The legacy of Henri Victor Regnault in the arts and sciences
Résumé
The 21st of July 2010 marked the bicentennial of the birth of Henri Victor Regnault, a famous French chemist and physicist and a pioneer of paper photography. During his lifetime, he received many honours and distinctions for his invaluable scientific contributions, especially to experimental thermodynamics. Colleague of the celebrated chemist Louis-Joseph Gay-Lussac (1778-1850) at the École des Mines and mentor of William Thomson (1824-1907) at the École Polytechnique, he is nowadays conspicuously absent from all the textbooks and reviews (Hertz, 2004) dealing with thermodynamics. This paper is thus the opportunity to recall his major contributions to the field of experimental thermodynamics but also to the nascent field, in those days, of organic chemistry. Avid amateur of photography, he devoted more than twenty years of his life to his second passion. Having initially taken up photography in the 1840s as a potential tool for scientific research, he ultimately made many more photographs for artistic and self-expressive purposes than scientific ones. He was a founding member of the Société Héliographique in 1851 and of the Société Française de Photographie in 1854. Like his scientific work, his photography was quickly forgotten upon his death, but has begun to attract new respect and recognition.
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