What is Charles' law?

Theodore G. Lindeman, professor and chair of the chemistry

department of Colorado College in Colorado Springs, offers
this explanation:
The physical principle known as Charles' law states that the volume of a
gas equals a constant value multiplied by its
temperature as measured on the Kelvin scale
(zero Kelvin corresponds to -273.15 degrees
Celsius).
The law's name honors the pioneer balloonist
Jacques Charles, who in 1787 did experiments
on how the volume of gases depended on
temperature. The irony is that Charles never
published the work for which he is remembered,
nor was he the first or last to make this
discovery. In fact, Guillaume Amontons had
done the same sorts of experiments 100 years
Image: Alan J.
earlier, and it was Joseph Gay-Lussac in 1808
Jircitano
who made definitive measurements and
published results showing that every gas he
JACQUES
tested obeyed this generalization.
CHARLES lofted the
It is pretty surprising that dozens of different
first hydrogen balloon
substances should behave exactly alike, as these
from Paris in 1783.
scientists found that various gases did. The
The law of gases that
accepted explanation, which James Clerk
explains why balloons
Maxwell put forward around 1860, is that the
rise bears his name.
amount of space a gas occupies depends purely
on the motion of the gas molecules. Under typical conditions, gas
molecules are very far from their neighbors, and they are so small that
their own bulk is negligible. They push outward on flasks or pistons or
balloons simply by bouncing off those surfaces at high speed. Inside a
helium balloon, about 1024 (a million million million million) helium
atoms smack into each square centimeter of rubber every second, at
speeds of about a mile per second!
Both the speed and frequency with which the gas molecules ricochet off
container walls depend on the temperature, which is why hotter gases
either push harder against the walls (higher pressure) or occupy larger
volumes (a few fast molecules can occupy the space of many slow
molecules). Specifically, if we double the Kelvin temperature of a rigidly
contained gas sample, the number of collisions per unit area per second
increases by the square root of 2, and on average the momentum of
those collisions increases by the square root of 2. So the net effect is that
the pressure doubles if the container doesn't stretch, or the volume
doubles if the container enlarges to keep the pressure from rising.

So we could say that Charles' Law describes how hot air balloons get
light enough to lift off, and why a temperature inversion prevents
convection currents in the atmosphere, and how a sample of gas can
work as an absolute thermometer.
Charles' law states that the volume of a gas equals a constant value multiplied by its
temperature as measured on the Kelvin scale (zero Kelvin corresponds to -273.15
degrees Celsius).
Amount of space a gas occupies depends purely on the motion of the gas molecules.
Under typical conditions, gas molecules are very far from their neighbours, and they
are so small that their own bulk is negligible. They push outward on flasks or
pistons or balloons simply by bouncing off those surfaces at high speed. Inside a
helium balloon, about 1024 helium atoms smack into each square centimeter of
rubber every second, at speeds of about a mile per second.
Both the speed and frequency with which the gas molecules ricochet off container
walls depend on the temperature, which is why hotter gases occupy larger volumes
Specifically, if we double the Kelvin temperature of a rigidly contained gas sample,
the number of collisions per unit area per second increases by the square root of 2,
and on average the momentum of those collisions increases by the square root of 2.
So the net effect is that volume doubles if the container enlarges to keep the pressure
from rising.