![]() Lavoisier is famous not only for his chemical theories but also for his work in the laboratory. Lavoisier is to the science of chemistry what Newton is to physics. He is sometimes called “the father of modern chemistry,” and this is an accurate description. ![]() ![]() They are part of an ongoing series of talks about why the College includes certain texts in its curriculum.Īntoine Lavoisier was an 18th century chemist whom we read in the Sophomore Natural Science tutorial. Goyette’s report to the Board of Governors at its May 11, 2018, meeting. He was killed by guillotine.The following remarks are adapted from Dean John J. A defence on the grounds that he was a famous scientist was rejected on the grounds that the new nation needed justice more than it needed science. In May 1794, Lavoisier was formally charged with diluting tobacco prior to its sale. That he attempted to rescue a number of foreigners from asset seizure or imprisonment did not help. Given his position as a tax collector, it is perhaps not surprising that Lavoisier was one of the many alleged traitors condemned by the revolutionary government of 1790s France. It was during this work that Lavoisier assisted in the development of metric measurements, believing it would provide objective standards for French weights and measures. In his 20s he was given a position as private tax collector (in pre-revolutionary France, tax collection was a privatized industry subsisting on royal collection contracts). He actually studied law and became a lawyer, although he never practiced the profession actively. This, coupled with the disproving of phlogiston, paved the way for a new era in the study of chemistry – and, indeed, Lavoisier is often regarded as the father of modern chemistry.īefitting his noble birth, Lavoisier was never solely a chemist. He subsequently pioneered vital methodological techniques of stoichiometry, establishing that total mass does not change during chemical reactions – a consequence of what we now know as the law of conservation of mass. This discovery was not the only component of Lavoisier’s work, but it paved the way for the most important. Noting some experiments involving dephlogisticated air and acid, he argued that the substance was actually the cause of fire – and called it “oxygen.” The new air had not simply been stripped of its phlogiston, Lavoisier argued instead, it was an identifiable chemical substance in its own right. Lavoisier rushed this discovery into publication, apparently in an attempt to take credit for Priestley’s innovation. Both men had discovered that Priestley’s dephlogisticated air could be combined with another special type of isolated “air,” “inflammable air” (what we now know as hydrogen), to produce water. We now realize that Priestley had discovered not dephlogisticated air, but oxygen, and that fire is the result of chemical reactions involving oxygen. Curiously, Priestley found, dephlogisticated air was also very pleasant to inhale. His dephlogisticated air seemed to make objects more flammable – so, he reasoned, it must have no phlogiston of its own, and therefore be prone to absorb it rapidly from other substances. ![]() In England, Joseph Priestley had just isolated and “discovered” oxygen, which he called “dephlogisticated air.” Operating on the basis of a Renaissance theory of fire, Priestley believed that phlogiston was an invisible substance contained in flammable objects which burst forth as fire. Lavoisier’s most important studies, however, began with the newly discovered substance oxygen. (Even today, the Academy has only a couple of hundred members.) His early work was on a wide range of subjects, ranging from streetlights to cartography. By the 1760s, when he was only in his 20s, he was already publishing new works on chemistry and was admitted to the prestigious French Academy of Sciences. He spent seven years studying scientific subjects – at the College Mazarin, where he was introduced to the heady brew of Enlightenment political and scientific thought. Lavoisier was born to a wealthy and aristocratic Parisian family, and grew up with a substantial inherited estate after the early death of his mother. He was executed for alleged fraud in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794) was a French aristocrat, businessman, and chemist best known for his successful attack on the Renaissance theory of phlogiston and his contributions to the law of conversation of mass, the periodic table of elements (in his time, only existing in list form), and the metric measurement system. ![]()
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