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Professor Michel®

Michel-Eugène Chevreul

The chemist on the tower.

31 August 1786 – 9 April 1889. He identified creatine. He spent old age taking fashionable nonsense apart.

Nineteenth-century engraved portrait of Michel-Eugène Chevreul

In 1832, while studying fats and meat extracts, Chevreul identified a crystalline substance from muscle. He named it creatine. He could not have known it would later sit at the centre of how muscles make quick energy, or that gyms would argue about loading phases. He was doing chemistry: find the thing, name the thing, and do not decorate it.

That is the entire brand brief. We did not discover creatine. He did. We sell it without a carnival attached.

A life that outran the century

  1. 1786Born in Angers, into a family of surgeons.
  2. 1803Leaves for Paris to study chemistry under Nicolas Vauquelin.
  3. 1823Publishes the landmark work on animal fats that founds lipid chemistry.
  4. 1824Director of dyes at the Gobelins tapestry works — colour contrast, for 61 years.
  5. 1832Isolates creatine from meat extract. Names it from Greek kreas, flesh.
  6. 1889One of 72 names on the Eiffel Tower. Dies in Paris on 9 April, aged 102.

The tower

Seventy-two scientists, engineers and mathematicians are named on the Eiffel Tower. Chevreul is one of them. When Gustave Eiffel planted the French tricolour on the summit on 31 March 1889, only two of those 72 were still alive. Chevreul was one. He died nine days later, just short of 103 — among the last people on earth born before the French Revolution.

Science newspaper, 12 April 1889, obituary of Michel Eugène Chevreul
Science, New York, 12 April 1889 — the week after his death.

He disliked a good story with no proof

Chevreul spent part of his old age dismantling table-turning and the “magic pendulum.” The movements, he showed, were the ideomotor effect: unconscious muscle, not spirits. He disliked people selling wonders they could not demonstrate. We took the name. We took the standard. A brand that needs a fairy-tale to move tubs can use someone else’s chemist.

Cover of Le Journal Illustré featuring Chevreul in old age
Le Journal Illustré, 5 September 1886 — interviews on the art of living to a hundred.

Colour, fat, candles, creatine

The rest of the résumé is not a garnish. Chevreul founded the chemistry of fats, improved soap and stearin candles, and wrote the law of simultaneous colour contrast that impressionists later used. Creatine was one crystal in a long laboratory life. We put his name on a tub because that laboratory life is the opposite of supplement culture: slow, named, and allergic to fraud.

The molecule he named, without the circus.

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