The French chemist Claude Louis Berthollet (1748-1822) made many original contributions to both theoretical and applied chemistry. He was one of the foremost disciples of Lavoisier.

Claude Louis Berthollet was born on Dec. 9, 1748, in the village of Galloire on Lake Annecy. He attended the University of Turin in Italy, where he graduated in medicine in 1770. He moved to Paris in 1772 to study chemistry.

In 1778 Berthollet married and took a second doctorate in medicine at the University of Paris, where his Italian degree was not recognized. By 1780 his published research on chemistry had earned him admission to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris, and 4 years later he was appointed director of the Gobelin tapestry works. Here he made a special study of the chemistry of dyeing, on which he published an important two-volume work in 1791.

In 1785 Berthollet adopted the new system of chemistry based upon the oxidation theory...