Life of jacques charles biography

French inventor, scientist and mathematician (1746–1823)

Jacques Alexandre César Charles (12 November 1746 – 7 April 1823) was a Frenchinventor, scientist, mathematician, and balloonist. Charles wrote almost nothing about mathematics, and most of what has been credited to him was due to mistaking him with another Jacques Charles (sometimes called Charles the Geometer), also a member of the Paris Academy of Sciences, entering on 12 May 1785.

Charles and the Robert brothers launched the world's first hydrogen-filled gas balloon August 27, 1783; then December 1, 1783, Charles and his co-pilot Nicolas-Louis Robert ascended to a height of about 1,800 feet (550 m) in a piloted gas balloon. Their pioneering use of hydrogen for lift led to this type of gas balloon being named a Charlière (as opposed to the hot-airMontgolfière).

Charles's law, describing how gases tend to expand when heated, was formulated by Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac in 1802, but he credited it to unpublished work by Charles.

Charles was elected to the Académie des Sciences in 1795 and subsequently became professor of physics at the Académie de Sciences.

Biography

Charles was born in Beaugency-sur-Loire in 1746. He married Julie Françoise Bouchaud des Hérettes (1784–1817), a creole woman 37 years younger than himself. Reportedly the poet Alphonse de Lamartine also fell in love with her, and she was the inspiration for Elvire in his 1820 autobiographical Poetic Meditation "Le Lac" ("The Lake"), which describes in retrospect the fervent love shared by a couple from the point of view of the bereaved man. Charles outlived her and died in Paris on 7 April 1823.

Hydrogen balloon flights

First hydrogen balloon

Charles conceived the idea that hydrogen would be a suitable lifting agent for balloons having studied the work of Robert Boyle's Boyle's Law which was published 100 years earlier in 1662, and of his contemporaries Henry

Jacques-Alexandre Charles, a French chemist, was born Nov. 12, 1746. Charles, with the help of the Robert brothers, built and launched the first hydrogen-filled balloon on Aug. 27, 1783, from the Champ de Mars in Paris. Just three months later, on Dec. 1, a much larger hydrogen balloon lifted off from the gardens of the Tuileries, with Charles and the younger Robert brother in the gondola. The crowd of 400,000 was impressed by the ascent, which went up to 1800 feet, but the process of filling the balloon with gas was much more impressive, in our opinion. The hydrogen gas was generated by a large circle of oak barrels filled with iron nails, into each of which was poured, in succession, concentrated sulfuric acid. The iron replaced the hydrogen in the H₂SO₄, and the released gas gushed furiously to the surface and was conveyed by tubes to a central vat, where it was bubbled through water (to wash out any remaining acid) and then piped to the balloon. Since the reaction is exothermic, which is to say, it releases heat, the barrels were close to igniting, and the iron tubing grew too hot to touch. When you recall that hydrogen is seriously flammable, it is amazing that the entire enterprise didn't go up in flames. But it didn't, and Charles became famous, so that hydrogen balloons in France were henceforth called charlières (just as hot-air balloons were called montgolfières, in honor of the Montgolfier brothers, who flew the first hot-air balloons).

We have several books in the History of Science Collection that describe and illustrate the two balloon ascents of Charles and the Robert brothers. From a contemporary account (1784), we see: the ascent on Dec. 1 (second image above); the process of filling a small balloon with a single barrel of iron nails and sulfuric acid (third image); the method for filling a larger balloon with six barrels of acid (fourth image),

Jacques-Alexandre-C�sar Charles

Charles' Law (Jacques-Alexandre-C�sar Charles)

On 5 June 1783, Joseph and tienne Montgolfier used a fire to inflate a spherical balloon about 30 feet in diameter that traveled about a mile and one-half before it came back to earth. News of this remarkable achievement spread throughout France, and Jacques-Alexandre-C�sar Charles immediately tried to duplicate this performance. As a result of his work with balloons, Charles noticed that the volume of a gas is directly proportional to its temperature.

V a T

This relationship between the temperature and volume of a gas, which became known as Charles' law, provides an explanation of how hot-air balloons work. Ever since the third century B.C., it has been known that an object floats when it weighs less than the fluid it displaces. If a gas expands when heated, then a given weight of hot air occupies a larger volume than the same weight of cold air. Hot air is therefore less dense than cold air. Once the air in a balloon gets hot enough, the net weight of the balloon plus this hot air is less than the weight of an equivalent volume of cold air, and the balloon starts to rise. When the gas in the balloon is allowed to cool, the balloon returns to the ground.

Charles' law can be demonstrated with the apparatus shown below. A 30-mL syringe and a thermometer are inserted through a rubber stopper into a flask that has been cooled to 0�C. The ice bath is then removed and the flask is immersed in a warm-water bath. The gas in the flask expands as it warms, slowly pushing the piston out of the syringe. The total volume of the gas in the system is equal to the volume of the flask plus the volume of the syringe. The table below contains typical data obtained with this apparatus.