Joseph Achille Le Bel

Joseph- Achille Le Bel ( born January 21, 1847 in Pechelbronn, Alsace, † August 6, 1930 in Paris) was a French chemist.

Life and work

Pechelbronn was the first place in Europe, was recovered at the oil. Le Bel was born into a wealthy family of Alsace, which controlled the petroleum industry in Pechelbronn. His father was Frédéric -Louis Achille Le Bel ( 1807-1867 ).

In 1865 he was sent to the École Polytechnique in Paris, to get a training in chemistry and spent much of his time with the chemical basic research. After graduation, he worked as an assistant at the chemist Antoine Balard and Adolphe Wurtz in Paris at the Sorbonne, where he worked on, among others, the composition of the oil of his homeland. Already in 1874 he published an important work on the relationship between " atomic formulas " and the rotatory power of organic compounds.

In 1882 he took over the management of the company in Pechelbronn, which he had inherited from his father. He developed for the treatment of oil a distillation process. The operation experienced under his leadership a great economic boom. However, in 1889 he sold the company because it was not satisfied with the role as an industrial manager, and returned as a multi-millionaire to Paris.

From 1889 he worked in the laboratory of Armand Gautier at the Ecole de Médecine, and later as a private scholar without binding to a college or an institute. To this end, he set up his own laboratory a house, and he also had a well of depth 45 m to create, to have a place with almost constant temperature. This was also used for his studies on the so-called katathermische radiation, a radiation which should compensate for the heat losses to the ground of his hypothesis.

Le Bel initiated from theoretical considerations from the tetrahedral structure of many organic carbon compounds. He founded modern stereochemistry. The term stereochemistry is only a few years later, in 1888, imported from a proposal by Victor Meyer ( 1848-1897 ).

He pointed the then puzzling optical activity of organic compounds by adopting tetrahedral asymmetric carbon atoms. This declaration he took in 1874 at the same time, but independently of Jacobus Henricus van ' t Hoff. In later years, Le Bel examined the cosmic rays.

Works

• Cosmologie Rational (1929 )