Henry Louis Le Chatelier[1] (French pronunciation: [ɑ̃ʁi lwi lə ʃɑtlje]; 8 October

1850 – 17 September 1936) was a French chemist of the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. He devised Le Chatelier's principle, used by chemists and chemical
engineers to predict the effect a changing condition has on a system in chemical
equilibrium.

Early life
Le Chatelier was born on 8 October 1850 in Paris and was the son of French
materials engineer Louis Le Chatelier and Louise Durand. His father was an
influential figure who played important roles in the birth of the French aluminium
industry, the introduction of the Martin-Siemens processes into the iron and steel
industries, and the rise of railway transportation. Le Chatelier's father
profoundly influenced his son's future. Henry Louis had one sister, Marie, and four
brothers, Louis (1853–1928), Alfred (1855–1929), George (1857–1935), and André
(1861–1929). His mother raised the children by regimen, described by Henry Louis:
"I was accustomed to a very strict discipline: it was necessary to wake up on time,
to prepare for your duties and lessons, to eat everything on your plate, etc. All
my life I maintained respect for order and law. Order is one of the most perfect
forms of civilization."[2]

As a child, Le Chatelier attended the Collège Rollin in Paris. At the age of 19,
after only one year of instruction in specialized engineering, he followed in his
father's footsteps by enrolling in the École Polytechnique on 25 October 1869. Like
all the pupils of the Polytechnique, in September 1870, Le Chatelier was named
second lieutenant and later took part in the Siege of Paris. After brilliant
successes in his technical schooling, he entered the École des Mines in Paris in
1871.

Le Chatelier married Geneviève Nicolas, a friend of the family and sister of four
fellow students of the Polytechnique. They had seven children, four girls and three
boys, five of whom entered scientific fields; two died preceding Le Chatelier's
death.

Career
Despite training as an engineer, and even with his interests in industrial
problems, Le Chatelier chose to teach chemistry rather than pursue a career in
industry. In 1887, he was appointed head of the general chemistry to the
preparatory course of the École des Mines in Paris. He tried unsuccessfully to get
a position teaching chemistry at the École polytechnique in 1884 and again in 1897.

The Sorbonne. Professor Henry Louis Le Chatelier (Bibliothèque de La Sorbonne,

NuBIS)
At the Collège de France, Le Chatelier succeeded Schützenberger as chair of
inorganic chemistry. Later he taught at the Sorbonne university, where he replaced
Henri Moissan.

At the Collège de France, Le Chatelier taught:

Phenomena of combustion (1898)

Theory of chemical equilibria, high temperature measurements and phenomena of
dissociation (1898–1899)
Properties of metal alloys (1899–1900)
Iron alloys (1900–1901)
General methods of analytical chemistry (1901–1902)
General laws of analytical chemistry (1901–1902)
General laws of chemical mechanics (1903)
Silica and its compounds (1905–1906)
Some practical applications of the fundamental principles of chemistry (1906–1907)
Properties of metals and some alloys (1907)
After four unsuccessful campaigns (1884, 1897, 1898 and 1900), Le Chatelier was
elected to the Académie des sciences (Academy of Science) in 1907. He was also
elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1907. In 1924, he became an
Honorary Member of the Polish Chemical Society.[3]

Scientific work
In chemistry, Le Chatelier is best known for his work on his principle of chemical
equilibrium, Le Chatelier's principle, and on varying solubility of salts in an
ideal solution. He published no fewer than thirty papers on these topics between
1884 and 1914. His results on chemical equilibrium were presented in 1884 at the
Académie des sciences in Paris.

Le Chatelier also carried out extensive research on metallurgy and was one of the
founders of the technical newspaper La revue de métallurgie (Metallurgy Review).

Part of Le Chatelier's work was devoted to industry. For example, he was a

consulting engineer for a cement company, the Société des chaux et ciments Pavin de
Lafarge, today known as Lafarge Cement. His 1887 doctoral thesis was dedicated to
the subject of mortars: Recherches expérimentales sur la constitution des mortiers
hydrauliques (Experimental Research on the Composition of Hydraulic Mortars).

On the advice of a paper of Le Chatelier that the combustion of a mixture of oxygen

and acetylene in equal parts rendered a flame of more than 3000 celsius,[4] in 1899
Charles Picard (1872-1957) started to investigate this phenomenon but failed
because of soot deposits. In 1901 the latter consulted with Edmond Fouché and
together they obtain a perfectly stable flame and the oxyacetylene industry was
born.[5] In 1902 Fouché invented a gas welder tool with French patent number
325,403 and in 1910 Picard developed the needle valve.[6]

Le Chatelier in 1901 attempted the direct combination of the two gases nitrogen and
hydrogen at a pressure of 200 atm and 600 °C in the presence of metallic iron. An
air compressor forced the mixture of gases into a steel Berthelot bomb, where a
platinum spiral heated them and the reduced iron catalyst.[7] A terrific explosion
occurred which nearly killed an assistant. Le Chatelier found that the explosion
was due to the presence of air in the apparatus used. And thus it was left for
Fritz Haber to succeed where several noted French chemists, including Thenard,
Sainte Claire Deville and even Berthelot had failed. Less than five years later,
Haber and Claude were successful in producing ammonia on a commercial scale,
acknowledging that the account of Le Chatelier's failed attempt had accelerated
their research. Near the end of his life, Le Chatelier wrote, "I let the discovery
of the ammonia synthesis slip through my hands. It was the greatest blunder of my
scientific career”.[8]

Le Chatelier's principle
Main article: Le Chatelier's principle
Le Chatelier's Principle states that a system always acts to oppose changes in
chemical equilibrium; to restore equilibrium, the system will favor a chemical
pathway to reduce or eliminate the disturbance so as to restabilize at
thermodynamic equilibrium. Put another way,

If a chemical system at equilibrium experiences a change in concentration,

temperature or total pressure, the equilibrium will shift in order to minimize that
change.

This qualitative law enables one to envision the displacement of equilibrium of a

chemical reaction.

For example: a change in concentration of a reaction in equilibrium for the

following equation:

N2(g) + 3H2(g) ⇌ 2NH3(g)

If one increases the pressure of the reactants, the reaction will tend to move
towards the products to decrease the pressure of the reaction.

However consider another example: in the contact process for the production of
sulfuric acid, the second stage is a reversible reaction:

2SO2(g) + O2(g) ⇌ 2SO3(g)

The forward reaction is exothermic and the reverse reaction is endothermic. Viewed
by Le Chatelier's principle a larger amount of thermal energy in the system would
favor the endothermic reverse reaction, as this would absorb the increased energy;
in other words the equilibrium would shift to the reactants in order to remove the
stress of added heat. For similar reasons, lower temperatures would favor the
exothermic forward reaction, and produce more products. This works in this case,
since due to loss of entropy the reaction becomes less exothermic as temperature
increases; however reactions that become more exothermic as temperature increases
would seem to violate this principle.

Politics
It was then typical for scientists and engineers to have a very scientific vision
of industry. In the first issue of La revue de métallurgie, Le Chatelier published
an article describing his convictions on the subject,[9] discussing the scientific
management theory of Frederick Winslow Taylor. In 1928, he published a book on
Taylorism.

Le Chatelier was politically conservative. In 1934, he published an opinion on the

French forty-hour work week law in the Brussels publication Revue économique
internationale. However, in spite of certain anti-parliamentarian convictions, he
kept away from any extremist or radical movements.[citation needed]

His brother Alfred Le Chatelier, a former soldier, opened the Atelier de Glatigny
in the rural area of Glatigny (Le Chesnay), near Versailles, in 1897. The workshop
made sandstone ceramics, high-quality porcelain and glassware. In 1901, the critic
Henri Cazalis (alias Jean Lahor), listed the workshop as one of the best producers
in France of Art Nouveau ceramics.[10] Henry Louis Le Chatelier seems to have
encouraged Alfred's workshop and assisted with experiments in the composition of
porcelain and the reactions of quartz inclusions, and also designed a
thermoelectric pyrometer to measure temperature in the kilns.[11]

Works
Cours de chimie industrielle (1896; second edition, 1902)
High Temperature Measurements, translated by G. K. Burgess (1901; second edition,
1902)
Recherches expérimentales sur la constitution des mortiers hydrauliques (1904;
English translation, 1905)
Leçons sur le carbone (1908)
Introduction à l'étude de la métallurgie (1912)
La silice et les silicates (1914)
Honours and awards
Le Chatelier named "chevalier" (knight) of the Légion d'honneur in 1887, became
"officier" (officer) in 1908, "commandeur" (Knight Commander) in 1919, and was
finally awarded the title of "grand officier" (Knight Grand Officer) in May 1927.
He was admitted to the Academie des Sciences in 1907.

He was awarded the Bessemer Gold Medal of the British Iron and Steel Institute in
1911, admitted as a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1913 and awarded their
Davy Medal in 1916.[12]
References
Desch, C. H. (1938). "Henry Louis Le Chatelier. 1850–1936". Obituary Notices of
Fellows of the Royal Society. 2 (6): 250–259. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1938.0005. See
signature on second page.
L. Guillet, Révue de métallurgie, special edition, January 1937
"President of honour and honorary members of PTChem". Retrieved 23 February 2020.
"Fouché, Edmond". SIPPAF. Système d'Information Patrons et Patronat Français.
Retrieved 30 May 2022.
Robert-Hauglustaine, Anne-Catherine (2000). "Les métiers du soudage en France et
la création de filières de formation". Le Mouvement Social (193): 29–59.
doi:10.2307/3779979. JSTOR 3779979.
"LE CHALUMEAU (1902)". TRACES DE FRANCE. 13 May 2018.
4. "Henri Le Chatelier: His Publications," Ceram. Abs., 16, (Oct., 1937)
Silverman, Alexander (1938). "Le Chatelier and the synthesis of ammonia". Journal
of Chemical Education. 15 (6): 289. Bibcode:1938JChEd..15R.289S.
doi:10.1021/ed015p289.3.
H.L. Le Chatelier, "Role of Science in Industry" in La revue de métallurgie, n°1,
1904 page 1 to 10
Arthur 2017, p. 110.
Arthur 2017, p. 112.
"Henry Louis Le Chatelier. 1850–1936". Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal
Society. Royal Society. 2 (6): 250–259. 1938. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1938.0005. Retrieved
8 September 2020.
Sources
Arthur, Paul (2017), "Alfred Le Chatelier et l'Atelier de Glatigny" (PDF), Sèvres
(in French) (26), retrieved 2018-02-25
External links
"Henry LE CHATELIER (1850–1936) Sa vie, son œuvre." Révue de Métallurgie, special
edition, January 1937. [1] (in French)
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