Pierre-François-Guillaume Boullay

Pierre-François-Guillaume Boullay was a French chemist and pharmacist, born in Caen on 21 April 1777 and dying in Paris on 2 November 1869. After studying pharmacy and chemistry he became a preparator for the chemistry course of Louis-Nicolas Vauquelin and opened a drug store. He took a doctorate in sciences by 1818 and was elected a member of the French Académie de Médecine, which he headed after 1834. He published on ethers, sweet almonds and the extraction of picrotoxin, among other subjects. Together with his son Félix-Polydore Boullay, who died in 1835 at the age of twenty nine from the consequences of an accident while handling ether, he was the first to turn alcohol into ether by dehydrating it with phosphoric acid, and the two are also credited with spreading the principle of percolation as a method of extraction.