Sir Charles Brian Blagden FRS (17 April 1748 – 26 March 1820) was an English physician and chemist. He served as a medical officer in the Army (1776–1780) and later held the position of Secretary of the
Royal Society
The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...
(1784–1797). Blagden won the Copley Medal in 1788 and was knighted in 1792.
He died in
Arcueil
Arcueil () is a commune in the Val-de-Marne department in the southern suburbs of Paris, France. It is located from the center of Paris.
Name
The name Arcueil was recorded for the first time in 1119 as ''Arcoloï'', and later in the 12th ...
, France in 1820, and was buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
Science
In June 1783, Blagden, then assistant to
Henry Cavendish
Henry Cavendish ( ; 10 October 1731 – 24 February 1810) was an English natural philosopher and scientist who was an important experimental and theoretical chemist and physicist. He is noted for his discovery of hydrogen, which he termed "infl ...
, visited
Antoine Lavoisier
Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier ( , ; ; 26 August 17438 May 1794), CNRS (
chemical reaction
A chemical reaction is a process that leads to the IUPAC nomenclature for organic transformations, chemical transformation of one set of chemical substances to another. Classically, chemical reactions encompass changes that only involve the pos ...
, 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
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...
in 1789. He was elected to the
American Philosophical Society
The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and communit ...
in 1789.
Blagden experimented on human ability to withstand high temperatures. In 1775 he showed that human beings could withstand room temperatures as high as 260 degrees Fahrenheit (127 degrees Celsius).. In his report to the Royal Society in 1775, he was first Western scientist to officially recognise the role of
perspiration
Perspiration, also known as sweating, is the production of fluids secreted by the sweat glands in the skin of mammals.
Two types of sweat glands can be found in humans: eccrine glands and apocrine glands. The eccrine sweat glands are distr ...
in
thermoregulation
Thermoregulation is the ability of an organism to keep its body temperature within certain boundaries, even when the surrounding temperature is very different. A thermoconforming organism, by contrast, simply adopts the surrounding temperature ...
.
Blagden's experiments on how dissolved substances like salt affected the freezing point of water led to the discovery that ''the
freezing point
The melting point (or, rarely, liquefaction point) of a substance is the temperature at which it changes state from solid to liquid. At the melting point the solid and liquid phase exist in equilibrium. The melting point of a substance depend ...
of a
solution
Solution may refer to:
* Solution (chemistry), a mixture where one substance is dissolved in another
* Solution (equation), in mathematics
** Numerical solution, in numerical analysis, approximate solutions within specified error bounds
* Soluti ...
concentration
In chemistry, concentration is the abundance of a constituent divided by the total volume of a mixture. Several types of mathematical description can be distinguished: '' mass concentration'', ''molar concentration'', '' number concentration'', ...