Lavoisier, Antoine (1743-1794)

 

       Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier (also Antoine Lavoisier after the French Revolution; (26 August 1743 – 8 May 1794); (French pronunciation: [ɑ̃twan lɔʁɑ̃ də lavwazje]), the "father of modern chemistry", was a French nobleman prominent in the histories of chemistry and biology. He stated the first version of the law of conservation of mass, recognized and named oxygen (1778) and hydrogen (1783), abolished the phlogiston theory, helped construct the metric system, wrote the first extensive list of elements, and helped to reform chemical nomenclature. He discovered that, although matter may change its form or shape, its mass always remains the same.

      Over the 20 year period 1770 - 1790, the science of chemistry experienced a revolution so fundamental and so complete that there has been nothing like it since. The architect of the revolution was one man, Antoine Lavoisier. Lavoisier believed that weight was conserved through the course of chemical reactions even those involving gases. He explained combustion (and respiration) in terms of chemical reactions that involve a component of air which he called oxygen. His venue for the chemical revolution came in 1775, when he was appointed Commissioner of the Royal Gunpowder and Saltpeter Administration. As such, he was able to build a fine laboratory at the Paris Arsenal and make important connections to the scientific community of all of Europe. One of the first chemists to adopt Lavoisier's theories was Joseph Black who taught them as early as 1784.

Contributions to chemistry

    Lavoisier demonstrated the role of oxygen in the rusting of metal, as well as oxygen's role in animal and plant respiration. Working with Pierre-Simon Laplace, Lavoisier conducted experiments that showed that respiration was essentially a slow combustion of organic material using inhaled oxygen. Lavoisier's explanation of combustion disproved the phlogiston theory, which postulated that materials released a substance called phlogiston when they burned.

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Constantino, Leslie

Cruz, Xyrill

Darocca, Tish

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