BERTH, originally a nautical term, probably connected with the verb “to bear,” first found in literature at the end of the 16th century, with the alternative spelling “birth.” Its primary meaning is “sea-room,” whether on the high seas or at anchor. Hence the phrase “to give a wide berth to,” meaning “to keep at a safe distance from,” both in its literal and its metaphorical use. From meaning sea-room for a ship at anchor, “berth” comes to mean also the position of a ship at her moorings (“to berth a ship”). The word further means any place on a ship allotted for a special purpose, where the men mess or sleep, or an office or appointment on board, whence the word has passed into colloquial use with the meaning of a situation or employment. From the Icelandic byrdi, a board, is also derived the ship-building term “berth,” meaning to board, put up bulk-heads, etc.
BERTHELOT, MARCELLIN PIERRE EUGÈNE (1827-1907), French chemist and politician, was born at Paris on the 29th of October 1827, being the son of a doctor. After distinguishing himself at school in history and philosophy, he turned to the study of science. In 1851 he became a member of the staff of the Collège de France as assistant to A.J. Balard, his former master, and about the same time he began his life-long friendship with Ernest Renan. In 1854 he made his reputation by his doctoral thesis, Sur les combinaisons de la glycérine avec les acides, which described a series of beautiful researches in continuation and amplification of M.E. Chevreul’s classical work. In 1859 he was appointed professor of organic chemistry at the École Supérieure de Pharmacie, and in 1865 he accepted the new chair of organic chemistry, which was specially created for his benefit at the Collège de France. He became a member of the Academy of Medicine in 1863, and ten years afterwards entered the Academy of Sciences, of which he became perpetual secretary in 1889 in succession to Louis Pasteur. He was appointed inspector general of higher education in 1876, and after his election as life senator in 1881 he continued to take an active interest in educational questions, especially as affected by compulsory military service. In the Goblet ministry of 1886-1887 he was minister of public instruction, and in the Bourgeois cabinet of 1895-1896 he held the portfolio for foreign affairs. His scientific jubilee was celebrated in Paris in 1901. He died suddenly, immediately after the death of his wife, on the 18th of March 1907, at Paris, and with her was buried in the Panthéon.
The fundamental conception that underlay all Berthelot’s chemical work was that all chemical phenomena depend on the action of physical forces which can be determined and measured. When he began his active career it was generally believed that, although some instances of the synthetical production of organic substances had been observed, on the whole organic chemistry must remain an analytical science and could not become a constructive one, because the formation of the substances with which it deals required the intervention of vital activity in some shape. To this attitude he offered uncompromising opposition, and by the synthetical production of numerous hydrocarbons, natural fats, sugars and other bodies he proved that organic compounds can be formed by ordinary methods of chemical manipulation and obey the same laws as inorganic substances, thus exhibiting the “creative character in virtue of which chemistry actually realizes the abstract conceptions of its theories and classifications—a prerogative so far possessed neither by the natural nor by the historical sciences.” His investigations on the synthesis of organic compounds were published in numerous papers and books, including Chimie organique fondée sur la synthèse (1860) and Les Carbures d’hydrogéne (1901). Again he held that chemical phenomena are not governed by any peculiar laws special to themselves, but are explicable in terms of the general laws of mechanics that are in operation throughout the universe; and this view he developed, with the aid of thousands of experiments, in his Mécanique chimique (1878) and his Thermochimie (1897). This branch of study naturally conducted him to the investigation of explosives, and on the theoretical side led to the results published in his work Sur la force de la poudre et des matières explosives (1872), while on the practical side it enabled him to render important services to his country as president of the scientific defence committee during the siege of Paris in 1870-71 and subsequently as chief of the French explosives committee. In the later years of his life he turned to the study of the earlier phases of the science which he did so much to advance, and students of chemical history are greatly indebted to him for his book on Les Origines de l’alchimie (1885) and his Introduction à l’étude de la chimie des anciens et du moyen âge (1889), as well as for publishing translations of various old Greek, Syriac and Arabic treatises on alchemy and chemistry (Collection des anciens alchimistes grecs, 1887-1888, and La Chimie au moyen âge, 1893). He was also the author of Science et philosophie (1886), which contains a well-known letter to Renan on “La Science idéale et la science positive,” of La Révolution chimique, Lavoisier (1890), of Science et morale (1897), and of numerous articles in La Grande Encyclopédie, which he helped to establish.
BERTHIER, LOUIS ALEXANDRE, prince of Neuchâtel (1753-1815), marshal of France and chief of the staff under Napoleon I., was born at Versailles on the 20th of February 1753. As a boy he was instructed in the military art by his father, an officer of the Corps de génie, and at the age of seventeen he entered the army, serving successively in the staff, the engineers and the prince de Lambesq’s dragoons. In 1780 he went to North America with Rochambeau, and on his return, having attained the rank of colonel, he was employed in various staff posts and in a military mission to Prussia. During the Revolution, as chief of staff of the Versailles national guard, he protected the aunts of Louis XVI. from popular violence, and aided their escape (1791). In the war of 1792 he was at once made chief of staff to Marshal Lückner, and he bore a distinguished part in the Argonne campaign of Dumouriez and Kellermann. He served with great credit in the Vendéan War of 1793-95, and was in the next year made a general of division and chief of staff (Major-Général) to the army of Italy, which Bonaparte had recently been appointed to command. His power of work, accuracy and quick comprehension, combined with his long and varied experience and his complete mastery of detail, made him the ideal chief of staff to a great soldier; and in this capacity he was Napoleon’s most valued assistant for the rest of his career. He accompanied Napoleon throughout the brilliant campaign of 1796, and was left in charge of the army after the peace of Campo Formio. In this post he organized the Roman republic (1798), after which he joined his chief in Egypt, serving there until Napoleon’s return. He assisted in the coup d’état of 18th Brumaire, afterwards becoming minister of war for a time. In the campaign of Marengo he was the nominal head of the Army of Reserve, but the first consul accompanied the army and Berthier acted in reality, as always, as chief of staff to Napoleon. At the close of the campaign he was employed in civil and diplomatic business. When Napoleon became emperor, Berthier was at once made a marshal of the empire. He took part in the campaigns of Austerlitz, Jena and Friedland, and was created duke of Valengin in 1806, sovereign prince of Neuchâtel in the same year and vice-constable of the empire in 1807. In 1808 he served in the Peninsula, and in 1809 in the Austrian War, after which he was given the title of prince of Wagram. Berthier married a niece of the king of Bavaria. He was with Napoleon in Russia in 1812, Germany in 1813, and France in 1814, fulfilling, till the fall of the empire, the functions of “major-general” of the Grande Armée. He abandoned Napoleon to make his peace with Louis XVIII. in 1814, and accompanied the king in his solemn entry into Paris. During Napoleon’s captivity in Elba, Berthier, whom he informed of his projects, was much perplexed as to his future course, and, being unwilling to commit himself, fell under the suspicion both of his old leader and of Louis XVIII. On Napoleon’s return he withdrew to Bamberg, where he died on the 1st of June 1815. The manner of his death is uncertain; according to some accounts he was assassinated by members of a secret society, others say that, maddened by the sight of Russian troops marching to invade France, he threw himself from his window and was killed. Berthier was not a great commander. When he was in temporary command in 1809 the French army in Bavaria underwent a series of reverses. Whatever merit as a general he may have possessed was completely overshadowed by the genius of his master. But his title to fame is that he understood and carried out that master’s directions to the minutest detail.
BERTHOLLET, CLAUDE LOUIS (1748-1822), French chemist, was born at Talloire, near Annecy in Savoy, on the 9th of December 1748. He studied first at Chambery and afterwards at Turin, where he graduated in medicine. Settling in Paris in 1772, he became the private physician of Philip, duke of Orleans, and by his chemical work soon gained so high a reputation that in 1780 he was admitted into the Academy of Sciences. In 1785 he declared himself an adherent of the Lavoisierian school, though he did not accept Lavoisier’s view of oxygen as the only and universal acidifying principle, and he took part in the reform in chemical nomenclature carried out by Lavoisier and his associates in 1787. Among the substances of which he investigated the composition were ammonia, sulphuretted hydrogen and prussic acid, and his experiments on chlorine, which he regarded, not as an element, but as oxygenated muriatic (oxymuriatic) acid, led him to propose it as a bleaching agent in 1785. He also prepared potassium chlorate and attempted to use it in the manufacture of gunpowder as a substitute for saltpetre. When, at the beginning of the French Revolution, the deficiency in the supply of saltpetre became a serious matter, he was placed at the head of the commission entrusted with the development of its production in French territory, and another commission on which he served had for its object the improvement of the methods of iron manufacture. He was also a member in 1794 of the committee on agriculture and the arts, and technical science was further indebted to him for a systematic exposition of the principles of dyeing—Élémens de l’art de la teinture, 1791, of which he published a second edition in 1809, in association with his son, A.B. Berthollet (1783-1811). After 1794 he was teacher of chemistry in the polytechnic and normal schools of Paris, and in 1795 he took an active part in remodelling the Academy as the Institut National. In the following year he and Gaspard Monge were chosen chiefs of a commission charged with the task of selecting in Italy the choicest specimens of ancient and modern art for the national galleries of Paris; and in 1798 he was one of the band of scientific men who accompanied Napoleon to Egypt, there forming themselves into the Institute of Egypt on the plan of the Institut National. On the fall of the Directory he was made a senator and grand officer of the Legion of Honour; under the empire he became a count; and after the restoration of the Bourbons he took his seat as a peer. In the later years of his life he had at Arcueil, where he died on the 6th of November 1822, a well-equipped laboratory, which became a centre frequented by some of the most distinguished scientific men of the time, their proceedings being published in three volumes, between 1807 and 1817, as the Mémoires de la société d’Arcueil. Berthollet’s most remarkable contribution to chemistry was his Essai de statique chimique (1803), the first systematic attempt to grapple with the problems of chemical physics. His doctrines did not meet with general approval among his contemporaries, partly perhaps because he pushed them too far, as for instance in holding that two elements might combine in constantly varying proportions, a view which gave rise to a long dispute with L.J. Proust; but his speculations, in particular his insistence on the influence of the relative masses of the acting substances in chemical reactions, have exercised a dominating influence on the modern developments of the theory of chemical affinity, of which, far more than T.O. Bergman, whom he controverted, he must be regarded as the founder.