Book to Note

Claude Viel. Henri Moissan, pharmacien, premier Français prix Nobel de chimie: 1852–1907 (Henri Moissan, pharmacist, first French Nobel Laureate in chemistry: 1852–1907). Paris: Pharmathèmes, 2006. 168 pp. €39.

Reviewed by Christopher P. Munden

Claude Viel, professor emeritus of the Faculté de Pharmacie of Tours, has produced the first work devoted to Henri Moissan, the first French Nobel Laureate in chemistry. Largely unknown to today’s general public even in France, Moissan played a major role in the advancement of modern science. His Nobel Prize, the centennial of which was celebrated by the French chemical community last year, recognized his two major contributions: the isolation of fluorine in 1886, a feat which revived the science of mineral chemistry; and the development of his eponymous electric furnace, which permitted new high-temperature chemical experiments and which Moissan used to create the first synthetic diamonds. Drawing upon unpublished and little known documents, some of which are reproduced in the volume, Viel successfully contextualizes Moissan’s scientific work and sketches a vivid portrait of a cultivated and captivating man, at home in both the higher echelons of the French scientific community and in the art galleries of fin de siècle Paris.