With his skill in science, and with his work with the scientific method, Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac earns the title of a great scientist. He was born on December 6, 1778 and he was the oldest child. His father was Antoine Gay. He was a lawyer who called himself Gay-Lussac to be apart from all of the other people with the same last name as Gay there. He got that name from the name of some family property near St Leonard(4) .The French Revolution affected the French scientists then. Gay-Lussac was sent to Paris when he was fourteen when his father was arrested. After taking private lessons and going to boarding school, the Ecole Polytechnique, and the civil engineering school, Gay-Lussac became an assistant to Berthollet, a co-worker of Lavoisier. Gay-Lussac then got his chance to work with famous men. Here with these people he received his training in chemical research(4). Gay-Lussac did his first major research in the winter of 1801-1802 when he was 24. He found some different evidence about the expansion properties of different gases. He took out the water vapor from the equipment he used and made sure that the gases didn’t have any moisture, he got results that were more accurate than the others before him. He concluded that equal volumes of all gases expand equally with the same increase in temperature. (16,19). Gay-Lussac and Thenard, a laboratory professor, isolated the element boron. Also, Gay-Lussac worked with isolation of plant alkaloids medical uses and was able to produce oxalic acid from the fusion of sawdust and alkali.(17) One of his most important industrial achievement was the production of sulfuric acid. He used tall absorption towers called the Gay-Lussac Towers. The reaction took place in chambers that were lead-lined where sulfuric acid was produced. Gay-Lussac found a way to recycle the substance that was left after the sulfuric acid was produced. Sulfuric acid was produced a lot this way back then. (13) Gay-...
