Stas, Jean Servais

19th Century
Born: Leuven (Belgium), 1813
Died Brussels (Belgium), 1891
Stas worked under the direction of Dumas, with whom he established the atomic weight of carbon. Stas was appointed as professor at the Military School in Brussels in 1840 and worked assiduously in determining atomic weights more accurately than had ever been done before. Stas’ aim to prove the hypothesis of Proust, that all atoms were conglomerations of hydrogen atoms, could not become achieved. Stas was probably the most skilful, chemical analyst of the nineteenth century.