Berthelot, (Pierre-Eug�ne) Marcellin 1827-1907
French chemist and politician

Born in Paris, he became the first Professor of Organic Chemistry at the Coll�ge de France (1865). He was put in charge of Paris defences in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), and was Foreign Minister (1895-96) and an Academician (1900). He helped to found thermochemistry, introduced a standard method for determining the latent heat of steam, and discovered many of the derivatives of coal tar. His syntheses of many fundamental organic compounds helped to destroy the classical division between organic and inorganic compounds. He studied the mechanism of explosion, wrote many scholarly works on the history of early chemistry and did much to initiate the chemical analyses of archaeological objects. He received the Legion of Honour in 1861 and succeeded Louis Pasteur as secretary of the French Academy of Sciences in 1889.

Bibliography: Jean Jacques, Berthelot, 1827-1907: autopsie d'un mythe