Emile-Hilaire Amagat

Abstract

BY the death of M. Emile-Hilaire Amagat at his country estatie at Saint Satur in the department of Cher, France loses one of her most distinguished physicists. Born in 1840, he held several minor teaching appointments before becoming professor at the Ecole Normal at Cluny. Here in 1867 he commenced his researches into the behaviour of gases under high pressures, which rapidly brought him into the front rank as an experimentalist. At Lyons, where he had become professor at the Catholic university, he utilised the tower of one of the churches as the site for a mercury manometer giving pressures up to 80 atmospheres, and in one of the coal mines of Saint Etienne constructed one up to 430 atmospheres. His observations on nitrogen at these pressures enabled him to use the nitrogen manometer in his experiments on other gases, on liquids and solids, and on the conditions of transition from one state to the other. By the help of a skilled mechanic he had himself trained, he was able to construct apparatus for observations at pressures up to 3000 atmospheres. His results, which appeared for the most part in the Annales de Chimie et de Physique, were summarised in memoirs of dates 1883 and 1893, and his curves showing the variation of the value of pv as p increases for hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbonic acid have been reproduced in standard text-books for the last twenty years.