Charles, Jacques

views updated

Charles, Jacques

FRENCH MATHEMATICIAN AND PHYSICIST
1746–1823

Jacques-Alexandre-César Charles was a mathematician and physicist remembered for his pioneering work with gases and hydrogen balloon flights. Charles was born on November 12, 1746, in Beaugency, Loiret, France; his first occupation was as a clerk at the Ministry of Finance in Paris. However, his interests eventually turned to science.

In the late 1700s ballooning became a major preoccupation of France and other industrialized nations. In early June 1783 the Montgolfier brothers launched the first successful hot-air balloon in Paris. Charles, who was interested in aeronautics, understood the concept of buoyancy and also was aware of Henry Cavendish's discovery of hydrogen, an element some fourteen times lighter than air, seventeen years earlier. On August 27, 1783, Charles launched the first hydrogen-filled balloon using gas produced by the reaction of sulfuric acid on iron filings. Among the 50,000 witnesses of this event was Benjamin Franklin, then residing in Paris as the U.S. ambassador to France. When the balloon returned to Earth in the French countryside, it was reportedly attacked with axes and pitchforks by terrified peasants who believed it to be a monster from the skies. On November 21 of that same year the Montgolfier brothers launched the first hot-air balloon with humans aboard, managing an altitude of less than 30 meters (98 feet). Charles, with the aid of brothers Nicholas and Aine Jean Robert, became the first human to ascend in a hydrogen balloon just ten days later. A far greater height of almost 3,000 meters (9,843 feet) was attained thanks to the superior lift of the hydrogen balloon Charles had designed and helped build.

Charles is best known for his studies on how the volume of gases changes with temperature. The English scientist Robert Boyle had many years earlier determined the inverse relationship between the volume V and pressure P of a gas when temperature T is held constant. In 1662 he published the results that would later come to be known as Boyle's law (V α1/P at constant T ). During the winter of 1787 Charles studied oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and carbon dioxide and found that the volume of all these gases increased identically with higher temperature when pressure was held constant (VαT at constant P ). Charles did not publish the results of his work at the time, but another French scientist, Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac, eventually learned of them. When Gay-Lussac did more extensive and precise experiments and published his similar findings in 1802 (as did the English scientist John Dalton), he acknowledged Charles's original work. Thus, the law governing the thermal expansion of gases, although sometimes called Gay-Lussac's law, is more commonly known as Charles's law.

While most of Charles's papers were on mathematics, he was ultimately an avid scientist and inventor. He duplicated a number of experiments that Franklin and others had completed on electricity and designed several instruments, including a new type of hydrometer for measuring densities and a reflecting goniometer for measuring the angles of crystals. Charles was elected to France's Academy of Sciences in 1785 and later became professor of physics at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers. He died in Paris on April 7, 1823.

see also Boyle, Robert; Cavendish, Henry; Dalton, John; Gay-Lussac, Joseph-Louis.

David A. Dobberpuhl