Sabatier, Paul (1854-1941)

French chemist. He found in 1897 that if a mixture of ethylene and hydrogen was passed over a column of heated nickel, the ethylene changed into ethane. Further work revealed that nickel could be used to catalyse numerous chemical reactions. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1912 for finding the method of catalytic hydrogenation of organic compounds.

Sabatier was born in Carcassone, Aude, and studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. From 1884 he was professor at Toulouse.

With his assistant Abbé Jean-Baptiste Senderens (1856-1936), Sabatier extended the nickel-catalyst method to the hydrogenation of other unsaturated and aromatic compounds, and synthesized methane by the hydrogenation of carbon monoxide. He later showed that at higher temperatures the same catalysts can be used for dehydrogenation, enabling him to prepare aldehydes from primary alcohols and ketones from secondary alcohols.

Sabatier later explored the use of oxide catalysts, such as manganese oxide, silica, and alumina. Different catalysts often gave different products from the same starting material.

Alumina, for example, produced olefins (alkenes) with primary alcohols, which yielded aldehydes with a copper catalyst.