Claude-Auguste Lamy

Claude Auguste Lamy (1820 to 1878) was a French physicist and chemist who isolated the element thallium in 1862, independently of William Crookes, so that the two are considered co-discoverers even though they did not collaborate. Born at Ney in the Jura, he entered the Ecole Normale Superieure, where he was a fellow student of Louis Pasteur, and graduated in 1842. He taught physics at Lille and Limoges, defended his doctoral thesis in Paris in 1851 and became professor at the faculty of sciences of Lille in 1854, also teaching at the school of industrial arts and mines there. In Lille in 1862 he isolated 14 grams of thallium using a spectroscope lent by his brother-in-law, the chemist Frederic Kuhlmann. In 1865 he moved to the Ecole centrale des arts et manufactures in Paris as chair of industrial chemistry, succeeding Anselme Payen, and in 1873 he became president of the Societe francaise de chimie.