Benoit Paul Émile Clapeyron (1799 - 1864)

Born 26 Jan 1799 in Paris, France

Husband of Mélanie Bazaine — married 7 Jan 1834 in Paris, France

Died 28 Jan 1864 at age 65 in Paris, France

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Biography

Benoit Clapeyron is Notable.

Benoit was born in 1799. He passed away in 1864. He was a French engineer who designed steam locomotives and worked on the theory of heat.

After having worked in Russia for 10 years on roads and bridges, Clapeyron returned to France after 1830. He proposed a railway line from Paris to St Germain and sought funding for the project. However, before funding was obtained he was offered a chair at the École des Mineurs in St Étienne. In 1835 the construction of the line from Paris to St Germain was authorised and Clapeyron and Lamé were put in charge of the project.

In 1834, he made his first contribution to the creation of modern thermodynamics by publishing a report entitled Mémoire sur la puissance motrice de la chaleur (Memoir on the Motive Power of Heat), in which he developed the work of the physicist Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot, deceased two years before. Though Carnot had developed a compelling analysis of a generalised heat engine, he had employed the clumsy and already unfashionable caloric theory.

Clapeyron, in his memoire, presented Carnot's work in a more accessible and analytic graphical form, showing the Carnot cycle as a closed curve on an indicator diagram, a chart of pressure against volume (named in his honor Clapeyron's graph). The Clapeyron relation, a differential equation which determines the heat of vaporisation of a liquid, is named after him.

In 1836 Clapeyron, who specialised in designing steam locomotives, went to England to arrange for the building of some specialist locomotives. He approached Sharp, Roberts, and Company, a firm which made railway locomotives in one of the earliest applications of the use of interchangeable parts. Continuing with his project on his return to France, Clapeyron extended his activities to the design of metal bridges.

Sources

• Wikipedia: Émile Clapeyron
• Wikidata: Item Q313551, en:Wikipedia
• https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Clapeyron/
• France, Mariages, 1546-1924, database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:FXL4-TZ4 : 7 October 2019), Benoit Paul Emile Clapeyron, 7 Jan 1834; citing Marriage, Paris, Seine, France, Archives départementales du Jura (Departmental Archives of Jura), France. FHL microfilm 312,657.
• "France, Naissance et baptêmes, 1546-1896", database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:X18M-4YP : 14 September 2019), Emile Clapeyron in entry for Marie Alice Clapeyron, 1839.
• "France, Naissance et baptêmes, 1546-1896", database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:X18M-4YT : 14 September 2019), Emile Clapeyron in entry for Marguerite Laure Clapeyron, 1839.
• "Actes de mariage, Paris, France, 1860-1918", database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:CYQ8-SFPZ : 10 April 2020), Benoit Paul Emile Clapeyron in entry for Pierre Ernest Sageret, 1860.
• Archives Départementales Des Yvelines; Saint-Quentin-En-Yvelines, France; Etat Civil 1792-1916
• Haut Rhin, France, Births, Marriages, and Deaths 1504-1922.
• https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/252018371/benoit_paul-clapeyron