Edmond Frémy

Frémy was born at Versailles, entered Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac's laboratory in 1831, and was employed at the École Polytechnique in 1834 and at the Collège de France in 1837.

His next post was that of repetiteur at the École Polytechnique, where in 1846 he was appointed professor, and in 1850 he succeeded Gay-Lussac in the chair of chemistry at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, of which he later became director (1879–1891) after Michel Eugène Chevreul.

He also studied the coloring of leaves and flowers, the composition of bone, cerebral matter, and other animal substances, and the processes of fermentation, in which he was an opponent of Pasteur's views.

[1] Keenly alive to the importance of the technical applications of chemistry, Frémy devoted special attention as a teacher to the training of industrial chemists.

In the later years of his life he applied himself to the problem of obtaining alumina in the I crystalline form, and succeeded in making rubies identical with the natural gem not merely in chemical composition but also in physical properties.