Chemistry Lavoisier

The dawn of the nineteenth century saw a drastic shift from the dominance of French chemistry to first English-, and, later, German-influenced chemistry. Lavoisier s dualistic views of chemical composition and his explanation of combustion and acidity were landmarks but hardly made chemistry an exact science. Chemistry remained in the nineteenth century basically qualitative in its nature. Despite the Newtonian dream of quantifying the forces of attraction between chemical substances and compiling a table of chemical affinity, no quantitative generalization emerged. It was Dalton s chemical atomic theory and the laws of chemical combination explained by it that made chemistry an exact science. 

Far above Leblanc, at the very pinnacle of French science, stood Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, a government financier and reformer and the father of modern chemistry. Lavoisier was a fabulously rich tax collector. His net income hovered in modern terms somewhere between 2.4 million and 4.8 million a year, and he dedicated much of it to his scientific library and chemical laboratory. 

M. Beretta, A new course in chemistry Lavoisier s first chemical paper , Biblioteca di Nuncius Studi e testi, 13, Uppsala Studies in History of Science, 16, Olschki, Firenze, 1994. 

Mature fields of historical scholarship - not unlike classical music in that regard -boast of a repertoire of standard pieces for which the sources are easily accessible, the main lines of interpretation firmly established, and for which the interpretation has reached a considerable level of refinement. This is equally true for the historiography of chemistry. Lavoisier s chemical revolution, the evolution and diversification of chemistry as a discipline, or the social history of the professional chemist constitute such standard pieces in its repertoire. And, as in classical music, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries attract the largest audiences. 

Talking about true elements as indivisible atoms was metaphysics, not chemistry. Lavoisier insisted on making that point ... 

But caloric was not quite so vicious a theory. Here was the great difference between the myth of phlogiston and the fiction of caloric. Lavoisier did not depend upon caloric to explain the facts of chemical changes. His chemistry was not based upon vaporous caloric, while Becher s phlogiston was the actual foundation of the structure of chemistry. Lavoisier wanted to crush phlogiston. To appease those chemists who demanded a substitute, he gave them the comparatively harmless prescription of caloric. Believe it or not, caloric would do no harm either way. It served as a vicarious palliative to save chemistry from the lethal dose of phlogiston. 

Despite Robert Boyle s best efforts, the atomic theory did not become widely accepted during his lifetime. Most scientists agree that the birth of modern chemistry had to wait almost another 100 years after Boyle s death, when Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794) would publish his great work, Traite Elementaire de Chimie, in 1789. Considered by many to be the founder of modern chemistry, Lavoisier carried out carefully controlled experiments, which provided real evidence for the Law of Conservation of Mass, which we covered in Lesson 1-4. 

In addition to all the things that Lavoisier contributed to chemistry, his work advanced the idea of analytical chemistry. Lavoisier carefully... 

Lavoisier formulated the rule that chemical reactions do not alter total mass after finding that reactions in a closed container do not change weight. This disproved the phlogiston theory, and he named Priestley s substance oxygen. He demonstrated that air and water were not elements. He defined an element as a substance that could not be broken down further. He published the first modern chemistry textbook. Elementary Treatise of Chemistry. Lavoisier was executed in the Reign of Terror at the height of the French Revolution. 

In chemistry, Lavoisier shed a dazzling new light upon the long labours of generations of devoted workers, and opened out a new world to his successors. In the words of Liebig He discovered no new body, no new property, no natural phenomenon previously unknown all the facts he established were the necessary consequences of the labours of those who preceded him. His merit, his immortal glory, consists in this—that he infused into the body of science a new spirit. ... 

Lavoisier s untimely death ended an era in the history of chemistry. With his contributions to chemistry ranging from developing the modem concept of combustion to establishing the language of chemistry, Lavoisier provided the foundation for the study of chemistry as a modem science, see ALSO Berthollet, Claude-Louis. 

The foundation of chemistry was constructed by A. de Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry. Lavoisier proposed the law of the conservation of mass stating the mass of an isolated system is maintained as a result of processes acting inside the system, and organized the whole knowledge of earlier chemistry in his book, Traite elementaire de chimie (Elementary Treatise on Chemistry) (1789). Following the law of definite composition (1799) stating a chemical compound always contains exactly the same proportion of elements by mass, suggested by... 

Lavoisier [1965] p. 119. On the role played by plant and animal chemistry in Lavoisier s Trcdte see also Holmes [1985] pp. 385—409. Holmes asserted that in its chapters devoted to plant and animal chemistry Lavoisier s Traite undergoes a transition from polished textbook to almost a jM eliminary progress report (ibid. p. 385). 

The Traite completely broke with the tradition of earlier chemistry textbooks, which had mainly provided a series of descriptions of the preparation of a great many substances. Tlie Traite was divided into three parts. The first was concerned with aeriform fluids (gases), and with combustion and the formation of acids. The second part dealt with the compounds formed by pairs of elements and the salts formed by the inorganic and organic acids known at the time. The third part was a description of the instruments and operations of chemistry. Lavoisier decided to omit any consideration of affinities or elective attractions on the grounds that the principal data are still wanting. ... 

In 1789 Antoine Lavoisier published a chemical textbook titled Elementary Treatise on Chemistry. Lavoisier is known as the father of modem chemistry because he was among the first to study chemical reactions carefully. As we saw previously, Lavoisier studied combustion, and by burning substances in closed containers, he was able to establish the law of conservation of mass, which states that matter is neither created nor destroyed in a chemical reaction. 

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