Born in
Aix-la-Chapelle in 1810 (modern Aachen, Germany and at that time under French rule), he moved to Paris at the age of eight, following the death of his parents. There, he worked for an upholstery firm until he was eighteen. In 1830, he was admitted to the
École Polytechnique, and in 1832 he graduated from the
École des mines. Working under
Justus von Liebig at
Gießen, Regnault distinguished himself in the nascent field of
organic chemistry by synthesizing several
chlorinated hydrocarbons (e.g.
vinyl chloride in 1835,
dichloromethane and perchloroethylene in 1839,
1,1,1-Trichloroethane in 1838 or 1840), and he was appointed professor of chemistry at the University of
Lyon. In 1840, he was appointed the chair of chemistry of the École Polytechnique, and in 1841, he became a professor of physics in the
Collège de France. Beginning in 1843, he began compiling extensive numerical tables on the properties of
steam. These were published in 1847, and inspired
Charles Algernon Parsons to develop the
steam turbine. Regnault received the
Rumford Medal of the
Royal Society of London and appointment as
Chief Engineer of Mines. In 1851 he was elected a foreign member of the
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In 1854 he was appointed director of the
porcelain works at
Sèvres, the
Manufacture nationale de Sèvres. In 1855, he was elected to the
American Philosophical Society. At Sèvres, he continued work on the thermal properties of matter. He designed sensitive
thermometers,
hygrometers,
hypsometers and
calorimeters, and measured the
specific heats of many substances and the
coefficient of thermal expansion of gases. In the course of this work, he discovered that not all gases expand equally when heated and that
Boyle's law is only an approximation, especially at temperatures near a substance's boiling point. Regnault was also an avid amateur photographer. He introduced the use of
pyrogallic acid as a developing agent, and was one of the first photographers to use paper negatives. In 1854, he became the founding president of the
Société française de photographie. In 1871, his laboratory at Sèvres was destroyed and his son
Alex-Georges-Henri Regnault killed, both as a result of the
Franco-Prussian War. He retired from science the next year, never recovering from these losses. ==Legacy==