![]() In the 1950s and 1960s, Rittenhouse Square was known as a place where gay men and lesbians coming into the city could meet others and socialize.(Photo courtesy of the John J. Postwar downtown Philadelphia, or “Center City,” as it was beginning to be called, had the largest concentration of apartments and rental rooms in the “ City of Homes,” providing gay men, lesbians, and transgendered people with the privacy and urban anonymity they sought. The war had uprooted millions of men and women across the country and exposed them to urban life here and abroad they had never seen before. The community and the geographical spaces it occupied played a vital role in the social and political struggles of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) people locally and in the nation.Īfter World War II, Philadelphia’s gay geography, like that in many American cities, expanded greatly. ![]() In the second half of the twentieth century, the Center City neighborhood that became known as the Gayborhood formed in the vicinity of Locust and Thirteenth Streets. Philadelphia, the Place that Loves You Back.This conclusion subsequently became known as Gay-Lussac’s law. In 1808 Gay-Lussac announced what was probably his single greatest achievement: from his own and others' experiments he deduced that gases at constant temperature and pressure combine in simple numerical proportions by volume, and the resulting product or products-if gases-also bear a simple proportion by volume to the volumes of the reactants. Not only did he gather magnetic measurements at various altitudes, but he also took pressure, temperature, and humidity measurements and samples of air, which he later analyzed chemically. In 1804 Gay-Lussac made several daring ascents of over 7,000 meters above sea level in hydrogen-filled balloons-a feat not equaled for another 50 years-that allowed him to investigate other aspects of gases. From his first major program of research in 1801–1802, he concluded that equal volumes of all gases expand equally with the same increase in temperature: this conclusion is usually called “Charles's law” in honor of Jacques Charles, who had arrived at nearly the same conclusion 15 years earlier but had not published it. He shared the interest of Lavoisier and others in the quantitative study of the properties of gases. Science History Institute Early Investigations of Gases Gay-Lussac’s own career as a professor of physics and chemistry began at the École Polytechnique. There his mentors included Pierre Simon de Laplace and Claude Louis Berthollet, among other scientists converted by Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier to oxygen chemistry. Joseph, however, benefited from the new order when he was selected to attend the École Polytechnique, an institution of the French Revolution designed to create scientific and technical leadership, especially for the military. His comfortable existence as the privately tutored son of a well-to-do lawyer was disrupted by political and social upheavals: his tutor fled, and his father was imprisoned. Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac (1778–1850) grew up during both the French and Chemical Revolutions. His daring ascents in hydrogen-filled balloons were key to his investigations. While one is generally attributed to a fellow countryman, the other is well known as Gay-Lussac’s law. French chemist Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac proposed two fundamental laws of gases in the early 19th century. ![]()
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