Victor-Auguste Jacquelain

Victor-Auguste Jacquelain (1804-1885) was a French pharmacist who studied the phenomenon of allotropry in carbon and demonstrated the transformation of the diamond into graphite, at the high temperature of a special sun lens. He developed a cheap process for preparing iodic acid by the reaction between powdered iodine and nitric acid, developed a new process for preparing platinum black and malleable platinum by heating a mixture of potassium chloroplatinate and potassium chloride to very high temperature, the utilization of charcoal for illumination purposes, the fabrication of highly pure sulfuric acid for analytical and forensic purposes, and determination the composition of all the hydrates of sulfuric acid.