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Marcellin Berthelot

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Marcellin Berthelot

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Also known as Pierre Eugène Marcellin Berthelot, Pierre Eugene Marcellin Berthelot, Pierre Eugène Berthelot

French chemist and politician (1827-1907)

OverviewAI-generated

Pierre Eugène Marcellin Berthelot was a French chemist, physicist, and politician. He worked in physical chemistry, organic chemistry, and politics, and was employed by the Collège de France. Berthelot served as an irremovable senator and Minister of Foreign Affairs. He was also an Esperantist who spoke and wrote in Esperanto and French.

Born in Paris in 1827, he was educated at Lycée Henri-IV. He died of a myocardial infarction in Paris in 1907 and is buried in the Panthéon. His spouse was Sophie Berthelot, and they had four children: Philippe, André, René, and Daniel.

Berthelot received the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour, the Copley Medal, the Davy Medal, and the Concours général. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He was a member of the Royal Society, the Société Philomathique de Paris, the Académie Française, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Synthesized by Vinony from 26 facts across 2 sources: Wikidata, Vinony collections. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.

Wikidata facts

Instance of
human
Gender
male
Citizenship
France
Place of death
Paris
Languages spoken
French
Doctoral student
Paul Sabatier
Field of work
politics
Movement
freethought
Image
Marcellin Berthelot.jpg
Show 18 more facts
place of burial
Panthéon
cause of death
myocardial infarction
Commons category
Marcellin Berthelot
date of birth
1827-00-00
date of death
1907-00-00
Commons gallery
Marcellin Berthelot
manner of death
natural causes
name in native language
Marcellin Berthelot
birth name
Pierre Eugène Marcellin Berthelot
writing language
French
Commons Creator page
Marcellin Berthelot
contributed to creative work
Popular Science
maintained by WikiProject
WikiProject Mathematics
P8168
Lintsi
Sources (10)

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Encyclopedic overview

Pierre Eugène Marcellin Berthelot ( French: [bɛʁtəlo]; 25 October 1827 – 18 March 1907) was a French chemist and Republican politician noted for the Thomsen–Berthelot principle of thermochemistry. He synthesized many organic compounds from inorganic substances, providing a large amount of counter-evidence to the theory of Jöns Jakob Berzelius that organic compounds required organisms in their synthesis. Berthelot was convinced that chemical synthesis would revolutionize the food industry by the year 2000, and that synthesized foods would replace farms and pastures. "Why not", he asked, "if it proved cheaper and better to make the same materials than to grow them?"

He was considered "one of the most famous chemists in the world." Upon being appointed to the post of Minister of Foreign Affairs for the French government in 1895, he was considered "the most eminent living chemist" in France. In 1901, he was elected as one of the "Forty Immortals" of the Académie française. He gave all his discoveries not only to the French government but to humanity.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Marcellin Berthelot” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

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