Henri Moissan

Origins and early life

Ferdinand Frédéric Henri Moissan was born in Paris on 28 September 1852, the son of Francis Ferdinand Moissan, a minor officer of the Eastern Railway Company, and Joséphine Améraldine Mitel, a seamstress. He was of Jewish descent and practised the Catholic faith. The family moved to Meaux in 1864, where he attended the local school and was apprenticed to a clockmaker; the war against Prussia brought them back to Paris in 1870, and he lacked the grade universitaire a university then required.

Work and career

After a year in the army he enrolled at the École supérieure de pharmacie, passed the baccalauréat at the second attempt in 1874, qualified as a first-class pharmacist in 1879 and took his doctorate in 1880. Fluorine was known to exist and had defeated everyone who went after it: it attacks almost any vessel that holds it, and several chemists were poisoned, some fatally, trying to set it free. Moissan, who had no laboratory of his own and borrowed space from colleagues, found in 1886 the combination that worked — electrolysis of potassium hydrogen difluoride dissolved in liquid hydrogen fluoride, in a platinum-iridium apparatus chilled to −50 °C, which kept the hydrogen at one electrode and the fluorine at the other.

He first succeeded on 26 June 1886, and that remains the commercial route today. He also developed the electric-arc furnace that carries his name, and the mineral moissanite is named after him. He received the 1906 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and died suddenly in Paris on 20 February 1907, shortly after returning from Stockholm.