page_title: Luigi Valentino Brugnatelli
section_title: Academic career and discoveries
hierarchical_section_title: Luigi Valentino Brugnatelli / Academic career and discoveries
caption_attribution_description: Aula Magna of the University of Pavia (Pavia, Italy) Svenska: Huvudaulan - Aula Magna
context_page_description: Luigi Valentino Brugnatelli was an Italian chemist and inventor who discovered the process for electroplating in 1805.
context_section_description: He occasionally taught at the University of Pavia where he became the head of chemistry teaching in 1796. In 1813 he became its Rector.
  In 1798 Brugnatelli discovered the silver salt fulminic acid when he found that if silver was dissolved in nitric acid and the solution added to spirits of wine, a white, highly explosive powder was obtained. Decades later in 1860 this silver fulminate was used by the confectioner Tom Smith to give the 'snap' to his new novelty - the Christmas cracker. A personal friend of Alessandro Volta, Brugnatelli accompanied him to Paris in 1801 to illustrate the invention of the voltaic pile. 
  In 1802 Brugnatelli successfully carried out the first gilding electroplating experiments with the coating of carbon electrodes by a metallic film, finally refining the process in 1805 for which he used his colleague Volta's invention of five years earlier, the voltaic pile, to facilitate the first electrodeposition. He hypothesized that in the chemical pile there was also a transport of atoms, obtaining experimental evidence of this. He discovered the properties of coal cathodes as electrical conductors and succeeded in covering them with a metallic layer. He sensed the possible applications in the industrial field, sharing this procedure with a Pavese goldsmith, who used it.
  Brugnatelli's inventions were suppressed by the French Academy of Sciences and did not become used in general industry for the following thirty years. By 1839, scientists in Britain and Russia had independently devised metal-deposition processes similar to Brugnatelli's for the copper electroplating of printing press plates.
  He was the first to adopt and make known in Italy the new theories and the new nomenclature introduced in chemistry by Antoine Lavoisier. He tried to introduce new concepts and new terminology (for example, instead of "lifeless" nitrogen he first proposed "light generator" and then "putrid" septone), but while these innovations gained some recognition even abroad they were ultimately not accepted. 
  In 1818, the year of his death, Brugnatelli was the first to prepare the compound alloxan, discovered by Justus von Liebig and Friedrich Wöhler.
  An editorial entrepreneur, Brugnatelli played a very important role in stimulating scientific publications in Italy, helping to spread advanced knowledge of chemistry, physics and natural sciences. 
  Luigi Valentino Brugnatelli died in his native Pavia in 1818 aged 57.
caption: The Aula Magna at the University of Pavia - Brugnatelli taught here from 1796 to 1818
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