biography
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1728–99)
|
| biography:
| Chemist, born in Bordeaux, SW France. He studied at Belfast, Glasgow, and Edinburgh, and in 1756 showed that the causticity of lime and alkalis is due to the absence of the ‘fixed air’ (carbon dioxide) present in limestone and the carbonates of the alkalis. He evolved the theory of ‘latent heat’, on which his scientific fame chiefly rests, and founded the theory of specific heats. In 1766 he became professor of medicine and chemistry at Edinburgh. |
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