Paul Sabatier
Sabatier, Paul (1854-1941) was a French organic chemist. He won the 1912 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his method of using nickel as a hydrogenation catalyst. A catalyst is a substance that increases the speed of a chemical reaction without being consumed by the reaction. Hydrogenation is a chemical process that adds hydrogen to a substance.
Sabatier showed that ethylene gas could be converted to ethane gas by passing the ethylene over powdered nickel. Sabatier shared the prize with another French chemist, François Auguste Victor Grignard, who independently did related research.
Sabatier was born on Nov. 5, 1854, in Carcassonne, France. He graduated from the École Normale Supérieure in 1877. The next year he taught physics at a secondary school in Nîmes. In 1878, he became a professor at the Collège de France in Paris. He received his doctorate in the physical sciences from the college in 1880.
For the next year, Sabatier was a professor of physics at the Faculté des Sciences at Bordeaux. In 1882, he became an assistant professor of physics at the Faculté des Sciences at Toulouse. In 1883, he began to teach chemistry there as well. Sabatier became professor of chemistry in 1884 and chaired the chemistry department for the rest of his career. From 1905 to 1929, he was also dean of the university's Faculty of Science.
Sabatier's research from the 1890's onward emphasized organic chemistry (the study of compounds that contain carbon atoms), which included his work on hydrogenation catalysts. In 1913, he published the book La catalyse en chimie organique (Catalysis in Organic Chemistry). Sabatier's health began to fail in 1939, and he died in Toulouse on Aug. 14, 1941.