Anselme Payen was a French chemist. He was born in Paris, where his father started to give him scientific lessons at the age of 13. He studied then partly at the École Polytechnique with the best chemists. At the age of 20 he became manager of the family borax-refining factory, where he developed a process for synthesizing borax from soda and boric acid. He also invented new processes for refining sugar, a decolorimeter, a way to refine starch and alcohol from potatoes, … Wikipedia
The definitive Wikipedia entry for Anselme Payen. Wikipedia is the biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anselme_Payen
