Jean-Baptiste Joseph Dieudonné Boussingault (2 February 1801 – 11 May 1887) was a French chemist who made significant contributions to agricultural science, petroleum science and metallurgy.
Biography
Jean-Baptiste Boussingault – an agricultural scientist and chemist – was born in Paris. After studying at the school of mines at Saint-Etienne he went to Alsace to work in the asphalt mines – a two-year interlude that was to shape his contributions to science.
During the insurrection of the Spanish colonies, the president of Gran-Colombia, the liberator Simón Bolívar, named Francisco Antonio Zea, ambassador in France, to contract youngers and singles European scientists to investigate the available sources of his new formed nation. In 1822 Boussingault with the Peruvian geologist Mariano Rivero were contracted by Zea and they went to Venezuela as a mining engineer on behalf of an English company contracted by Bolivar. In Urao lagoon near Lagunillas, Merida State, Venezuela discovered the mineral Gaylussite. During his stay in America, he observed that goiter was endemic in some areas and not in others, and that this was related to the presence of iodine in the salt of some salt flats. Consequently, on his return to Europe, he proposed the use of this iodized salt to combat goiter, although his proposal was not taken into account.
At Santa Fe de Bogota he was attached to the staff of General Bolivar as colonel and traveled widely in the northern parts of the continent. Between March and December 1831, he attempted to climb seven Andean volcanoes: Puracé, Galeras and Cumbal in Colombia, and Pichincha, Antisana, Cotopaxi and Chimborazo in Ecuador. In 1831 he climbed to a new highest altitude by a Western explorer on Chimborazo (6.006 m) in the process.
thumb|right|205px|Gaylussite discovered in Lagunillas, Merida State, Venezuela
Returning to France in 1832 he married Adele Le Bel whose family had the concession to the asphalt mines where he had previously worked and it was in this period that he made his greatest discoveries. Later he became professor of chemistry at Lyon, and in 1839 was appointed to the chair of agricultural and analytical chemistry at the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers in Paris. In 1848 he was elected to the National Assembly representing his adopted Alsace, where he sat as a Moderate republican. Three years later he was dismissed from his professorship on account of his political opinions, but so much resentment at this action was shown by scientific men in general, and especially by his colleagues, who threatened to resign in a body, that he was reinstated. He died in Paris.
His first papers were concerned with agricultural and mining topics, and his sojourn in South America yielded a number of miscellaneous memoirs, on the cause of goitre in the Cordilleras, the gases of volcanoes, earthquakes, tropical rain, &c., which won the commendation of Alexander von Humboldt. From 1836 he devoted himself mainly to agricultural chemistry and animal and vegetable physiology, with occasional excursions into mineral chemistry. His work included papers on the quantity of nitrogen in different foods, the amount of gluten in different wheats, investigations on the question whether plants can assimilate free nitrogen from the atmosphere (which he answered in the negative and propose the basis of what became known as the nitrogen cycle), the respiration of plants, the function of their leaves, the action and value of manures and chemical fertilizers, and other similar subjects.
See also
- Boussingaultia – A genus of the family Basellaceae