French chemist who, as a student of Dumas was given the responsibility of determining the problems with the candles in the French King's 1833 soireé. He braved Berzelius's criticism and demonstrated that hydrogen was being replaced by oppositely changed chlorine atoms, evolving hydrogen chloride gas. This contradicted Berzelius's radical theory, which forbid the replacement of an electronegative element with a more electropositive one, and brought him ridicule from the established chemical community. Laurent used ideas from crystallography to represent organic compounds by three-dimensional structures. However, he believed these structures to be merely symbolic. He collaborated in experiments with Gerhardt, and further developed the type theory proposed by Dumas.

Berzelius, Dumas, Gerhardt