Réaumur, René Antoine Ferchault de

French entomologist, physicist, and metallurgist (1683–1757)

Born at La Rochelle in western France, Réaumur traveled to Paris in 1703 and was admitted to the French Academy of Sciences in 1708. He was commissioned by Louis XIV (1710) to compile a report on the industry and arts of France, published as the Description des arts et métiers (Description of the Arts and Skilled Trades).

Réaumur made contributions to many branches of science and industry. He developed improved methods for producing iron and steel; the cupola furnace for melting gray iron was first built by him (1720). In 1740 he produced an opaque form of porcelain, still known as Réaumur porcelain. Perhaps his greatest individual achievement was the six-volume Memoires pour servir à l'histoire des insectes (1734–42; Memoirs Serving as a Natural History of Insects), the first serious and comprehensive entomological work.

Réaumur also devised a thermometer (1731), using a mixture of alcohol and water, with its freezing point of water at 0° and its boiling point at 80° (the Réaumur temperature scale). Through his research into digestion he established that this was a chemical rather than a mechanical process and he isolated gastric juice in 1752.

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Réaumur, René-Antoine Ferchault de (1683-1757) French scientist whose many interests earned him the nickname of the Pliny of the 18th c. He is remembered for the thermometric scale that bears his name, and for his magnum opus of painstaking observation, Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire naturelle des insectes (6 vols., 1734-42).

Réaumur, René Antoine Ferchault de (rā'əmyʊr, Fr. rənā' äNtwän' fĕrshō' də rāōmür') , 1683–1757, French physicist and naturalist. He invented an alcohol thermometer (1731) and the Réaumur temperature scale, in which the freezing point of water is 0° and the boiling point 80°. In 1710 he directed the official description of arts and trades in France. He investigated gold-bearing rivers, turquoise mines, and forests. He did research on the composition of Chinese porcelain, which led him to develop an opaque glass, and on the composition and manufacture of iron and steel, including a means of tinning iron. As a naturalist he is best known for his exhaustive study of insects (6 vol., 1734–42; a 7th vol., part of the original manuscript, appeared in 1928); he also studied regeneration in crayfish and showed corals to be animals, not plants.