Antoine Bussy

Antoine Alexandre Brutus Bussy (29 May 1794 – 1 February 1882) was a French chemist who primarily studied pharmaceuticals. He, alongside Friedrich Wöhler, first isolated beryllium.

Education Antoine Bussy entered the École Polytechnique in 1813, and there followed the courses delivered by Pierre Robiquet, the great French chemist who was to make decisive breakthroughs in bio-chemistry (he isolated the first amino-acid ever identified, asparagin, in 1805–1806), in industrial dyes (he isolated and identified alizarin, the most famous and first modern industrial red dye) and the pick-up of modern medication (he isolated, identified and started mass production of codeine, 1832). Robiquet tutored Antoine Bussy in his career as a chemist researcher and in his private career as pharmacist as well. In 1828, Bussy published a preliminary notice of a new method of preparing magnesium by heating magnesium chloride and potassium in a glass tube. When the potassium chloride was washed out, small globules of magnesium remained.