Lavoisier, Antoine responses

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. ... 

Two centuries have passed since the French Revolution started. In May 1794, Antoine Laurent Lavoisier was called before the Revolutionary Tribunal and told that the Republic had no use for savants [1]. He was decapitated. Lavoisier had just identified oxygen as the element responsible for combustion and essential for respiration. In the words of the mathematician Lagrange, It took but a moment to cut off that head, though a hundred years perhaps would be required to produce... 

In both France and England, the responses to these wartime challenges involved research, education, and quality control. In France, the major figure was Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier his English equivalent was William Congreve (the Elder). 

For most of the eighteenth century the phlogiston theory was the principal theory of chemistry. As chemical knowledge increased, the theory was forced to adopt ever more convoluted explanations to account for the new discoveries. The pneumatic chemists provided the evidence upon which a new theory could be based. The chemist who was principally responsible for sweeping aside the old ideas and bringing about a revolution in chemical thought was Antoine Laurent Lavoisier. 

It was Joseph Priestley who discovered oxygen. He realized that this gas was the component of ordinary air that was responsible for combustion and made animal respiration possible. Priestley told the chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier about his discovery of oxygen. He at once saw the significance of this substance and the door was opened for the chemical revolution that established modem chemistry. 

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