Fourcroy, Antoine-Francois

Daniell, John Fredrick, 180 Davy, Humphrey, 72, 73, 156, 176 de Broglie, Louis, 40 de Buffon, Comte, 72 de Fourcroy, Antoine Francois, 27 de Mestral, George, 299 de Morveau, Guyton, 27 Democritus, 9, 10, 47, 71 Diocletian, 12 Dobereiner, Johann, 61, 62... 

Antoine-Francois de Fourcroy, 1755-1809. French chemist of the Revolutionary Period. Defender of Lavoisier s views on combustion. In collaboration with Lavoisier, Guyton de Morveau, and Berthollet he carried out a reform of chemical nomenclature. Fourcroy prepared and analyzed many reagents and medicinals. 

Quoted in Jankovic, Reading the Skies, p. 154. Jankovic points to a range of other authors who likened the atmosphere to a chemical laboratory at this time, including Le Roy, George Adams, Antoine Francois Fourcroy, Richard Kirwan, George Shaw, William Nicholson and Thomas Thomson. 

Carbon was officially classified as an element near the end of the 18th century. In 1787, four French chemists-Guyton de Morveau, Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, Claude Louis Berhollet, and Antoine Francois Fourcroy—wrote a book outlining a method for naming chemical substances, A Method for Chemical Nomenclature. The name they gave to carbon was carbone, which was based on the earlier Latin term for charcoal, charbon. 

The name chromium was suggested by two French chemists, Antoine Francois de Fourcroy (1755-1809) and Rene-Just Haiiy (1743-1822), because chromium forms so many different colored... 

The works performed by Antoine Francois de Fourcroy (1755-1809), Louis Nicolas Vauquelin (1763-1829), Joseph Louis Proust (1754-1826) and Jons Jakob Berzelius (1779-1848) introduced new concepts in chemistry. Gay-Lussac published his Law of Combining Volumes in 1809, the year after John Dalton (1766-1844) had proposed his Atomic Theory of Matter around 1803. It was left to Amedeo Avogadro (1776-1856) to take the first major step in rationalizing Gay-Lussac s results two years later. 

After learning of Lavoisier s exposition, several other chemists, including most notably Claude Louis Berthollet, Louis Bernard Guyton de Morveau, and Antoine Francois Fourcroy, began to see the utility of his notions. Lavoisier s ideas became known as the theory of the French chemists. Lavoisier, however, said It is mine. ... 

In 1787, the Academie Royale des Sciences in Paris published a book entitled Meth-ode de nomenclature chimique The front page names four authors Louis-Bemard Guyton de Morveau, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, Claude Louis Berthollet, and Antoine Francois Fourcroy. In this book, one encounters the first comprehensive classification of chemical substances according to composition in the history of chemistry. Taking into account the stature of its authors, its proximity in time to Lavoisier s Trade elementaire de chimie from 1789, and the fact that it first appeared in a book on chemical nomenclature, this classification immediately raises a variety of questions and issues. 

Once these difficulties had been overcome, the new theory began to gain ground. Joseph Black was an early convert, and he was teaching the antiphlogistic chemistry to his students at Edinburgh before 1784. The French chemists de Morveau, Claude Louis Berthollet (1748-1822) and Antoine Francois de Fourcroy (1755-1809) accepted the theory in 1785 or soon after, and once won over they collaborated with Lavoisier in the reform of chemical nomenclature. 

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