Eugène-Melchior Péligot [SEP] place of death
Eugène-Melchior Péligot
Eugène-Melchior Péligot (24 March 1811 in Paris – 15 April 1890 in Paris), also known as Eugène Péligot, was a French chemist who isolated the first sample of uranium metal in 1841.
Péligot proved that the black powder of Martin Heinrich Klaproth was not a pure metal (it was an oxide of uranium, known in chemistry as UO). He then succeeded in producing pure uranium metal by reducing uranium tetrachloride (UCl) with potassium metal. Today better methods have been found
Eugène-Melchior Péligot, was able to prepare the first sample of uranium metal. Henri Becquerel subsequently discovered radioactivity in 1896 by using uranium.
In the 1790s, Joseph Priestley and the Dutch chemist Martinus van Marum observed the transformative action of metal surfaces on the dehydrogenation of alcohol, a development which subsequently led, in 1831, to the industrial scale synthesis of sulphuric acid using a platinum catalyst.
In 1803, cerium was the first of the lanthanide metals to be discovered, in Bastnäs, Sweden by Jöns Jakob Berzelius