Background
Jean-Baptiste Joseph Dieudonné Boussingault was born in 1801 in Paris, France.
Jean-Baptiste Joseph Dieudonné Boussingault was born in 1801 in Paris, France.
He studied at the school of mines at Saint-Etienne. From 1837 to 1854 he studied the proportions of organic materials that pass through plants and animals.
After studying at the school of mines at Saint- Etienne he went, when little more than twenty years old, to South America as a mining engineer on behalf of an English company.
During the insurrection of the Spanish colonies he was attached to the staff of General Bolivar, and travelled widely in the northern parts of the continent.
His first papers were concerned with mining topics, and his sojourn in South America yielded a number of miscellaneous memoirs, on the cause of goitre in the Cordilleras, the gases of volcanoes, earthquakes, tropical rain, which won the commendation of A. von Humboldt.
His work included papers on the quantity of nitrogen in different foods, the amount of gluten in different wheats, investigations on the question whether plants can assimilate free nitrogen from the atmosphere (which he answered in the negative), the respiration of plants, the function of their leaves, the action and value of manures, and other similar subjects.
He collaborated with J. B. A. Dumas in writing an Essai de statique chimique des Ures organises (1841), and was the author of Traiti d'Zconomie rurale (1844), which was remodelled as Agronomie, chimie agricole, et physiologie (5 vols. , 1860 - 1874; 2nd ed. , 1884), and of Etudes sur la transformation du fer en acier(1875).
In 1848 he was elected to the National Assembly, where he sat as a Moderate republican.
In 1839, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Returning to France he married Adele Le Bel whose family had the concession to the asphalt mines. Through his wife he had a share in an estate at Bechebronn in Alsace, where he carried out many agricultural experiments.