Henri Étienne Sainte-Claire Deville

Henri Étienne Sainte-Claire Deville (11 March 18181 July 1881) was a French chemist.

He was born in the island of St Thomas in the Danish West Indies, where his father was French consul. Together with his elder brother Charles he was educated in Paris at the collège Rollin. In 1844, he graduated as a doctor of medicine and doctor of science. In that same year, he was appointed to organize the new faculty of science at Besançon, where he acted as dean and professor of chemistry from 1845 to 1851. When he returned to Paris in the 1952 he succeeded Antoine Jérôme Balard at the École Normale, and in 1859 became professor at the Sorbonne in place of J. B. A. Dumas, for whom he had begun to lecture in 1853. He died at Boulogne-sur-Seine.

In 1841, he began his experiments with investigations of oil of turpentine and tolu balsam. In 1849 he discovered anhydrous nitric acid (nitrogen pentoxide), a substance interesting as the first obtained of the so-called "anhydrides" of the monobasic acids. In 1854, he succeeded in making metallic aluminium, and he thought of a method by which the metal could be prepared on a large scale by the aid of sodium, the manufacture of which he also developed. Together with Friedrich Wöhler, he discovered silicon nitride in 1857.

Deville was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1860. In 1885, the rue Sainte-Claire-Deville in the 12th arrondissement de Paris was named in his honour.

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Category:1818 births
Category:1881 deaths
Category:French chemists