Amedeo Avogadro

Amedeo Avogadro (full name: Lorenzo Romano Amedeo Carlo Avogadro, conte di Quaregna e di Cerreto) was an Italian physicist. He was the first to propose that equal volumes of gases have equal number of atoms, Avogadro's law. His name lives on in Avogadro's constant, which gives the number of entities in a mole of substance.

Life

Avogadro was born in Turin, Italy, on 9th August, 1776. He was the son of Count Filippo Avogadro and Anna Maria Vercellone. His father was a distinguished lawyer and civil servant, becoming a senator of Piedmont in 1768, and was appointed advocate general to the senate of Vittorio Amedeo III in 1777. Under the French rule of 1799 he was made president of the senate.

Amedeo went to school in Turin. Coming from a family of lawyers, Avogadro initially chose for a legal career, and became a bachelor of law in 1792. Four years later he gained his doctorate and began to practice law.

Avogadro inherited his father's title in 1787. He married Felicita Mazzé, and the couple had six children. Avogadro led a modest and industrious life. Later in life Avogadro got interested in science, and in 1800 he began private studies of mathematics and physics. His first scientific research in 1803, undertaken jointly with his brother Felice, was on electricity.

In 1806, Avogadro was appointed demonstrator at the Academy of Turin, and in 1809 became professor of natural philosophy at the college of Vercelli. Avogadro was greatly influenced by Gay-Lussac’s law of combining volumes. In 1811 he published a paper in French on a manner of determining the relative masses of the elementary particles of bodies and the proportions to which they enter into their compounds. Essai d’une maniere de déterminer les masses relatives des molecules elementaires des corps et les proportions selon lesquelles elles entrent dans ces combinations. In this paper he coined the word molecule (diminuitive of the Latin mole, a mass), for the smallest particle that normally exists in a free state In 1820, when the very first chair of mathematical physics in Italy was established at the University of Turin, Avogadro was appointed. Unfortunately, his post was short lived, since political changes suppressed the chair and Avogadro was out of a job by July, 1822. The chair was reestablished for Augustin-Lous Cauchy in 1832, and after Cauchy left in 1834, Avogadro was reappointed. As a scientist Avogadro was relatively unknown, particularly outside Italy. He remained at the university until his retirement in 1850. Avogadro died on the 9th July, 1856.