Gay Lussacs Law

Gay-Lussac, Joseph Louis (1778-1850), a French chemist and physicist.

The formulation of Gay-Lussac's Law (1808) was an important step
toward the discovery of fundamental properties of gases. Gay-Lussac
had also independently discovered Charles' Law in 1802. In 1804 he
ascended to 23,000 feet (7,000 m) in a balloon, to study the effect of
magnetism in the upper atmosphere.
In 1808 Gay-Lussac, working with Louis Jacques Thenard, isolated
boron. Gay-Lussac discovered cyanogen in 1809. In 1815 he proved that
prussic acid contains hydrogen and not oxygen. This completed the
downfall of Lavoisier's theory that all acids contain oxygen.
Gay-Lussac attended the cole Polytechnique in Paris, 1797-1800, and
was made a professor of chemistry at the school in 1809. He was also a
professor at the Sorbonne, 1808-32, and at the Botanical Garden after
1832. He was made a member of the French Academy in 1806 and was
elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1831.
Gay-Lussac's Law states:
When gases combine, their relative combining volumes and the volume of
the product, if it is a gas, can be expressed by small, whole numbers.
Gay-Lussac grew up during the period of the French Revolution. This
was a time when the science of chemistry also saw several changes.
Gay-Lussac was directly affected by the French Revolution. During the
revolution, his father was imprisoned and young Gay-Lussac was sent to
the Ecole Polytechnique. This was an institution created by the French
Revolution to nurture scientists, especially for military use.
Lussac's laws of combining volumes state that when gases react
together to form other gases, the ratio of the reacting gases and the
gases produced will be in whole numbers when all volumes are measured
at the same temperature and pressure. In 1802, he drew up a law
stating that if the volume and mass of a gas remained constant, and
the temperature of a gas increases, its pressure would increase
proportionally.

The expression Gay-Lussac's law is used for each of the two

relationships named after the French chemist Joseph Louis GayLussac and which concern the properties of gases, though it is more
usually applied to his law of combining volumes, the first listed
here. The first law relates to volumes before and after a chemical
reaction while the second concerns the pressure and temperature
relationship for a sample of gas often known asAmontons' Law.

1802 Gay-Lussac first formulated the law, Gay-Lussac's Law,

stating that if the mass and volume of a gas are held constant then
gas pressure increases linearly as the temperature rises. This is
sometimes written as P = k T, where k is a constant dependent on
the mass and volume of the gas and T is temperature on an absolute
scale (in terms of the ideal gas law, k = nR/V).
1804 He and Jean-Baptiste Biot made a hot-air balloon ascent to a
height of 7,016 metres (23,018 ft) in an early investigation of
the Earth's atmosphere. He wanted to collect samples of the air at
different heights to record differences in temperature and
moisture.
1805 Together with his friend and scientific
collaborator Alexander von Humboldt, he discovered that the
composition of the atmosphere does not change with decreasing
pressure (increasing altitude). They also discovered that water is
formed by two parts of hydrogen and one part of oxygen (by volume).

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