Jean Charpentier

December 8, 1786 (age 69)

Freiberg, Saxony, Germany

Graduating with distinction, Charpentier began his career in the coal mines at Waldenburg, Lower Silesia (of which his brother Toussaint was director), where he solved an engineering problem that had baffled Humboldt. From 1808 to 1813 Charpentier traveled in the Pyrenees, where he directed a copper mine at Baigorry. His researches on Pyrenees geology were published in 1823 in a work that received the prize of the Paris Academy of Sciences. In 1813 his friend Charles Lardy, also a student of Werner’s, secured Charpentier the post of director of the salt mines of Bex, in the canton of Vaud. These salt mines held a special position in the Swiss economy, for they were the only ones in the Confederation and importation of salt was not only expensive but also subject to political conditions, especially if imported from France. The efficiency of the Bex mines was therefore a matter of national concern, and Charpentier was successful in raising it substantially. Instead of continuing the practice of searching for salt springs, he cut galleries into the rock and extracted the rock salt, which was taken to basins where water was added to form a saturated solution: it was then pumped into other containers and evaporated. In 1818 the disaster of the Glacier de Gietroz in the Val de Bagnes turned Charpentier’s attention to glaciers. He knew the views of Jean-Pierre Perraudin and of his friend Venetz on the formerly great extent of glaciers and rejected them as impossible; when he investigated them, however, he found to his astonishment that all the evidence supported such views. Immediately behind Charpentier’s house at Les Devens, near Bex, two huge blocks of rock lay unconformably on the slope of a hill. He was forced to the conclusion that only one means of transport could have brought these blocks from the mountains behind Bex to their present position: a glacier. Charpentier then devoted his time to a study of the Rhone valley and basin and the blocks of rock scattered in them all the way from the Alps to the Jura. Charpentier analyzed all existing hypotheses and refuted them with evidence of his own finding. The debacle of the Glacier de Giétroz showed him that masses of water do not move big blocks. To ensure Venetz’s priority in the idea of the previous extent of glaciers, he had Venetz’s paper of 1821, which had been forgotten, printed by the Swiss Natural Science Society in 1833 and himself read a paper before that organization in 1834. It was met with incredulity and scorn. Undismayed, Charpentier continued his observations and invited the incredulous to visit him and see the evidence for themselves. Among his visitors was Louis Agassiz, who was soon carried away with such enthusiasm for the theory of the Ice Age that he visited a number of glaciers and blocks and rushed into print, ahead of Charpentier, with his Études sur les glaciers (1840). Charpentier received Agassiz’s book on 28 October 1840, three days before he finished his own Essai sur les glaciers, which was published in February 1841. The scrupulous care with which he weighed the evidence and described the phenomenon of erratic blocks and the function of glaciers in transporting them makes this book a classic. There are, however, two aspects of Charpentier’s glacier studies in which he failed. The first is a matter that he rightly saw as of prime importance: the meteorological conditions requisite for the former great extent of glaciers. He saw that glaciers were formed from increased precipitation after the uplift of the Alps; and he sought the cause of this increase in the percolation of water into fissures in the earth’s crust following the uplift until terrestrial heat converted this water into steam and vapor that subsequently fell on the Alps as snow. The problem still awaits solution, even after Robert Falcon Scott’s suggestion that heating of the Arctic Ocean makes its water available for evaporation by winds and deposition as snow. The other aspect was the mechanism of glacier motion, which Charpentier ascribed to the expansion of water as it falls onto glaciers and is converted into ice. James Forbes of Edinburgh showed that glaciers move even in winter, when all water is frozen; and that when water freezes, the latent heat of ice melts the surrounding ice in a glacier (he found that the glacier stays at 0°C.). Forbes called on Charpentier in 1844 at Les Dévens; and Charpentier, always open-minded toward new evidence, was prepared to admit the correctness of Forbes’s demonstrations. When his fame had become established, Charpentier received numerous offers to lucrative posts elsewhere but refused them all, preferring to stay in “his” mountains.

Jean Charpentier

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also known as Jean de Charpentier, Johann von Charpentier

geologist professor scientist

Background

Charpentier was born on December 8, 1786, in Freiberg, Germany. His father, Johann Friedrich Wilhelm de Charpentier, was a professor at the Mining Academy of Freiberg; his mother was Luise Dorothea von Zobel.

Education

Charpentier followed the family profession of geology and entered the Mining Academy (now Freiberg University of Mining and Technology), which was directed by the famous neptunist Abraham Gottlob Werner, who had also taught Humboldt and Buch.

Career

Graduating with distinction, Charpentier began his career in the coal mines at Waldenburg, Lower Silesia (of which his brother Toussaint was director), where he solved an engineering problem that had baffled Humboldt. From 1808 to 1813 Charpentier traveled in the Pyrenees, where he directed a copper mine at Baigorry. His researches on Pyrenees geology were published in 1823 in a work that received the prize of the Paris Academy of Sciences.

In 1813 his friend Charles Lardy, also a student of Werner’s, secured Charpentier the post of director of the salt mines of Bex, in the canton of Vaud. These salt mines held a special position in the Swiss economy, for they were the only ones in the Confederation and importation of salt was not only expensive but also subject to political conditions, especially if imported from France. The efficiency of the Bex mines was therefore a matter of national concern, and Charpentier was successful in raising it substantially. Instead of continuing the practice of searching for salt springs, he cut galleries into the rock and extracted the rock salt, which was taken to basins where water was added to form a saturated solution: it was then pumped into other containers and evaporated.

In 1818 the disaster of the Glacier de Gietroz in the Val de Bagnes turned Charpentier’s attention to glaciers. He knew the views of Jean-Pierre Perraudin and of his friend Venetz on the formerly great extent of glaciers and rejected them as impossible; when he investigated them, however, he found to his astonishment that all the evidence supported such views. Immediately behind Charpentier’s house at Les Devens, near Bex, two huge blocks of rock lay unconformably on the slope of a hill. He was forced to the conclusion that only one means of transport could have brought these blocks from the mountains behind Bex to their present position: a glacier.

Charpentier then devoted his time to a study of the Rhone valley and basin and the blocks of rock scattered in them all the way from the Alps to the Jura. Charpentier analyzed all existing hypotheses and refuted them with evidence of his own finding. The debacle of the Glacier de Giétroz showed him that masses of water do not move big blocks. To ensure Venetz’s priority in the idea of the previous extent of glaciers, he had Venetz’s paper of 1821, which had been forgotten, printed by the Swiss Natural Science Society in 1833 and himself read a paper before that organization in 1834. It was met with incredulity and scorn.

Undismayed, Charpentier continued his observations and invited the incredulous to visit him and see the evidence for themselves. Among his visitors was Louis Agassiz, who was soon carried away with such enthusiasm for the theory of the Ice Age that he visited a number of glaciers and blocks and rushed into print, ahead of Charpentier, with his Études sur les glaciers (1840). Charpentier received Agassiz’s book on 28 October 1840, three days before he finished his own Essai sur les glaciers, which was published in February 1841. The scrupulous care with which he weighed the evidence and described the phenomenon of erratic blocks and the function of glaciers in transporting them makes this book a classic.

There are, however, two aspects of Charpentier’s glacier studies in which he failed. The first is a matter that he rightly saw as of prime importance: the meteorological conditions requisite for the former great extent of glaciers. He saw that glaciers were formed from increased precipitation after the uplift of the Alps; and he sought the cause of this increase in the percolation of water into fissures in the earth’s crust following the uplift until terrestrial heat converted this water into steam and vapor that subsequently fell on the Alps as snow. The problem still awaits solution, even after Robert Falcon Scott’s suggestion that heating of the Arctic Ocean makes its water available for evaporation by winds and deposition as snow. The other aspect was the mechanism of glacier motion, which Charpentier ascribed to the expansion of water as it falls onto glaciers and is converted into ice. James Forbes of Edinburgh showed that glaciers move even in winter, when all water is frozen; and that when water freezes, the latent heat of ice melts the surrounding ice in a glacier (he found that the glacier stays at 0°C.). Forbes called on Charpentier in 1844 at Les Dévens; and Charpentier, always open-minded toward new evidence, was prepared to admit the correctness of Forbes’s demonstrations.

When his fame had become established, Charpentier received numerous offers to lucrative posts elsewhere but refused them all, preferring to stay in “his” mountains.

Achievements

Charpentier is best known for his research on Swiss glaciers. He made extensive field studies in the Alps. His ideas were later taken up and developed by Louis Agassiz.

Personality

Charpentier was a man of great personality and charm, always helpful and kind. His home became a place of pilgrimage for men of science to discuss glaciology and to see his great collections of minerals, shells, and plants, which are now in the Lausanne Museum.

Connections

Charpentier married Thérèse Louise von Gablenz of Dresden, but she died young, during childbirth.

Father:: Johann Friedrich Wilhelm de Charpentier
Mother:: Luise Dorothea von Zobel
Spouse:: Thérèse Louise von Gablenz
colleague:: Louis Agassiz

References

The Little Ice Age: Ancient and Modern The evidence for the Little Ice Age, the most important fluctuation in global climate in historical times, is most dramatically represented by the advance of mountain glaciers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and their retreat since about 1850.
1988
History of Geology and Palæontology to the End of the Nineteenth Century
1901
Dictionary of Scientific Biography Volume 3
1971

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