Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac was born on December 6, 1778. He lived in the Limoges region of France until he was about fourteen years old. When he was fourteen, his father was arrested by the new French Republic, and Joseph went to Paris. There, he had private lessons, attended a boarding school, the École Polytechnique (Technical School) and the civil engineering school.

When he was about twenty-four years old, he finished his first major research during the winter of 1801 - 1802 with the help of fellow scientists, Berthollet and LaPlace. In this research, he improved on Jacques Charles' conclusions on the behavior of ideal gases. From Charles, he knew that equal volumes of all gases expand equally with the same increase in temperature. Unlike Charles, he discovered the coefficient of expansion for gases. Gay-Lussac's presise measurements of the expansion of gases were used by Lord Kelvin when he developed his absolute temperature scale, and the Third Law of Thermodynamics, and also by Clausius when he developed the Second Law. Perhaps what he is most well-known for is he Law of Combining Volumes. He presented his results before the Societé Philomatique in Paris on December 31, 1808.