Paul Sabatier Biography

World of Chemistry on Paul Sabatier

Paul Sabatier, who shared the 1912 Nobel Prize in chemistry with his countryman Victor Grignard, spent thirty-two years of a fifty-year career studying heterogeneous catalysis, especially the catalytic hydrogenation of organic compounds over finely divided metals.

Born on November 5, 1854, in Carcassone, France, Sabatier attended school in Carcassone, where his uncle was a teacher. An older sister helped tutor him, taking Latin and mathematics for that purpose. When his uncle transferred to the Toulouse Lycée, Sabatier followed. While at Toulouse, he used his free time to attend a public course in physics and chemistry that gave him a taste for science.

Accepted at both the École Polytechnique and the École Normale Supérieure in 1874, he entered the latter and graduated at the head of his class in 1877. He worked as an instructor in Nîmes for a year, but teaching secondary school physics was not what he wanted, and he returned to Paris as an assistant to Marcellin Berthelot at the Collège de France. There, in 1880, he earned his doctoral degree with a thesis on metallic sulfides.

After a year of teaching physics at the Faculté des Sciences at Bordeaux, he returned to Toulouse in 1882 to teach physics at the Faculté des Sciences there. In 1883, his duties expanded to include chemistry, and in 1884, at the age of thirty, the earliest allowable, he was appointed Professor of Chemistry. He remained in that post for the rest of his career, refusing offers from the Sorbonne to succeed Henri Moissan and from the Collège de France to succeed Berthelot. He was chosen Dean of the Faculty of Science in 1905, an office which he held for over twenty-five years. In addition to his research and teaching during this period, he was instrumental in the creation of schools of chemistry, agriculture, and electrical engineering at Toulouse. Even after his official retirement in 1929, he continued, by special permission, to lecture until failing health forced him to stop in 1939. Sabatier died on August 14, 1941.

Sabatier was a man of great reserve, and there is little information available about his private life. His marriage to Mlle. Herail was ended by her death in 1898. He never remarried, and their four daughters were raised with the help of his older sisters.

After receiving the Nobel Prize in 1912, Sabatier was elected a year later the first member of the Academy of Sciences, who did not reside in Paris. He had been a corresponding member since 1901, but the residency requirement kept him from full membership until a special class of six non-resident members was created, in part so that he could become a full member without having to move to Paris. He was made a Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur in 1907 and named Commander in 1922. Among the many other honors bestowed on him by various organizations in different countries were the Davy Medal from the Royal Society in 1915 and the Franklin Medal from the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia in 1933. He received honorary doctoral degrees from the universities of Pennsylvania (in 1926, in conjunction with the Philadelphia Sesquicentennial celebration), Louvain, and Saragossa.

For his doctoral research and during his first fifteen years at Toulouse, Sabatier worked in the area of inorganic chemistry. His early work on the sulfides, hydrogen sulfides, and polysulfides of alkali and alkaline earth metals helped to clarify a complicated area of chemistry. He prepared the first pure sample of dihydrogen disulfide and was the first to make silicon monosulfide and tetraboron monosulfide as well as boron and silicon selenides. He carried out a number of thermochemical studies of the hydration (addition of H₂O) of metal chlorides and chromates and various copper compounds and was a pioneer in the use of absorption spectroscopy to study chemical reactions.Absorption spectroscopy exploits the unique patterns of light absorption characteristic of chemical substances to identify them. Spectroscopes scatter the light with a prism so that the dark absorption lines become visible in the spectrum.

In the 1890s it occurred to Sabatier to see if nitric oxide would produce a compound with nickel analogous to the recently discovered compound of nickel and carbon monoxide. These experiments, conducted with the chemist Jean-Baptiste Senderens , were not very fruitful, though some nitrogen compounds of copper, cobalt, nickel, and iron were obtained by the reaction of nitrogen dioxide with the metal. Sabatier then thought to use acetylene, an organic compound, but learned that Moissan and François Moreau had passed acetylene over powdered nickel made by heating nickel oxide with hydrogen and reported the formation of only carbon, some liquid hydrocarbons, and a gas they thought to be hydrogen.

In 1897, after being assured that Moissan and Moreau had no plans to continue their acetylene studies further, Sabatier and Senderens tried the reaction using the gas ethylene, another hydrocarbon. The experiment was successful and thus solidified Sabatier's switch to organic (carbon-based) chemistry. The result was again the formation of carbon, liquid hydrocarbons, and a gas, but on analyzing the gas, they found it to be mostly ethane and only a little hydrogen. Appreciating that the ethane could only have arisen through the addition of hydrogen to the ethylene (hydrogenation), they tried passing a mixture of ethylene and hydrogen over finely divided nickel and found that the smooth hydrogenation of ethylene took place at only a little above room temperature (30-40°C). For the next thirty-two years, Sabatier and his students investigated the heterogeneous catalysis (a process in which a third substance, or catalyst, influences the rate of a chemical reaction) of a variety of organic reactions by metals and metal oxides.

On the basis of his studies, Sabatier explained the catalytic action by the formation of unstable intermediate compounds between the catalyst and the reactant(s). This view, opposed to an earlier theory that the effect was due only to local extremes of pressure and temperature in small pores of the catalyst, proved to be correct and revolutionized organic chemistry.

In 1912, Sabatier's work was recognized by the shared award of the Nobel Prize in chemistry. The following year, he summed up his fifteen years of work on catalysis and reviewed the accumulating literature in the field in the book La Catalyse en chimie organique. Although his pioneer work was basic to the development of important industrial processes such as the catalytic cracking of petroleum to increase the yield of gasoline and the hydrogenation of vegetable oils to make shortening, Sabatier did not interest himself in such practical applications, nor did he profit from them.