Lavoisier and the Chemical Revolution

The following day the mathematician Lagrange said, It took them only a second to cut this head, but one hrmdred years are perhaps not enough to bring forth a new one of this greatness.  

Lavoisier was probably the first to make really quantitative experiments. He was able to show that the quantity of matter is the same before and after a chemical reaction, even if the matter has changed its state. As already mentioned Lavoisier demon- 

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Frederic Lawrence Holmes, Lavoisier and the Chemistry of Life An Exploration of Scien-tific Creativity (Madison University of Wisconsin Press, Antoine Lavoisier The Next Crucial Year (Princeton Princeton University Press, 1998). See also Holmes, Lavoisier s Conceptual Passage, in Arthur Donovan, ed., The Chemical Revolution. Essays in Reinterpretation, Osiris 4 (1988) 82-92. This special issue of Osiris also contains C.E. Perrin, Research Traditions, Lavoisier and the Chemical Revolution, 53-81. 

Carleton E. Perrin, one of the most productive of Lavoisier scholars, provided a thorough account of the phlogiston chemistry that dominated French chemistry before Lavoisier Research Traditions, Lavoisier and the Chemical Revolution, Osiris 4 (1988) 53-81. In the same issue of Osiris, J.B. Gough offered a unique but dubious view of the importance of Stahls phlogistic theo 7+ Lavoisier and the Fulfillment of the Stahlian Revolution, Osiris 4 (1988) 15-33. 

Perrin, Carleton E. Research Traditions, Lavoisier and the Chemical Revolution. Osiris 4 (1988) 53-81. 

C. E. Perrin, Research Traditions, Lavoisier, and the Chemical Revolution, Osiris [2] 4, 1988, 53-81 John G. McEvoy, Continuity and Discontinuity in the Chemical Revolution, ibid., 195-213. 

Perrin, C. E. Of Theory Shifts and Industrial Innovations The Relations of J. A. C. Chaptal and A. L. Lavoisier. Annals of Science 43,1986, 511-542. Perrin, C. E. Revolution or Reform The Chemical Revolution and Eighteenth Century Concept of Scientific Change. History of Science 15, 1987, 395-423. Perrin, C. E. Research Tradition, Lavoisier, and the Chemical Revolution. Osiris [2] 4, 1988, 53-81. 

The tempo of scholarship on Lavoisier and the Chemical Revolution increased in the late 1980s in connection with the commemoration of the bicentenaries of climactic events of that revolution the new nomenclature of 1787 and the publications of Lavoisier s Traite elementaire de chimie and of the first volume of the Annales de... 

T. H. Levere, Lavoisier Language, instruments and the chemical revolution , in Nature, Experiment and the Sciences Essays on Galileo and the History of Science, ed. T. H. Leavere and W. R. Shea, Kluwer Academic, Amsterdam, 1990, pp. 207-233. 

The fundamental idea of modern chemistry is that matter is made up of atoms of various sorts, which can be combined and rearranged to produce different, and often novel, materials. The person responsible for this master-concept of our age (Greenaway, p. 227) was John Dalton. He applied Newton s idea of small, indivisible atoms to the study of gases in the atmosphere and used it to advance a quantitative explanation of chemical composition. If French chemist Antoine Lavoisier started the chemical revolution, then it was Dalton who put it on a firm foundation. His contemporary, the Swedish chemist Jons J. Berzelius, said If one takes away from Dalton everything but the atomic idea, that will make his name immortal. ... 

See B. Bensaude-Vincent s introduction to L. B. Guyton de Morveau, A. L. Lavoisier, C. L. Berthollet, and A. E de Fourcroy, Methode de nomenclature chimique (Seuil, 1994). See also W. R. Albury, The Logic of Condillac and the Structure of French Chemical and Biological Theory, 1780-1801, Ph.D. dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1972 John G. McEvoy, The Enlightenment and the Chemical Revolution, in Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. R. Woolhouse (Kluwer, 1988). 

Trevor H. Levere, Lavoisier Language, Instruments and the Chemical Revolution, in Nature, Experiment, and the Sciences, ed. T. Levere and W. Shea (Kluwer, 1990) idem, Balance and gasometer in Lavoisier s Chemical Revolution, in Lavoisier et la Revolution chimique, ed. M. Goupil (SABIX-Ecole polytechnique, 1992) Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Eaux et mesures. ficlairages sur I itineraire intellectuel du jeune Lavoisier, Revue d histoire des sciences et leurs applications 48, 1995, 49-69 idem, The Chemist s Balance for Fluid Hydrometers and their Multiple Identities, 1770-1810, in Instruments and Experimentation, ed. Holmes and Levere. 

Donovan, Lavoisier and the Origins of Modern Chemistry, in The Chemical Revolution, ed. Donovan Evan M. Melhado, Chemistry, Physics, and the Chemical Revolution, Isis 76, 1985, 195-211. 

Levere, Trevor H. Lavoisier Language, Instruments, and the Chemical Revolution. In Nature, Experiment, and the Sciences, ed. T. Levere and W. Shea (Kluwer, 1990). 

McEvoy, John G. Positivism, Whiggism, and the Chemical Revolution A Study in the Historiography of Chemistry. History of Science 35, 1997, 1-33. McKie, Douglas. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier The Lather of Modern Chemistry (Philadelphia Lippincott, 1935). 

That a conscious association between the rise of modern science and the dissolution of traditional society extended into the eighteenth century is evident in conservative reaction to the Enlightenment and the Chemical Revolution. Thus the arch-reactionary John Robison linked Lavoisier s chemistry, the metric system and the Revolutionary calendar to the obliteration of the past inherent in the unrestrained advocacy of rational analysis . More perspicaciously, Edmund Burke excoriated Enlightenment chemistry in the following terms ... 

Davis, The First Edition of the Skeptical Chymist, p. 79 Agassi, Towards an Historiography of Science, p. 44. See also Cochrane, Lavoisier, pp. 76-7 McEvoy, Positivism, WTiiggism and the Chemical Revolution , p. 31, n. 63. 

See Foucault, The Order of Things, pp. 17-63. See also Hannaway, The Chemists and the Word, pp. 62-72. For a fuller discussion and documentation of the issues covered in this section see McEvoy, Priesdey Responds to Lavoisier s Nomenclature . See also McEvoy, The Enlightenment and the Chemical Revolution , pp. 317—19. 

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