Bertrand Pelletier

Bertrand Pelletier was the son of the pharmacist Bertrand Pelletier, and his wife Marie Sabatier. After training with his father, which lasted until 1778, he continued his apprenticeship with Bernard Coubet in Paris. There, Pelletier became friend with Jean Darcet (1725–1801) and Pierre Bayen (1725–1798). In 1782, he became Darcet's assistant and demonstrator at the Collège de France. The same year, his first publication on the preparation and properties of arsenic acid was published in François Rozier's Journal d’observations sur la Physique, l’Histoire naturelle et sur les Arts et Métiers

On the recommendation of Darcet, Hilaire Rouelle's widow appointed him managing director of the pharmacy rue Jacob in 1783. The following year, Pelletier was master apothecary, married Marguerite Sedillot and bought Rouelle's pharmacy. From 1783, Pelletier was a student at the Paris Faculty of Medicine, where he made but no degree.

In 1784, on a suggestion from crystallographer Jean-Baptiste Romé de L’Isle, Pelletier produced strongly soluble salt crystals through slow evaporation and inoculation. A year later, he confirmed Carl Wilhelm Scheele's discovery that chlorine can be produced from hydrochloric acid and manganese. Like Claude Louis Berthollet, Pelletier arrived to the false conclusion that the resulting gas was a combination of hydrochloric acid and oxygen. An adherent to Carl Wilhelm Scheele's phlogiston theory, Pelletier followed Lavoisier's more modern approaches only after 1787. From 1785 to 1792, he studied phosphorus in depth. He succeeded for the first time the presentation of phosphides of many metals.

During the French Revolution, Pelletier was a member of the Bureau de Consultation des Arts et Metiers and the Commission Temporaire des Arts. In 1790 he undertook two trips to Reims where he passed the exams to be a doctor. In 1792, Pelletier was selected to be a member of the French Academy of Sciences. In 1794, he was appointed assistant-professor to the newly created École polytechnique and in 1795 was chosen to be a member of the Institut de France where he followed the course on mineral chemistry by Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau.

Information taken mostly from Johann Christian Poggendorff: Biographisch–literarisches Handwörterbuch zur Geschichte der exacten Wissenschaften. Zweiter Band M–Z, Verlag von Johann Ambrosius Barth, Leipzig 1863, (p. 391–392) (online).

• Paul Dorveaux: Apothicaires membres de l’Académie des Sciences: XIII. Bertrand Pelletier. In: Revue d’histoire de la pharmacie. Band 25, No. 97, 1937, S. 5–24 (online).
• W. A. Smeaton: Pelletier, Bertrand. In: Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Band 10, Charles Scribner's Sons, Detroit 2008, S. 496–497 (online).