PAYEN, ANSELME

(b. Paris, France, 17 January 1795; d. Paris, 13 May 1871)

industrial chemistry, agricultural chemistry.

Payen’s father owned a factory in Grenelle, a suburb of Paris, in which sal ammoniac was made from animal waste. He would not permit his son to go to school and himself took charge of his education; the boy grew up well-informed on scientific matters but rather unsociable — traits that persisted throughout his life. The turmoil of the Hundred Days and its aftermath prevented him from entering the École Polytechnique, but he studied chemistry privately with Vauquelin and Chevreul. Payen’s first industrial venture was the manufacture of borax, which until then had been imported; but more significant was his advocacy of animal charcoal (the carbonaceous residues from the Grenelle works) as superior to wood charcoal for decolorizing purposes in the recently established beet-sugar industry. He also and his own beet-sugar factory at Vaugirard.

In 1829 Payen began to teach industrial chemistry at the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures; ten years later he was also appointed to a similar chair at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, although he did not abandon his industrial interests. He wrote a large number of papers, mostly on technological matters of local and temporary concern. The subjects included manures (some in collaboration with Boussingault), sugar refining, rubber and guttapercha, water supply, potato blight, and phylloxera. Such extensive publication would imply some dilution of quality, and Berzelius had an uncharitably low opinion of Payen’s rank as a chemist. “I know the man so well”, Berzelius wrote to Wöhler on 12 January 1847, “that I never rely on him where accuracy is concerned. But when it is matter of writing pamphlet-fodder for the general public, then he is in his element”.

Payen is remembered mainly for his work on carbohydrates, some of it done with Persoz. In 1833 they found that starch was hydrolyze to sugar by a substance contained in malt, which they called diastase, now known to be a mixture of extracellular enzymes. (Their priority in this matter was disputed.) Payen later showed that starch has the same chemical composition, regardless of the species of plant from which it is prepared. In 1838 he distinguished two components in woody tissue, an isomer of starch for which he coined the name cellulose and the “true woody material”, later called lignin; the two could be separated chemically.

Payen spent all his life in the same poor quarter of Paris, much respected by his working-class neighbors. Of his five children only one daughter survived him. He is reputed never to have missed a lecture until, toward the end of 1869, he collapsed in front of his class. Even so, during the siege of Paris he devoted himself to attempts to make various unusual materials edible. He died during the Commune and was given an unpublicized and perfunctory funeral to the distant rattle of musketry.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Approximately 200 papers written by Payen or in collaboration with others are listed in the Royal Society Catalogue of Scientific Papers, IV, 783–789; VIII, 574–575; XII, 563. His books, in their various eds., are listed in Bibliothèque Nationale Catalogue general des livres imprimes, CXXXI, cols. 947–964. His most important work is the printed version of his lecture course, Manuel du cours de chimie organique appliquée aux arts industriels et agricoles, J. J. Gatnier, ed., 2 vols. (Paris, 1842–1843).

II. Secondary Literature. The most informative obituary of Payen is by J.-A. Barral, in Mémoires publies par la Société centrale d’agriculture de France (1873), 67–87. A. Girard, in Annales du Conservatoire des arts et metieers, 9 (1870) [sic], 317–331, admits to knowing little of Payen’s private life and confines himself to an account of his work. An anonymous notice in Revue scientifique, 8 (1871), 94–96, is more than a list of some of Payen’s papers with brief comments.

W. V. Farrar