac influenced students at the research level. The author of a text-book inevitably influences a wide circle of students but we have seen that the only text-books published under Gay-Lussac's name were extracts from lecture courses, compilations of which he disapproved.
After Gay-Lussac's death anyone who wished to consider his work would have to extract it for the most part from the appropriate journals, a method of publication more likely to bury than display any achievement.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Gay-LussacScientist and Bourgeois, pp. 248 - 262Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1978