Henri Moissan
The Nobel prize-winning French chemist who found silicon carbide in the Canyon Diablo meteorite, a mineral now called moissanite.
Key facts
- Born
- 1852
- Died
- 1907
- Nationality
- French
- Field
- Chemist
Ferdinand Frédéric Henri Moissan was a French chemist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1906 for isolating the element fluorine, a dangerous and highly reactive gas, and for developing the electric arc furnace, which could reach temperatures far higher than any ordinary furnace.
Moissan was also fascinated by diamonds and tried to make them artificially. When tiny diamonds were found in the Canyon Diablo iron meteorite from Arizona in 1891, he studied pieces of the meteorite himself.
In 1893 he dissolved samples of Canyon Diablo in acid and found tiny, very hard hexagonal crystals in the residue. In 1904 he identified them as silicon carbide, a compound of silicon and carbon. It had already been made in factories as an abrasive, but had never been seen in nature. In 1905 the gem expert George Kunz named the natural mineral moissanite in his honour.
Natural moissanite is extremely rare on Earth. Today it is made artificially as a sparkling gemstone that looks like diamond. In meteorites, tiny grains of silicon carbide include some of the presolar stardust made around other stars before the Sun formed.