Antoine Jerome Balard

Antoine Jérôme Balard was a French chemist and one of the discoverers of bromine, born at Montpellier on 30 September 1802. He began as an apothecary but took up teaching, serving as chemical assistant at the faculty of sciences of his native town and then as professor of chemistry at the royal college and school of pharmacy there. In 1826 he discovered in seawater a substance he recognised as a previously unknown element and named it bromine, which Carl Jacob Löwig had independently prepared the year before. He succeeded Louis Jacques Thénard in the chair of chemistry at the faculty of sciences in Paris and in 1851 became professor of chemistry at the Collège de France, where Marcellin Berthelot was his pupil, assistant and then colleague. Louis Pasteur was also his pupil, and Pasteur found the difference between right-handed and left-handed crystals in his laboratory. Balard died in Paris on 30 April 1876.