Jean-Antoine Chaptal, comte de Chanteloup (5 June 1756 – 30 July 1832) was a distinguished French chemist, physician, agronomist, industrialist, statesman, educator and philanthropist. His multifaceted career unfolded during one of the most brilliant periods in French science. In chemistry it was the time of Antoine Lavoisier, Claude-Louis Berthollet, Louis Guyton de Morveau, Antoine-François Fourcroy and Joseph Gay-Lussac. Chaptal made his way into this elite company in Paris beginning in the 1780s, and established his credentials as a serious scientist most definitely with the publication of his first major scientific treatise, the Ėléments de chimie (3 vols, Montpellier, 1790). His treatise brought the term "nitrogen" into the revolutionary new chemical nomenclature developed by Lavoisi