Charles Blagden

Charles Brian Blagden
Blagden Charles (late 18th/early 19th century) by Mary Dawson Turner from a sketch by Thomas Phillips.
Born	17 April 1748 Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire
Died	26 March 1820 Arcueil, France
Nationality	United Kingdom
Known for	Studies of perspiration and the freezing point of solutions
Notable awards	Copley Medal (1788)

Sir Charles Brian Blagden FRS (17 April 1748 – 26 March 1820) was a British physician and scientist. He served as a medical officer in the Army (1776–1780) and later held the position of Secretary of the Royal Society (1784–1797). Blagden won the Copley Medal in 1788 and was knighted in 1792.

He died in Arcueil, France in 1820, and was buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Science

In June 1783, Blagden, then assistant to Henry Cavendish, visited Antoine Lavoisier in Paris and described how Cavendish had created water by burning "inflammable air". Lavoisier's dissatisfaction with the Cavendish's "dephlogistinization" theory led him to the concept of a chemical reaction, which he reported to the Royal Academy of Sciences on 24 June 1783, effectively founding modern chemistry. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1789.

Blagden experimented on human ability to withstand high temperatures. In his report to the Royal Society in 1775, he was first to recognise the role of perspiration in thermoregulation.

Blagden's experiments on how dissolved substances like salt affected the freezing point of water led to the discovery that the freezing point of a solution decreases in direct proportion to the concentration of the solution, now called Blagden's Law. (See: Freezing-point depression)

External links

• Blagden Papers at the Royal Society
• National Public Radio story about Blagden