Berthelot's Centenary

One reason for choosing last week to dedicate the international chemistry cornerstone was that the week marked the hundredth anniversary of Marcellin Pierre Eugene Berthelot's birth.**

Berthelot proved the science of organic chemistry. Before him chemists thought that they could make compounds only of inorganic elements, that organic growths depended upon a "vital principle." Berthelot reasoned that all chemical phenomena followed physical laws. In his laboratory he treated glycerin with certain acids and got fats, oils and butters. He combined hydrogen and carbon by means of the voltaic arc and got acetylene. "Berthelot condenses it [acetylene] under the action of heat and behold, we have benzine," writes Premier Poincare in the current Chimie et Industrie, French periodical. "He adds hydrogen and behold, there appears ethylene, which, united with water, will produce alcohol. He places it in contact with air and with an alkaline solution--and behold, acetic acid or vinegar. If I were to enumerate all his successful reconstructions I should never end."

**Not to be confused with Claude Louis Berthollet (1748-1822), who made the first systematic attempt to deal with the physics of chemistry. His great book was his Essai de statique chimique (1803).