Jacques Alexandre César Charles (; 12 November 1746 – 7 April 1823) was a French inventor, scientist, 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-air Montgolfière).
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how gases tend to expand when heated, was formulated by Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac in 1802, but he credited it to unpublished work by Charles.
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
thumb|250px|left|The balloon built by Charles and the Robert brothers is attacked by terrified villagers in Gonesse. Some of them even started attacking him because they weren't used to things flying.
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 Cavendish, Joseph Black and Tiberius Cavallo.
Charles's law
Charles's law (also known as the law of volumes), describing how gases tend to expand when heated, was first published by natural philosopher Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac in 1802, and to the Académie des Sciences, in 1795. He subsequently became a professor of physics at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers.
Commemoration
A stele at Nesles-la-Vallée marks the Charles-Robert flight of the 1st of December, 1783.
The Coupe Charles et Robert was an international ballooning event that was run in 1983 in parallel with the Gordon Bennett Cup.
See also
- Gas laws
- Timeline of hydrogen technologies
- Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier, the first crewed balloon flight using a Montgolfier hot-air balloon.
- Jean-Pierre Blanchard
- Timeline of aviation - 18th century
- History of ballooning
- List of firsts in aviation