Paul Sabatier, 1859-1941

Abstract

Paul Sabatier was born at Carcassonne on 5 November 1859, and was educated at the Ecole Normale, which he entered in 1874. In 1878 he became assistant to Berthelot at the College de France after spending a year as professor at the Lycee of Vimes. In 1880 he presented for the degree of Doctor of Science a thesis on metallic sulphides. He spent the next year and a half as Maitre de Conference in the faculty of sciences at Bordeaux, and in January 1882 he entered the university of Toulouse to which he grew greatly attached and where he spent the rest of a remarkably active life, becoming dean of the faculty of sciences in 1905. He died at Toulouse on 14 August 1941. Sabatier’s early work lay in the fields of inorganic and physical chemistry. In the former he published a series of papers on the sulphides, including one on hydrogen disulphide (1886). In an examination of the properties of the oxides of nitrogen he, together with his pupil J. B. Senderens, discovered a number of new metallic nitrides. The deep blue nitroso-disulphonic acid and a series of complex cupric salts must be mentioned as other interesting achievements in preparative inorganic chemistry. His early investigations in physical chemistry comprised a series of thermochemical measurements inspired by his professor, Marcelin Berthelot, a study of the velocity of transformation of metaphosphoric acid and the partition of a base between two acids. It was not until he had been in the university of Toulouse for fifteen years that he commenced his remarkable investigations on the application of catalytic methods to organic compounds. When Sabatier commenced his investigations on the catalytic properties of finely divided metals, little was known about their mode of reaction, although the phenomenon of catalysis had been well established. The investigations of Faraday had led to the formulation of a physical theory of catalysis which postulated the absorption of gases in the pores of the solid catalyst.