Lavoisier, Antoine Laurent
Lavoisier, Antoine Laurent (1743-1794), French chemist, who is considered the founder of modern chemistry.
Lavoisier was born on August 26, 1743, in Paris and was educated at the Collège Mazarin. He was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1768. He held many public offices, including those of director of the state gunpowder works in 1776, member of a commission to establish a uniform system of weights and measures in 1790, and commissary of the treasury in 1791. He attempted to introduce reforms in the French monetary and taxation system and in farming methods. As one of the farmers-general, he was arrested and tried by the revolutionary tribunal, and guillotined on May 8, 1794.
Lavoisier's experiments were among the first truly quantitative chemical experiments ever performed. He showed that, although matter changes its state in a chemical reaction, the quantity of matter is the same at the end as at the beginning of every chemical reaction. These experiments provided evidence for the law of the conservation of matter. Lavoisier also investigated the composition of water, and he named the components of water oxygen and hydrogen.
Some of Lavoisier's most important experiments examined the nature of combustion, or burning. Through these experiments, he demonstrated that burning is a process that involves the combination of a substance with oxygen. He also demonstrated the role of oxygen in animal and plant respiration. Lavoisier's explanation of combustion replaced the phlogiston theory, which postulates that materials release a substance called phlogiston when they burn.
With the French chemist Claude Louis Berthollet and others, Lavoisier devised a chemical nomenclature, or a system of names, which serves as the basis of the modern system. He described it in Méthode de nomenclature chimique (Method of Chemical Nomenclature, 1787). In Traité élémentaire de chimie (Treatise on Chemical Elements, 1789), Lavoisier clarified the concept of an element as a simple substance that could not be broken down by any known method of chemical analysis, and he devised a theory of the formation of chemical compounds from elements. He also wrote Sur la combustion en general (On Combustion, 1777) and Considerations sur la nature des acides (Considerations on the Nature of Acids, 1778).
Lavoisier was born on August 26, 1743, in Paris and was educated at the Collège Mazarin. He was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1768. He held many public offices, including those of director of the state gunpowder works in 1776, member of a commission to establish a uniform system of weights and measures in 1790, and commissary of the treasury in 1791. He attempted to introduce reforms in the French monetary and taxation system and in farming methods. As one of the farmers-general, he was arrested and tried by the revolutionary tribunal, and guillotined on May 8, 1794.
Lavoisier's experiments were among the first truly quantitative chemical experiments ever performed. He showed that, although matter changes its state in a chemical reaction, the quantity of matter is the same at the end as at the beginning of every chemical reaction. These experiments provided evidence for the law of the conservation of matter. Lavoisier also investigated the composition of water, and he named the components of water oxygen and hydrogen.
Some of Lavoisier's most important experiments examined the nature of combustion, or burning. Through these experiments, he demonstrated that burning is a process that involves the combination of a substance with oxygen. He also demonstrated the role of oxygen in animal and plant respiration. Lavoisier's explanation of combustion replaced the phlogiston theory, which postulates that materials release a substance called phlogiston when they burn.
With the French chemist Claude Louis Berthollet and others, Lavoisier devised a chemical nomenclature, or a system of names, which serves as the basis of the modern system. He described it in Méthode de nomenclature chimique (Method of Chemical Nomenclature, 1787). In Traité élémentaire de chimie (Treatise on Chemical Elements, 1789), Lavoisier clarified the concept of an element as a simple substance that could not be broken down by any known method of chemical analysis, and he devised a theory of the formation of chemical compounds from elements. He also wrote Sur la combustion en general (On Combustion, 1777) and Considerations sur la nature des acides (Considerations on the Nature of Acids, 1778).
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